Gov. Sani Bello of Niger has ordered the immediate payment of March salary for local government council workers in the state.
He gave the directive on Thursday during an inspection of the verification exercise of the local government staff in Minna.
Bello said that the delay was due to the huge wage bill of both the state and the 25 councils, explaining that it is the reason for the staff verification.
“I want to appeal to you all to be patient. I have directed the release of everybody’s money and you people should go back to your councils. I wish to assure everyone of you that the verification exercise was not a punitive measure targeted at anybody.
“The staff audit is a necessity. You all know that since the inception of this administration, we have always paid workers as at when due but we need to get our figures right hence this exercise.
“We have a very high wage bill we cannot accommodate. This month (March) alone the whole money we got from Federal Government is N2.69 billion and our wage bill is N2.4 billion.
“We have to borrow over N400 million from the bank; so the verification must continue,” he added.
However, the governor said that the verification would be suspended for a while on humanitarian ground.
Bello explained that the suspension would allow for the fine tuning of the exercise to reduce the challenges faced by staff especially those from far locations.
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