It first started as a rumour but now it is real. Local councils in Kwara State have begun the downsizing of their workforce due to their inability to pay their employees' salaries.

But the Senior Special Assistant on Media to the Governor, Dr. Muideen Akorede, said it was not true that the councils were disengaging their workers, adding the state government was only capturing the biometrics of the workers to fish out ghost employees on their pay roll.

Akorede linked the delay in the payment of the workers' salaries to the lethargy of the Federal Government in releasing the monthly allocations to the states, which had also affected the councils.

The Guardian learnt that the alleged inability of over two-thirds of the 16 councils to pay the salaries of their workers as at when due informed the move to trim their workforce.

An official at Ifelodun Local Council alleged that 120 workers had been sacked since the exercise begun while 30 had been laid off in Moro Local Council.

A Government House source believed that the inability of the councils to pay the workers' salaries might lead to a prompt review of the Joint Accounting System between the state government and the councils.

Some of the affected workers urged the state government to shelve the exercise because it would hurt the councils and the sacked workers.

Recently in Ilorin, Governor Abdul Fatah Ahmed, held a closed-door meeting with the council chairmen and ordered them to submit to him the reports of their expenditure from the excess crude oil funds disbursed to them by the Federal Government.

The councils complied with the directive on July 12, 2012.

Reacting to the development, the Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, Kayode Yusuf, described the alleged retrenchment as false. He, however, said the biometric exercise, when completed, would help the councils to identify "ghost workers" among them.

He said: "I am saying it categorically that the government is not going to retrench any worker. Only the space of those who fraudulently entered the service could not be guaranteed."

Yusuf also blamed the Federal Government for the delay in the payment of the workers' salaries.

He said the drastic deduction in the revenue allocations to the state government by the Federal Government could not be divorced from the problem, stressing that the state government last month assisted the councils with about N400 million when it was apparent that they could not pay the workers' salaries.

The Guardian, however, learnt that workers in Offa, Baruten, Kaiama and Ilorin-West councils received their July salary on Monday.

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