Bauchi State Ministry of Education has introduced handheld fingerprint devices to put the menace of ghost workers, absenteeism and nonchalant attitude of workers under check.
According to the State Commissioner for Education, Dr. Aliyu Usman Tilde, who disclosed this to newsmen in Bauchi yesterday, the device will enable workers to clock in and out of their duty posts to subsequently qualify them for their monthly salaries.
Tilde, who lamented the nonchalant attitude of teachers before his appointment, said about 53.5 per cent of workers was fond of shunning their duty post.
He said the development had dragged 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 was not encouraging at all, 53.5 per cent of them (teachers) do not go their work place 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 8:00am 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 teachers resume, deliver lesson and goes out of school.”
