Within the past two weeks, there
have been no fewer than three
reports of discovery of ghost
workers fleecing the public treasury
of badly needed funds. Ghost
workers, for those who may not be
familiar with the Nigerian parlance,
are non-existent workers collecting
salaries from public institutions.
These ghosts are not the bodiless
spirits that scared children in the
folktales of old, but non-existent
characters for whom bank accounts
are opened and operated by some
unscrupulous people who pay
salaries into them in grand theft
schemes that have been an
albatross for government over the
years.
The public offices at which ghost
workers have been detected of late
are the National Identity
Management Commission (NIMC),
which confirmed that 4000 of its
10,300 workers are ghosts. This
problem came to light after
completion of the commission’s
biometric data capture system. The
Director General of the Commission,
Mr. Chris Onyemenam, said apart
from the 4000 ghost workers, 800
employees could also not show up
during a staff identification process.
Elimination of the ghost workers is
expected to save the Commission
millions of naira that would have
been paid out as salaries.
The Rivers State Universal Basic
Education Board (RSUBEB) has also
discovered 1,477 ghost workers in
the state’s Ministry of Education. The
chairman of RSUBED, Mr. Ali
Oruitemeka, said about N200 million
would be saved monthly following
the deletion of names of the ghost
workers from the ministry of
education payroll.
Also, Olusegun Aganga, former
finance minister now minister of
trade and investment, said about
43,000 ghost workers were
detected and removed from
government payroll in the last one
year. He explained that the fictitious
names were padded into the payroll
of 36 government ministries,
departments and agencies (MDAs)
but were discovered through the
newly introduced Integrated
Personnel and Payroll Information
System (IPPIS).
He said the problem led to a
situation in which personnel costs in
the Federal civil service increased to
N1.3 trillion from N850 billion
between 2009 and 2010. About N12
billion, he said, was recovered as a
result of the discovery. The
Inspector General of Police, Hafeez
Ringim, also sometime ago
disclosed that about 30 per cent of
the entire police workforce of
337,000 are ghost policemen who
have been collecting salaries from
the government for many years.
He said an audit of police personnel
revealed that there are no fewer
than 107,000 ghost policemen in the
country.
With so many ghost workers in the
public service, it is no surprise that
all tiers of government are
complaining that they cannot fund
the wage increase.
To free funds for higher wages, all
tiers of government should
embrace the new Integrated
Personnel and Payroll Information
System used by the federal
government to detect ghost
workers at the federal level.
Ghost workers should not be
allowed to cripple the nation’s
payment system. If ghost workers
are dealt with, it will leave more
funds that could assist in payment
of the National Minimum wage to
workers, and also fund
development of infrastructure
It is, however, necessary to go
beyond the frequent identification of
ghost workers on the government
payroll. It is also important to ask
how names of those ghost workers
got on the payroll in the first place.
For example, we have been told that
N200 million is being saved
following the discovery that that
amount was being paid to ghost
workers monthly at the Cross River
State Ministry of Education. But
now that the ghosts have been
detected, is it not possible to detect
the public officers, bank officials and
others that put these ghosts on the
payroll, and benefited from their
inclusion?
These ghost paymasters must be
brought to book to ensure that they
do not engage in such bad
practices, henceforth. It is necessary
to clean up the payroll system to
ensure that only genuine workers
take salaries. This should be done in
conjunction with reduction of waste
in public expenditure. Everything
should be done now to end the era
of ghost workers in the public
service.
The mass murder in Norway
My heart goes out today to Norway,
where a crazed man identified as 32-
year old Anders Behring Breivic
detonated a bomb in a government
office in the country’s capital, Oslo,
killing 7 people. He put on police
uniform and headed to a Labour
youth camp where he shot
indiscriminately into a crowd of
about 500 youths attending a youth
league meeting. At the end of the
crazy rampage of the man who
described himself as a “moderate
agnostic” who went on to become
“moderately religious”, an additional
85 people were dead, 96 injured
and many are still missing.
The mass murderer reportedly shot
many who tried to escape his
shooting spree by swimming away
from the island where the youth
programme was going on, with
many dying in the sea. A total of 92
people died.
This sordid incident has drawn
reactions from across the world,
including from America’s Barack
Obama and Nigeria’s Goodluck
Jonathan
The world is still seeking for
answers to the mass murders,
which the killer described as
“gruesome, but necessary.” What
could have gone wrong? What
button went loose in this killer’s
brain?
While the world searches for
answers, one can only condole with
the families of the dead. It is so sad
for them to lose loved ones who
were neither ill nor known to be
engaged in any risky activity. The
youths were only participants in a
youth camp when they were
gunned down by Breivic who has
confessed to being solely
responsible for the attacks.
At the time of writing this, he had
not given any reason for the callous
murder of 93 people. But, he
promised to do so in court. One
lesson that this saddening
murdering spree, and similar cases
of mass murders and suicides
across the world has thrown up is
the need for sensitivity to the
emotional status of people,
especially those who have access to
guns and other weapons.
Obviously, the man did just go
from being a good, moderately
religious man to a mass murderer.
There must have been signals that
were missed by those around him.
While the effort to make sense of
the dastardly killings continues, I
condole with the families of the dead
and ask God to grant them strength
to pass through this very difficult
time of their lives.
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