Who will lay the restless ghosts of Nigeria’s civil service to rest? For almost as long as I can remember, these “invisible” ghosts have been on the prowl, weighing down the public payroll on which they sit pretty, collecting salaries for no work done. They are formless, invisible, inexistent spirits and ghouls, earning incomes at a time that strong, able-bodied and well qualified Nigerians are pounding the streets with university degrees in search of any job they could lay their hands on, including that of truck drivers, without much success.
It is quite unclear when exactly these ghosts and their greedy “fathers and grandfathers” in the public service chanced upon our country. One thing that is clear, however, is that like rats – another category of voracious “ghosts” of the animal variety – they have been around for ages, bloating the payroll and wolfing down significant amounts from the public treasury.
The problem of ghost workers began in Nigeria so long ago. A well- researched report in a national newspaper, recently, indicated that as far back as 2001, no fewer than 40,000 “inexistent workers” were found happily collecting salaries in the Federal public service. Chief Joseph Naiyeju, the Accountant-General of the Federation at the time, must certainly have been amazed when a manpower verification exercise conducted by the Federal Government threw up 40,000 “ghosts”.
In the Federal Capital Territory (Abuja) alone, former minister of the territory, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, reportedly discovered 6,000 active spirits on the payroll following a staff audit. Those ghosts had been happily collecting $8 million as salaries, annually.
Even among the police, a search for these ubiquitous spirits in 2010 threw up a whopping 100,000. A total one hundred thousand ghoulish spirits were sharing police salaries, taking up almost a third of all salaries paid by the police force. These bogeys bloated the police population to 330,000 instead of the actual 230,000, apparently contributing to inability of the force to pay reasonable salaries to the “flesh and blood” policemen.
Many states have not been left out of the ghost workers malaise. Our comrade governor in Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole, has had cause to complain about the ghost workers in the state civil service. Kogi State, in August 2009, lamented the loss of about N700 million to ghost workers monthly. Ekiti State, through Governor Kayode Fayemi, said it lost N3 billion, while the Customs, in 2009, was discovered to have about half of its workforce “inexistent.”
Strangely also, it would appear that many of the “people” upsetting the plans for improved power supply in the country, by the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, are actually faceless and bodiless souls. Local governments have also not been spared of the ghost worker virus. It is alive and well in the third tier of government. Even among the teachers of our children, there are ghosts. The Rivers State Universal Basic Education Board was reported to have lost huge sums to these ghosts, and the state is not the only one that has this problem.
And then, the greatest tragedy of it all. It is obvious that when ghost workers feed on the public payroll for decades, they do not just die off. Or, can ghosts die? Most unlikely, since they are lifeless, immortal souls. So, they simply transmute to ghost pensioners. That is the reason that Nigeria has a large number of aged and toothless grandfather and grandmother ghosts treading gingerly on the pensioners payroll with their walking sticks. The Nigerian Pension Reform Task Force was reported to have discovered 7,133 of these ghost pensioners on the pensioners roll in February 2012.
Now, where do all these ghost workers and pensioners leave the public treasury? The treasury becomes lean, famished. Public expenditure and national budgets become skewed in favour of recurrent expenditure, leaving little left for critical capital projects that can make a real impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. When the huge sums paid as salaries to ghost workers and pensioners are added to the humongous salaries of political appointees which reportedly gulps almost a third of all public revenue, it becomes quite glaring why Nigerians will continue to complain about bad roads and other dilapidated public infrastructure, while successive governments continue to mouth promises on their repair, without doing anything serious about the problem.
The government, however, is not resting on its oars on this ghostly palaver. Former Finance Minister now Minister of Trade and Investment, Olusegun Aganga, in 2011, said the Federal Government removed 43,000 ghost workers from the old payroll of 112,000 employees in the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the government, between 2010 and 2011. The current Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, while giving details of the mid-term report of the Goodluck Jonathan administration recently, said that 46,821 ghost workers were identified on the public payroll through the implementation of the new Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS). This is a biometric system which captures the bio-data of civil servants and makes it possible for salaries to be paid directly into their accounts. The IPPIS is the new policeman that is helping government to exorcise ghosts workers from the payment system.
But even then, the IPPIS is only a system operated by men and women. If unscrupulous civil servants can conjure inexistent persons on the public payroll, pay them salaries from the public till for years, and transmute them to “ghost pensioners”, what can they not do? Is the IPPIS truly infallible?
One fact that is clear is that the war against ghosts on the public payroll will best be won when those who created these ghosts, and have been benefiting from the monies paid to “them” over the years, are apprehended, named, shamed and brought to book.
The best way to go about this matter, however, is to first cover all the MDAs with this biometric system. Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has confirmed that only 215 MDAs with 153,019 workers had been covered with IPPIS by January this year, with N118.9 billion saved, and 46,821 ghost workers uncovered. Another 321 MDAs are yet to be covered, which means that thousands of fake and inexistent workers are still earning salaries for no work done. The battle to bring all MDAs, states and local governments under the IPPIS is a task that must be done. It is a matter that deserves the greatest urgency because it is glaring that thousands of ghosts are still feeding on public payrolls. If 46,000 ghosts can be existing on the payroll of 215 MDAs, the remaining 321 MDAs may have no less than 50,000 to 60,000 ghosts. The authorities need to quickly identify these ghost workers and their unscrupulous employers and payroll managers.
Certainly, those who are in charge of the management of payrolls in these institutions cannot feign ignorance of the existence of these ghosts. The banks to which their salaries are paid cannot also feign ignorance of how monies paid into such accounts are ferreted out.
All hands should be on deck to rest the restless ghost syndrome in Nigeria. This will go a long way in freeing public funds for other important programmes and projects.
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