LIVE ABROAD, EARN AT HOME

Who are the ghost workers? All the culprits should be brought to justice

In the past two decades, almost every worker’s verification exercise carried out by agencies of government has thrown up thousands of Nigerians who ordinarily should not be on the payroll. Last week, the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HOCSF), Folasade Yemi-Esan, revealed how a recent physical verification exercise exposed workers living abroad but still earning salaries in several government parastatals. “I called one of the heads of the agencies and queried why many people earning salaries are not on their desks. I asked how the agency came about such a huge number of the purported workers,” she said, before sharing what has for long been an open secret: “The Head of that agency told me that he discovered that a week after the verification exercise, some of them rushed from the United Kingdom to the country, with the intention to do their own verification.”

The issue of ‘ghost workers’ in the civil service has remained a recurring decimal under successive administrations, military and civilian. It is also not a secret that many government workers who have relocated abroad are still on the payroll due to the connivance of their direct supervisors and other colleagues with whom they share the illegal pay. This fraud, which ought to be an aberration in any proper self-accounting and self-auditing bureaucratic system, is now a national scourge. Despite that these ghost workers had been receiving regular salaries and allowances running into billions of Naira, questions persist as to why they are still in business. 

We must seriously interrogate why it is so easy for the perpetrators of the crime to do what they do effortlessly and yet are not caught. Transparency and accountability remain essential to tackling the problem. In 2011, Olusegun Aganga, the then finance minister revealed that the federal government had removed 43,000 ghost workers from its payroll. Two years later, the then Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala revealed that the introduction of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) had that year culminated in the uncovering of 46,821 ghost workers and saved the nation N118.9 billion.

The issue here is not discovering people who should not be on the payroll as the regular announcements have become rather boring. What Nigerians would like to know are the steps being taken to deal with confirmed cases and prevent new ones. We ought to know, for instance, how many workers who reside abroad are still being paid and for how long they have been there on the payroll. We should also be told the total sum the nation has lost so far to this organised crime. In which Ministry Department and Agency (MDAs) is this prevalent? Who are the enablers of this fraud? For now, there is no sign that anything is being done to bring culprits to justice.

It is unacceptable that Nigerians should be periodically regaled with tales of discovery of ‘ghost workers’, while no visible attempts are made to get to the bottom of such fraud and bring the wrath of the law to bear on its perpetrators. This mindless plunder of scarce state resources has lasted long enough. Nigerians are tired of reports of invisible workers that have been uncovered on the payroll. We want a closure to these channels through which humongous public funds are stolen. Above all, it is time the perpetrators were unmasked and punished. 

Now that it has been publicly admitted that there are workers on the payroll who reside abroad, Yemi-Esan should go further to identify the culprits and their enablers so that the law can take its course.