The three tiers of government in Nigeria are losing billions of naira annually to the seemingly intractable ghost worker phenomenon which has continued to ravage the civil service system over the years. This is as the federal, state and local governments are paying hundreds of millions of naira monthly to thousands of non-existent workers captured in their respective payrolls, thereby draining the governments of resources that could have been channelled into other productive ventures.
“The direct implication of ghost worker phenomenon is looting of money which was supposedly used to pay the salaries and allowances of those non-existent workers. Thus, the resources that should have been used for public good are illegally diverted to private pockets or bank accounts,” said Femi Aborishade of the Centre for Labour Studies, Ibadan.
“It also unnecessarily gives the false impression that the number of workers employed in the public sector is higher than what the reality is. Thus, it contributes to the perception that the recurrent budget is disproportionately high,” Aborishade, a legal practitioner and social advocate, told BDSUNDAY.
Kemi Adeosun, minister of finance, who appeared before the Senate Committee on Finance recently, revealed that about 23,000 ghost workers had been uncovered in the federal civil service. According to her, the adoption of the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) and Bank Verification Number (BVN) platforms helped in exposing the salary scam being perpetrated by civil servants.
BDSUNDAY analysis of the figure shows that the Federal Government could be losing up to N5 billion annually to these ghost workers, assuming the 23,000 figure is accurate, and assuming that each of these 23,000 ‘ghost workers’ earns a minimum monthly salary of N18,000, which is the national minimum wage. This will sum up to N414 million per month and about N5 billion in a year.
But huge as this may seem, it is a child’s play compared to the N170 billion which the former minister of finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, in October 2014 announced to Nigerians that the Federal Government had saved, in salaries and allowances, following the discovery of 60,000 ghost workers in federal establishments across the country during the staff audit of its ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) on the implementation of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS).
Earlier in 2011, the National Identity Management Commission, which is just one agency of government, had reportedly discovered that 4,000 names on its payroll were ghost workers.
“We did biometric data capture for the employees of the commission and it was amazing to find out that out of the 10,300 employees on the payroll, 4,000 were ghost workers,” Chris Onyemenam, the then director-general of the commission, had said.
BDSUNDAY analysis again shows that assuming each of these 4,000 names earned the minimum N18,000, that would sum up to N72 million monthly and N864 million in a year. By extension, assuming the 541 federals ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) each harbours 4,000 ghost workers, then the government coffers would be haemorrhaging by as much as N467.4 billion annually lost to ghost workers.
But that is far from the whole story as across the states and local government areas, it is the same tale of sleaze.
Sordid tales across the states
In November 2012, Kebbi State Verification Committee on Local Government Staff said it uncovered 9,258 ghost workers in the 21 local councils of the state.
A month later, the Abia State government announced that the biometric data implementation committee set up by it had discovered 1,727 ghost workers on the payroll of its 17 local government councils. According to the government, steadily rising wage bill in the local government system had prompted it to introduce biometric method of identifying the genuine workers so as to fish out the ghost names that appeared on the payroll.
More recently, in August 2015, the Okezie Ikpeazu administration in the state embarked on another staff verification exercise geared towards eliminating ghost workers from its public service, after which it said it had saved N160 million.
Also in 2013, the then Plateau State commissioner for information and communication, Yiljap Abraham, revealed that not less than 6,000 ghost workers had been discovered in the state’s civil service after a biometric verification exercise carried out by the state government. The commissioner said that after earlier committees set up by the government to determine the strength of its workforce had put the figure at between 17,000 and 18,000 workers, the governor became alarmed that despite the fact that there had been no new employment, the figure kept rising. The biometric exercise discovered that Plateau should not have more than 11,000 workers, meaning that the remaining were not legitimate workers.
“Between 2007 and 2011, we discovered that the figure of the civil service kept increasing despite the fact that people have been dying and have not been replaced. We have had people resigning, going on secondment and, yet, we have not had any corresponding decrease,” Yiljap said.
Shortly after he came to power in May last year, Ayodele Fayose, governor of Ekiti State, ordered the verification of the over 48,977 workers in the state’s payroll in a bid to rid the public service of ghost workers.
The following month, his Ebonyi State counterpart, dave Umahi, withheld salaries of local government workers over the high rate of ghost workers that had plagued the state.
In August, Samuel Aruwan, spokesman to Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, announced that the state government had saved N120 million in the first phase of the staff verification exercise it embarked upon to rid the state of ghost workers.
In September, the Kano State government announced the discovery of 1,830 ghost workers out of the 2,490 casual workers engaged as street cleaners by the state Refuse Management and Sanitation Board, which cost the government N18.1 million monthly.
The following month, the Benue State government embarked on a verification exercise during which it said it had uncovered over 10,000 ghost teachers and over 80 fully-staffed ghost schools, all of which were captured in the payment voucher in the various local governments and funds diverted into private accounts.
More recently, the Niger State government said earlier this month that it had uncovered 7,000 ghost workers in the payroll of the 25 local government councils in the state. Out of this number, 3,394 were fake local government staff while the rest were teachers in primary schools in the state. Following the huge salary bills it had to contend with in the implementation of the N18,000 minimum wage, the government had engaged a consultant to conduct staff verification in the councils. BDSUNDAY research shows that out of those screened by the consultant, 207 staff duplicated salary accounts into which monthly stipends were paid simultaneously while 565 on the payroll were under-aged children.
In Delta State, the government in 2012 said that about 7,000 ghost workers had been discovered in the state civil service during a biometric verification exercise. In 2013, the same government raised an alarm that ghost workers were draining its resources and disclosed that no fewer than 23,000 of them had been uncovered in the four years to 2013, with over N800 million paid out to them monthly as salary.
As part of efforts to check the problem of ghost workers, the government further suspended e-payment of workers’ salaries and adopted physical payment, explaining that other strategies earlier adopted to check corruption in the salary payment system, especially the ghost worker syndrome, had failed. It said despite more than 7,000 ghost workers discovered in the state through biometric staff audit in 2012, the wage bill had continued to rise, direly affecting budget performance in the state with regard to projects execution.
In May last year, shortly before the end of his tenure, the then state governor, Emmanuel Uduaghan, told the transition committee for incoming Ifeanyi Okowa administration that his government had discovered that names of 40 retired fire servicemen were still on the payroll of regular workers in the state.
Yet in September, Governor Ifeanyi Okowa set up a committee to investigate why the Delta State wage bill was higher than other states in the Niger Delta region that had more revenue resources, including higher federal allocation.
In Imo State, the Ikedi Ohakim government in 2010 said it was losing over N60 million annually to 194 ghost workers in the State Universal Basic Education Board, adding that with the discovery, the government would be saving N6,555,344 monthly.
In 2012, the Rochas Okorocha administration in the state said the civil service was siphoning a whooping N650 million monthly through ghost workers and pledged to plug all the loopholes through which this was happening. Yet again in 2015, the government said it had uncovered about 140 ghost workers during a verification exercise for pensioners in the 27 local councils.
Root of the problem
A cross-section of Nigerians who spoke to BDSUNDAY put the blame squarely on the shoulders of a sick system that allows corruption of all descriptions to fester.
“There is so much impunity in the system which should be addressed. A system that allows one single individual to keep $2.1 billion and distribute such among politicians as we are now hearing is a sick. It is a systemic problem,” said Bashir Lawal, secretary general, Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN).
On his part, Aborishade of the Centre for Labour Studies said the persistent problem of ghost workers is a reflection of corruption in the public service.
“Those who benefit are at the top of the public service in collusion with politicians who collect the salaries and allowances of such non-existent workers. Ordinary workers do not benefit. So, we cannot blame ordinary workers,” he said.
But for Osa Director, a legal practitioner, the recent claim by the finance minister that the ministry discovered 23,000 ghost workers within the system months after Okonjo-Iweala, the finance minister in the previous administration, made similar revelations was hard to believe.
“I am shocked and disappointed to hear the current minister of finance say that they have discovered 23,000 ghost workers within the system. You will recall that the former minister of finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, carried out a similar exercise in the federal civil service during which thousands of ghost workers were reported to have been got rid of, with billions of naira saved from that exercise,” said Director.
“With the latest claim of the discovery of another 23,000 ghost workers by Adeosun, one begins to ask the questions, who is a ghost worker? Or is it a gimmick to give the government a semblance of work or score a political point? How and when did these new figures that the minister mentioned creep into the system again after Okonjo-Iweala got rid of them? What is the nexus between the exercise carried out by the former administration and the new figure being bandied by the current government? These are the unanswered questions,” he said.
Director added that for Nigerians to take Adeosun seriously, she should explain the relationship between her recent discovery and that of Okonjo-Iweala.
“She should come out clean. She should provide detailed explanations. Is it that the previous administration did not do a thorough work? These are what Nigerians want to know. For me, I am worried with government officials playing politics with everything. This is not healthy for this economy,” he said.
Taming the monster
Though huge discoveries have been made over the years, some commentators regret that no credible step has been taken to recover the money and expose and punish the perpetrators, which is partly why the malaise has continued to fester.
“Government’s refusal to take steps to recover the money is an endorsement of corruption, a manifestation of impunity which encourages intending looters to seek to perfect their crime,” Eze Onyekpere, lead director, Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), said sometime ago.
Aborishade said the solution lies in running the public sector transparently.
“Government and unions should collaborate to establish the number of workers employed by biometric capturing. Salaries and allowances should be paid by electronic transfer to such established workers. The list of workers employed from time to time and the units to which they are deployed should be made accessible to trade unions and members of the public so that unions would have an opportunity to confirm that such persons are truly their members. The list of workers in every unit should be published on departmental notice boards and on the internet which should be available for verification and or objections by workers, trade unions and members of the public,” he stated.
For Lawal, there is need for every Nigerian to support the fight against corruption. At the level of ASCSN, he said they had over the years been educating their members to shun corrupt practices and members had substantially complied. He said those the government claimed to have discovered were not their members, challenging the government to publish the names purportedly discovered as ghost workers.
On his part, Director stressed the need to leverage on technology via e-payment system to deal with this “cancer” in the public service.
Furthermore, a research conducted by Idris Haruna, Adaja Joseph and Audu Joel Samson of the Federal Polytechnic Idah, Kogi State University, in 2015, titled “Integrated Personnel Payroll and Information System (IPPIS) Panacea for Ghost Workers Syndrome in Nigerian Public Service”, recommended that IPPIS should be adopted in the public service to ensure a virile economy through enhanced productivity.
CHUKS OLUIGBO & JOSHUA BASSEY
