THE BANE OF ‘GHOST WORKERS’

Government should put an end to the recurring problem of ghost workers

As Nigerian workers join the rest of the world to mark the 2025 ‘Labour Day, it is also important for the authorities to reflect on the issue of ‘ghost workers’ in the civil service which has remained a recurring decimal under successive administrations. The spectre, which ought to be an aberration in any proper self-accounting and self-auditing bureaucratic system, is now a national scourge that appears insurmountable. Only recently, amid reports that many of the civil servants who have since relocated abroad continue to receive salaries from the government, the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation has begun a personnel audit aimed at identifying and removing ‘ghost workers’ from the federal civil service payroll. But like previous such efforts, nothing may come out of the exercise.

Ordinarily, the introduction of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) in the nation’s Public Finance Management (PFM) system was largely designed to insulate the federal government payroll from this ghost workers syndrome. But every year, the nation is still regaled with tales of ghost workers that had been ‘uncovered’ and various sums ‘saved’, despite the full deployment of technological tools to forestall the problem. We must therefore interrogate why it is so easy for the perpetrators of the crime to do what they do effortlessly, and yet are not caught.

Human resource managers, approving and accounting officers in the civil service are alleged to be mainly culpable in the thriving enterprise of ‘ghost workers’. It is believed that these officials are not unaware of those who collect jumbo remunerations for work not done and how to plug the loopholes. Should this be the case, why have they consistently been left off the radar while Nigerians are entertained with endless rhetoric of how many ghost workers have been uncovered and how much has been saved?

Perhaps to underscore how deep-rooted this malaise has been, as far back as year 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had attached a condition to a N1 billion loan. The multilateral lender gave the then Olusegun Obasanjo administration a marching order to root out ghost workers in the federal civil service before it could approve the facility for Nigeria. Despite all the claims made at that time, the problem has remained intractable two and a half decades later.

The Minister of Finance under both Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala who is currently the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) once declared that her life was threatened for saving the country $3.6 billion in ghost workers and oil subsidy scam. This provides a lead: That those who fish in this illegal pond are powerful people.  The then Director-General, Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), Dasuki Arabi once disclosed that 70,000 ghost workers had been ‘eliminated’ from the federal government payroll through the IPPIS. According to him, the government had been able to save N220 billion. By September of same year, then National Security Adviser (NSA), Babagana Monguno also claimed that the federal government had uncovered about 54,000 fraudulent payroll entries in IPPIS.

 As experts have argued, transparency and accountability remain essential to solving the challenges and tackling the problem. Since it emanates from the manipulation of payroll technology, the solution to plugging such pilfering will require blocking prospective technological loopholes. We want a closure to this brazen theft of public funds that should not be difficult to detect since it is perpetrated through banks.

Until the perpetrators are unmasked and brought to justice, the government should spare Nigerians all the tales of money ‘saved’ from ‘unmasking’ ghost workers.