Jos-The Plateau House of Assembly on Tuesday directed the Local Government Service Commission to expedite action on the biometric exercise being conducted for local government employees in the state.
The directive came under ”matter of urgent public importance” presented on the floor of House by Amos Kumtul, the member representing Langtang North-Central Constituency.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the former administration had in 2013 introduced the biometric data capturing system as part of efforts to discover ghost workers on government’s pay roll.
According to Kumtul, many local government employees are suffering as they have not been paid salaries for more than two years since the exercise started.
He argued that there was “no concrete and justifiable reasons” why many workers had yet to be captured.
”It is a wise thing that government decided to ascertain the strength of its workforce by introducing the biometric data capturing.
“ It has, however, become a serious problem for workers that have not been captured and have not received salaries for over two years now.
”How can a salary earner who has children, relations and other dependants to cater for stay for that long without salary?
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”This has led to the demise of many of them; a good number of them have children out of school while many can’t even feed,” Kumtul said.
The lawmaker explained that those mostly affected were primary school teachers and health personnel working in rural areas.
He observed that in spite of the lack of salaries, the workers had continued to report daily at their duty posts.
Contributing, Jacob Kassam, the member representing Kanke Constituency, said that the motion was timely and called on the local government commission to act immediately.
”Yes, the biometric exercise is meant to correct the anomaly in the local government system, but I think it is causing harm to a lot.
“ If they are not to remain in service, they should be asked to go,” Kassam said.
The Speaker of the House, Peter Azi, directed the House Committee on Parastatals to immediately investigate the issue and report back to the House in two weeks. (NAN)