• Yet another fairy tale as Federal Government supposedly exposes 45,000 ghosts on its payroll
It would seem like sardonic humour to state that there are more ghosts in Nigeria’s civil service than real workers; but that is the picture being painted by the ghost-busting Ministry of Finance in the past few years. In fact, going by recent records, it could well be said that Nigeria is a ghost country where nothing is what it seems.
Mid-February, the Federal Executive Council had emerged from its weekly meeting to announce with so much flourish that it had discovered 45,000 ghost workers in 251 ministries, departments and agencies, MDAs, where the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS, had been deployed as at January this year. There are 321 MDAs under the federal service scheme yet to be audited. A simple extrapolation would paint a scary picture of a landscape brimming with multitudinous ghosts feeding from the treasury. It is also noteworthy that ghosts and tales of flitting wraiths abound across all the states and local council services. A keen enquirer needs only to poke a pointed stick at the payroll of any government establishment and these strange fellows would crawl out of the walls.
The tale of ghosts cohabiting with civil servants in Nigeria dates back a long time but the Federal Ministry of Finance took up the task of exterminating this unseen vampire since 2006 through what was termed biometric capture of the Federal Government’s workers. But apart from big headlines of saddening discoveries and huge sums expended in the ghost trail, no economic purpose seems to have been served so far. In mid-2011, early in the life of this administration, the Federal Ministry of Finance had made a song about unearthing about 100,000 ghost workers in a few MDAs in a renewed biometric exercise designed to reduce the burgeoning recurrent expenditure in the federal budget which stood at 75 per cent.
The ghost worker syndrome in Nigeria is disgraceful enough and must be rare in other climes; that the Ministry of Finance under its current leadership seems to mire what would have been a most laudable reform option is particularly troubling. In more serious societies, blatant criminal activities of this magnitude would have been confronted with the required zest and stamped out long ago. But here, criminals in the system who fleece the country of billions of naira monthly are accommodated and treated with such levity suggesting that their activity might well be an orchestrated scam in which everyone is a partaker.
The practice was that the Civil Service Commission and the Ministry of Establishment were the custodians of service personnel records, movements, remuneration schemes and salary structures. Where were these bodies when the service became ghost-infested? Who cross-checks, authorises and approves monthly salary payouts to thousands of non-existent workers? Who are the auditors and accounting officers of affected MDAs?
It must be noted that this annual ghost story has become very wearisome and there is no gainsaying that it impacts negatively on the country’s image. We urge the government, if it truly seeks to exorcise the ghosts, to adopt some drastic actions like summary dismissals and prosecution of the top brass of any ghost-infested MDA. It must also revive the service procedures for tracking employment, keeping records and verifying pay rolls.
Above all, the Federal Government must move quickly to put an end to this ingrained corruption, this shameful saga termed ghost workers, by fast-tracking and concluding the biometric capture of all civil servants as well as fully and expeditiously deploying the IPPIS in all MDAs.
