Nigeria increasingly looks like a country where even its public institutions can exist in the shadows and its workers can draw salaries without ever showing up for work. Amid the swirling controversy over a ‘ghost’ presidential tourism agency, the ghost workers menace reared its ugly head again in July — another reminder of an undying national debacle.
The ICPC said its investigation between 2024 and July 2026 uncovered 908 suspected ghost workers across at least 50 Ministries, Departments & Agencies (MDAs). That figure is an indictment of a public-service system that has supposedly undergone years of digitisation, biometric verification and personnel audits.
The investigation led to the recovery of N942 million in fraudulent salary payments. According to the report, the Nigeria Police Force accounted for the highest number, with 570 suspected ghost workers, followed by the National Water Resources Authority with 80.
Others include the Federal Ministry of Works with 56; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 24; and the Ministry of Defence, 19 suspected fake workers.
The details of the police case are particularly damning. The ICPC report stated that one suspect allegedly succeeded in adding his wife, son and mother-in-law to the federal payroll as full-time civil servants. He allegedly generated 12 distinct fictitious employee slots and routinely collected the monthly salaries attached to the ghost profiles, routing the money into accounts under his control.
This was clearly not a case of a computer system acting on its own. There is a strong hint of collusion. The official allegedly exploited backdoors and worked with crooked desk officers in the Accounts and IPPIS units to circumvent standard biometric verification.
That ugly revelation came as controversy raged over an alleged Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council and its supposed Director-General, Adeniyi Adeyemi.
The ICPC is investigating the matter alongside the EFCC and the police, even as the controversy has already generated two lawsuits against Adeyemi.
Taken together, these scandals expose the depth of institutional rot in Nigeria’s public service. That such practices continue despite the highly publicised reform efforts of successive administrations inevitably raises questions about the quality of due diligence applied to recruitment, personnel verification and staff audits across the Federal Civil Service.
The problem is compounded by the sheer size and proliferation of government agencies.
A BudgIT study noted that Nigeria now has 1,316 federal MDAs, almost three times the 541 recorded in 2012.
Even then, there was widespread alarm that the agencies had become too numerous, expensive and unwieldy.
To address the problem, the government empanelled the Steve Oronsaye Committee, which recommended a leaner public service through the merger and scrapping of agencies with overlapping functions.
Instead, the Federal Government has continued to create more agencies.
This is not merely a bureaucratic curiosity. Every new agency potentially creates another layer of administrative costs, appointments, payrolls, contracts and opportunities for patronage.
A country struggling with limited revenues and enormous development needs cannot afford an ever-expanding bureaucracy whose effectiveness is rarely subjected to rigorous scrutiny.
Nigeria has been down this road before.
Under President Olusegun Obasanjo, as many as 5,996 workers in the defunct Nigeria Airways were sacked in 2004.
The administration proceeded with the right-sizing of the federal workforce, affecting about 33,000 workers, particularly those in the lower cadres, or roughly 20 per cent of a workforce of about 160,000.
The stated objective was to improve efficiency and productivity while reducing a bloated workforce and the disproportionate share of national revenue consumed by maintaining it.
The administration also scrapped costly benefits such as free official housing, utility subsidies and dedicated fleet vehicles. These were converted into cash allowances to establish more predictable and transparent recurrent expenditure, while the Bureau of Public Service Reforms was established to streamline the public service and set minimum standards, according to the report, Civil Service Reforms in Nigeria (1999-2007): Dimensions and Consequences.
Yet even those reforms had their loopholes. It was alleged that about 2,000 of the sacked workers subsequently found their way back into the service through various means.
This shows that reforming structures without changing the culture that sustains abuse will only produce temporary results.
A separate report by Remi Aiyede of the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan, titled Public Service Reform and Nigeria’s Global Competitiveness, stated that the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan articulated its public-service reform objectives in the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy document published by the Federal Government in late 2004.
One of the most significant interventions was the implementation of IPPIS in 2010, which reportedly led to the removal of 43,000 ghost workers from the federal payroll.
Curiously, the latest ICPC investigation has now exposed how syndicate networks operating inside the accounting and IPPIS units of the police allegedly manipulated the digital portal to insert fictitious profiles that continued to draw salaries.
That is perhaps the most sobering aspect of the latest scandal. Technology did not eliminate corruption; it merely gave determined fraudsters a new platform on which to practise it.
This highlights the vulnerability of the public service to the whims of unscrupulous officials despite years of reforms, computerisation and institutional restructuring. A digital system is only as clean as the people who control its access points.
Reforms alone cannot turn the system around. The people operating it must also be properly oriented towards integrity and honest conduct. Otherwise, ghost workers will continue to find their way into payroll systems, regardless of how sophisticated the technology becomes.
There are allegations that unnamed heads of MDAs exploit periods of strikes to smuggle names into their respective payrolls. There are also claims that contract workers are regularly absorbed into the system and upgraded into full-time employees whenever the opportunity arises.
Such practices amount to nothing less than the systematic conversion of the public service into a patronage machine.
It is therefore heartening that the ICPC is moving to prosecute those implicated in the ghost-workers scam. But prosecution must not become another theatre of delay. The trials must follow due process under the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, while avoiding the familiar cycle of endless adjournments that allows politically connected suspects to outlive public outrage.
The scandalous details surrounding the PFIPC controversy are equally galling. That such an agency could allegedly exist within a system that has been subjected to repeated public-service reforms speaks volumes about the depth of institutional decay.
It raises an uncomfortable question about how many other questionable structures, appointments and payroll arrangements remain hidden beneath the surface?
Nigeria cannot continue to spend scarce public resources on institutions whose existence, mandates or personnel cannot withstand basic scrutiny.
The country needs a public service that is smaller where necessary, properly staffed where essential, professionally managed and relentlessly audited. More importantly, it needs a system in which the creation of an agency does not become an avenue for political patronage, and employment into the public service does not become an invitation to manipulate the payroll.
President Bola Tinubu has inherited not just a bloated bureaucracy but a system riddled with loopholes that make corruption possible.
His administration must therefore go beyond announcing another round of reforms. It must close the loopholes, enforce accountability and restore the culture of merit and integrity to public administration.
The ball is in Tinubu’s court to reform Nigeria’s public service around modern ethos, institutional discipline and genuine accountability. A government that cannot tell its real workers from its ghosts cannot credibly claim to know where its money is going.
