The Enugu State Commissioner for Local Government Matters, Okey Ani, has announced that the ministry will introduce workforce management biometrics in a bid to address truancy at the local government level, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported.

The commissioner said in an interview with NAN that the level of truancy in local government calls for concern and that the majority of staff members only go to work to collect salaries at the end of the month and disappear thereafter. According to the commissioner, the new biometrics system would be implemented before the end of the first quarter in 2013.

“Nobody pays for nothing. No work, no pay. You are meant to work for you to earn your salary,” Ani said. “If we establish this biometrics system, it will checkmate both ghost workers and absenteeism, and so on. We will be able to establish how many staff in the local government system, the real authentic staff because the ghost workers syndrome is not a joke.”

As BiometricUpdate.com has previously reported, Nigeria has been rapidly adopting biometric systems across the country for a wide variety of applications. Currently the country is looking to capture the biometric data of its citizens over the next five years. Additionally, the Nigerian Customs Service has announced that it will introduce a biometric system to protect from hackers gaining access to its Direct Traders Input System.


Though it isn’t yet apparent which workforce management system the Commissioner plans to adopt, M2SYS reports that the Nigerian federal government has implemented the M2SYS Hybrid Biometric Platform identification solution to register and track half a million federal employees, also in a bid to prevent ghost workers.