As the organised labour and the Niger state government resolved to implement the national minimum wage of N30,000, the state civil servant salary will now gulp N2.6 billion.
This figure indicates an increase of N500 million monthly as against N2.1 billion being spent for the same purpose before the current review.
The payment according to the Head of Service, Hajia Salamatu Abubakar is for the over 26,000 in the state employment excluding those in the local governments.
In an interactive session with newsmen on Wednesday in Minna, Abubakar put the staff strength in the 25 local government councils in the state at 30,000.
She said in line with the terms of the agreement reached with labour, government will start the payment of leave grant to workers from May this year.
Speaking on the activities of her office in the past few years, she said about 1, 419 senior civil servants were promoted between 2015 and last year, while 1, 096 executive officers were also elevated during the same period with her office spending N412,470,110 on training.
She added that the state government is also collaborating with the Ibrahim Badamasi University (IBBU) Lapai, Federal Universities of Technology Minna and the National Directorate of Employment NDE for the training of civil servants.
The head of service confirmed government plans to rationalise the civil service to put ’round pegs in round holes’ but assured that workers will not be retrenched.
According to her, “it is not the intention of the exercise to downsize, trainable ones will be trained others will be sent to MDAs because some MDAs have need for workers.
“We have a lot of redundancy, we will try to plug all these, we will as much as possible reduce the movement of ” hard copy files” through the computerisation of the service,” she added.
