The Zimbabwe government has flushed out more than 10 000 suspected ghost workers from its payroll following a biometric registration exercise, the state media reported on Monday.
Quoting Public Service Commission (PSC) head of human capital development and management Moses Mhike, The Herald daily said the ghost workers who were flushed out were those whose biometric data was non-compliant.
“We conducted a biometric exercise to get the data of all civil servants and comparing with the Registrar’s office. We realised that about 10,000 were not biometric compliant and traced them at each and every work station,” Mhike said.
The biometric registration was implemented with the assistance of the World Bank as part of efforts to weed out ghost workers and modernise management of the civil service.
The suspected ghost workers have contributed to Zimbabwe’s bloated civil service, which is estimated to have more than 500,000 workers and consumes more than 90 percent of state revenue in wages.
Most of the ghost workers are believed to be youth militias co-opted into the police and other government departments while a number continue to be paid despite having left their jobs or died.
JN/APA