Government has to deal with the ghost-worker phenomenon decisively
Nigeria’s perennial ghost-worker problem reached new depths of infamy when the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, announced that 80,115 of them had been discovered in the Nigeria Police Force (NPF).
The anomaly was exposed as a result of the full incorporation of the country’s 42 police commands and formations into the Federal Government’s Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) in February. The long-assumed figure of 371,800 officers in the NPF shrank to 291,685 after the exercise was carried out.
Government is to be commended for its dogged insistence on continuing with its programme of deploying the IPPIS in the payrolls of all ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), especially in the face of stout resistance from the police hierarchy. In October 2017, there were protests in Abuja, Kaduna and Port Harcourt by policemen objecting to the delay in payment of salaries which were ostensibly attributed to ongoing migration to IPPIS.
The significance of this discovery is hard to over-estimate. The most obvious is the financial implication of losing billions in public funds over time to ghost-workers representing 21.548 per cent of the NPF’s staff strength. The steady hemorrhaging of huge amounts in the NPF and elsewhere will definitely have had negative repercussions on bureaucratic efficiency and the national economy as a whole.
Then there is the grim realisation that the country’s police force is even fewer than hitherto believed. That means that Nigeria is much more ill-equipped to deal with the rash of security challenges confronting it; the reduced numbers imply that the police are far more overworked and less able to cope than was previously thought. The implications for the efficient handling of communal disturbances and other breakdowns of law and order are sobering.
There is also the unflattering insight into the ethical state and competence of the NPF itself. The ghost-worker scam is the most communal of crimes; for it to work properly, the active collaboration of hundreds of police officers across many diverse units is required. How did over 80,000 names get onto the police payroll in the first place? How were payments made, in spite of Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) ostensibly validating all account-holders? Why did the Police Service Commission (PSC) apparently have no inkling of what was going on?
It is critical that the nation move beyond what has become the routine celebration of anti-corruption initiatives like this one. The unearthing of financial malfeasance is not enough; true progress can only be made when safeguards are put in place to ensure that it never happens again and those who engaged in it are punished to the fullest extent of the law.
Establishing preventive measures to drastically reduce ghost-workers is a vital strategy, given the incredible regularity with which they are discovered at federal, state and local government levels. Repeated discoveries, year after year, often in the same parastatal or ministry, are a clear indication that the steps taken to eliminate the phenomenon, if any, are not working.
If this situation is to be reversed, it must begin with the identification and punishment of those involved in ghost-worker swindles. Since all payments are routed through the accounts departments of the organisations involved, that is where investigations should begin. The relevant officers should be made to explain who authorised such payments. Banks should be compelled to release the identities of those who operated the accounts of ghost-workers. Those found to be implicated in these offences must be prosecuted.
Regulatory agencies, such as the Police Service Commission in the case of the NPF, must be thoroughly overhauled to make them more efficient and responsive. In particular, the near-incestuous relationships which often exist between regulators and the organisations they oversee must be eliminated altogether. Not much can be achieved when watchdogs find it profitable to turn a blind eye to the underhand dealings of those they are supposed to be superintending
