Ghost corporation?

Editorial

Is the defunct Nigerian Mining Corporation a ghost parastatal, where workers collect salary without work?

The coiners of the social dictum, ‘wonders shall never end’ probably had Nigeria in mind, as truly bizarre and incredulous news daily make headlines. One such headlines has come from the House of Representative Committee on Public Accounts. The Committee just declared that some workers of the Nigerian Mining Corporation (NMC) still draw salaries — 14 years after the corporation was closed down!

For the avoidance of doubt, a 14-year-old child must be in lower rung of senior secondary school, mulling over the idea of entering university. In essence, we are saying that a decade and four years is a very long time for such a travesty to go on, in a country where legitimate and hard-working workers are often owed salaries for months and even years; and pensioners are forced to suffer for and sometimes die on the queue, waiting to collect their hard earned pensions.

This paradox is simply unnerving and the full disclosures must be made by all those responsible for this very astounding incident. The world is very aware of ghost workers.   But the idea of a ghost corporation seems very novel; and can only come from a country that boasts a sloppy bureaucracy. But again, this very sad news says a lot about the so called ‘workers’ who, for almost a decade and a half, have allegedly been collecting salaries, for just being alive!  What deadened conscience!

We commend Committee Chairman, Oluwole Oke, for directing the relevant officials to come answer some hard questions.  These officials are the Minister of Solid Minerals and Steel Development, Minister of Water Resources and the Director-General of the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE).  The trio should give reasons a corporation, closed down since 2006, continues to draw salaries, from the public till.

Still, we have a plethora of questions for the National Assembly and other government agencies.  Because government is a continuum, why did the successive National Assembly Committees, these past years, not detect this financial mess through their oversight functions? How were funds for those payments appropriated and sourced for in the budgeting over the years?

If there has been no audited reports for some government agencies and parastatals, who are those responsible and how have they been sanctioned? Who signed the payment ledgers for those being paid and what was their number? Are there top notch beneficiaries of the alleged sleaze?

The Federal Government must dig deeper and find those responsible for this scandal and prosecute them. That might just lead to the opening of a can of worms that can unearth more areas of fraud in the system. There have always been various allegations of deep corruption in the civil service and this single case might just be the lead to more discoveries.  Drawing salaries, over the years, for work not done, is one of the subtle criminalities the country is faced with; and the fight against such vices must be a serious one.

We advise that this discovery must not be seen as the only sore thumb of the Nigerian system. It is just one out of many. We see this as the fallout of a very weak system. We must agree as a country to build strong institutions that would endure the vagaries of life and serve the next generation of Nigerians. A weak system is a harbinger of sectoral failure; and no country has achieved greatness through weak systems.

In a democracy, the three arms: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary must adhere strictly to the principle of checks and balances.  That is when democracy not only endures, but also works for the people. This alleged sleaze may not an isolated one.  There are probably variants in almost all sectors of the economy.

That is why  a concerted, collaborative effort, of the three arms, is imperative to tackle the problem; and help stem, if not completely eradicate, this kind of tackiness that robs the country of scarce resources. We equally hope justice would be done to those found guilty as a deterrent to others.