The Bauchi state government says it has uncovered more than 100 ghost workers in the state’s health sector and vowed to punish them under civil service rules.
The Executive Chairman of Bauchi State Hospital Management Board, Mr. Sambo Alkali, disclosed this in Bauchi on Thursday.
Akali stressed that all the identified ghost workers’ names would soon be submitted to Gov. Bala Mohammed and subsequently, be dealt with according to the civil service rules.
“We are currently working on a verification exercise to fish out all those ghost workers people have been talking about. Recently, we have done it in our five facilities and we came up with more than 100 ghost health workers whose names will ultimately be submitted to the governor.
“What we are doing in Bauchi to curtail the issue of shortage of doctors, which is a global issue, is that the governor has approved a scheme which is giving us a beautiful result,’’ Akali said.
Speaking further, he said that currently, they have engaged more than 40 doctors on the scheme, which ranged from consultants to medical officers who were carefully selected and scientifically distributed based on the data available.
According to him, they were mandated by the governor to come up with all the gap analyses to improve the service delivery. The governor also mandated the state committee on health to produce a healthcare scheme of service that would address the salary issue and seek the support of medical professionals to work in Bauchi.
He added that the plan is to equate the state health workers’ salary with that of the Federal Government, which is on the verge of completion and will be submitted to the governor for onward implementation.
Also speaking, the state’s Commissioner for Health, Muhammed Dambam, stated that the governor had emphasised commitment to collaborate with relevant agencies and partners to establish Ready to Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) in the state.
Dambam said the essence of RUTF is to reduce malnutrition among children.
The governor had pledged to channel N250m to the drugs and medical consumable agency of the state this year, as he did in 2024.
