To qualify for a monthly salary, the Bauchi state government has introduced a handheld fingerprint device to clock workers in and out of their duty posts.
The device, according to the state commissioner of education, Dr. Aliyu Tilde was introduced by the ministry to put the menace of ghost workers, absenteeism and indolence under check.
Tilde lamented that before his appointment as the commissioner, about 53.5 percent of workers were shunning their duty post which has drawn the state’s education sector backward.
He said: “We now have the device in all the 219 secondary schools under the ministry. We have had a case of a teacher who only attended his school seven times in eleven years and when I came in, I requested for attendance register of various schools and the statistics there were not encouraging at all. 53.5 percent of them (teachers) do not go to their workplace at all.
“People are now less honest than before and given their large number, many of them can hide, a lot of them are in the rural areas where it is difficult to reach them for monitoring and evaluation. You find out that by the time you take up their attendance book, everyone is present and resumed work before 8:am even if he or she wasn’t there.
“It is very difficult to monitor this large number of workers, the best thing is to introduce technology. With this, you will be able to capture all the teachers within your purview. If anyone goes in, delivers a lesson or checks out, it will be clocked by the terminal. With this, I have been able to monitor in my office when my teacher’s resume, deliver lesson and goes out of school.”
Tilde said there would be cut off mark for attendance and any worker below the mark would not receive alert for the month adding that ” We are going to put a benchmark that will show that you were there. You go to work 23 days in a month, we may put a minimum of 17, 18 or 19 days in a month and anything short of that, the person won’t be paid.”
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