TZW
The statistics in the Bank of Tanzania monthly economic reviews show that wages and salary bill had declined to 569.8bn/- in February this year from 573bn/- in February 2016 making a difference of 3.346bn/-.
That is a period where about 28,000 workers were removed from the civil servants payroll in a national crackdown to purge ghost workers and those with forged certificates.
Last year the government cleared off its payroll 9,900 workers who were found to have forged academic qualifications and 17,900 ghost workers in 2016. President John Magufuli ordered the immediate dismissal of more than 9,900 civil servants in April last year after a nationwide verification of academic credentials uncovered workers with forged school and college certificates.
The audit showed they cost the government about 4.5bn/- a month in salaries.
The then Minister of State for Public Service Management, Angela Kairuki, noted that from a total of 435,000 civil servants who had their certificates verified, 9,932 were found to possess forged certificates.
The evaluation was commissioned by the President’s Office Public Service Management and Good Governance and conducted by a 15-member team.
The crackdown on fake degree holders came after another purge launched in March last year discovered more than 19,700 “ghost workers” on the public sector payroll. The ghost workers purge came after a report showed the government had also been losing 238bn/- each year to “ghost workers.”
who had now been removed from the public payroll, he said. The government said the public wage bill was bloated, with more than 550,000 civil servants at national and local levels.
The public sector had 766,803 by 2015 according to 2015 Employment and Earnings Survey (EES) conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).