THE GHOST WORKERS SYNDROME IN NIGERIA – AN ECONOMIC DRAIN THAT NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED, ESPECIALLY IN THE NIGER DELTA

By Zik Gbemre

Without a doubt, high among the problems bedeviling the Nigeria’s progressive development, especially in the area of its Public Service/Office, is the scourge of ghost workers. Though, the problem is evident across the country and actually a ‘national crisis’ and a huge drain on the national economy, its prevalence and adverse effect in the Niger Delta region, is far worse. In a nation where Personnel Costs represent more than forty percent of Government’s total Recurrent expenditure, bilking of Government via ghost workers constitutes a chunky portion of Recurrent expenses, particularly in the Niger Delta area.

What we know today as ghost workers, can be arguably said to have originated from the Niger Delta region. And it started like play in the host communities where by oil and gas companies contractors’ are compelled to employ locals, who never show up for work but earn monthly salaries. These oil and gas companies’ contractors’ are compelled by host communities to pay locals’ salaries without them doing any work. They just handover lists of locals for services without them actually doing/providing/offering any services to the contractors in the first place. The situation was so bad that often times, oil and gas companies’ contractors’ in the region were usually coerced to engage in this illegal/un-corporate practice and their refusal to cooperate often results to having their business operations to shut down. However, International Oil Companies (IOCs) like Shell (SPDC) at one time initiated a policy of “No Ghost Workers Is Allowed;” where the company instructed all their Contractors not to pay ghost workers when executing contracts. With this policy, Shell abolished the ghost workers syndrome within its system and operations. Sadly, while this problem still persists, today, the ugly phenomenon has graduated to a situation where it has now extended to the government/public sectors.

It is surprising to discover that some people are ghost workers in close to eight or more different places without working for not even one hour or providing any service. These people earn salaries on a monthly basis in the number of government agencies/departments/parastatals where their names are listed as those under the government/company employ. They practically earn salaries in all the government departments. And this ugly trend became legalized and more evident during the immediate past PDP-government under former President Goodluck Jonathan.

For decades, payroll fraud has continued to drain incredible sums of money from the Nigerian civil service. Infamously known as ‘ghost workers’, various methods have been employed to check the syndrome, but those behind it continues to find new techniques. At all levels of government – federal and state – there is a renewed fervour to tackle the problem, especially since the coming of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, the quest for transparency and the economic downturn. The term ‘ghost worker’ was born in reference to employees who convert salaries through false means, or where a fictitious person or a real worker simply did not work but got paid. This, of course, is perpetrated almost exclusively by civil servants within the civil service. The implementation of Biometric Verification Number (BVN), the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPP IS) are, among others, steps to check ‘ghost workers’.

Ghost workers essentially represent dysfunctionality in governance. The ghost workers problem, which ought to be an aberration in any proper self-accounting and self-auditing bureaucratic system, is now a national scourge that warrants urgent remedial measures. A ghost worker is a payroll personality, not actually employed by the paying public service institution. Ghost workers exist as a person or only in name. Ghost workers disenfranchise other Nigerians by collecting wages and entitlements not due to them. Some are double, triple and multiple dippers, who do one job but collect wages at two, three or multiple pay points.

When it comes to ghost workers, the motivation is simply greed. Those who orchestrate ghost workers merely tap into the seemingly depthless resources of the government. Most State budgets like the federal budgets are frontloaded with recurrent expenditure. A huge subset of that fiscal burden is dedicated to personnel emolument; and a high percentage of the personnel emolument currently go to ghost workers. The problem of ghost workers is so big, insidious and entrenched in the Nigerian bureaucracy that the nation is losing billions in the three tiers of government. Human resources managers at the federal, state and local government levels are mainly culpable; so too is the approving and accounting officers. These officials are not clueless of the origins of ghost workers and how to plug the loopholes. Rather, they willfully embrace such loopholes or in the least, pretend such loopholes do not exist, because they and their cohorts are the beneficiaries. Ironically, the ghost worker s problem is far more rampant in the public service bureaucracy and less so, in the organized private sector. This fact alone, affirms ghost worker proliferation as a public policy failure, which solution lies in the realm of hard-headed problem solving.

Various federal government agencies have recent weeks rolled out related hair-raising figures, of ‘ghost workers’ identified or removed from payrolls of organizations. The Director-General, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, Dr. Joe Abah said the federal government saved over N185billion by removing 65,000 ghost workers since the implementation of IPPIS. He added that its Work Efficiently Unit had identified 23,000 people that were collecting multiple salaries. Also, the acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC), Mr. Ibrahim Magu reportedly said the commission detected 37,395 ghost workers on the payroll of the federal civil service. He also revealed that the federal government lost about N1billion to ghost workers within a certain period. Then came the shocking revelation in March this year, by Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, that the federal government was investigating an additional 11,000 ‘ghost workers’ it discovered on its payroll. She said that the recent removal of 23,000 from the federal civil service had reduced government’s monthly payroll by N2.29 billion.

According to the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, she said the exercise was aimed at identifying the actual number of those workers who are on the Federal Government’s (FG) payroll, uncovering ghost workers and others earning salaries fraudulently. In her words: “As for the exact number of ghost workers discovered, I will say the figure keeps changing, because every day we keep cleaning up the payroll and this has been going on for a long time. But so far it seems it is about 43,000 and it keeps on increasing and we will continue until we have removed all, because every time we remove those who shouldn’t be there, it creates rooms to employ those who are ready to work and create money to spend on things the country need. So far we have reduced what we pay monthly by N4.5b‎n and it has been increasing every day because every day those that are not supposed to be on the payroll are being removed. We would keep on until we are sure that everybody receivin g salary from the federal government is valid and the only way we can do that is to pay salaries directly into their accounts and we can also verify by using BVN to ensure that no multiple payment and that the people are alive. I think is a very good thing.”

Irked by the scandal of phenomenal proportions, the Secretary-General, Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN), Comrade Alade Bashir Lawal, demanded that the federal government set-up a joint government-labour panel to establish the authenticity of the claim of the 23,000 ghost workers in its fold.

Over 43,000 ‘ghost workers’ are believed to appear on various payrolls, with a top government official revealing to Daily Trust that “The public service, including the judiciary, local government councils, military, Customs, Immigrations, FRSC, CBN and other para-military, are hotbeds of the so-called ghost worker scams.” He added that unbelievable levels of scandal will be discovered if a comprehensive biometric staff audit of the public service is carried out. It was also gathered that without the involvement and cooperation of workers, government efforts can yield only so much results, falling short of the desired level of eradication. Cartels of sorts, according to a source, are responsible for the stealthily stolen money, creating aliases to which salaries slim and fat are paid. The ‘owners’ of these fabricated workers would then, sometimes in collaboration with bank officials, cash out. “Y ou will be shocked at the number of senior and junior civil servants who ‘own’ such workers,” she said. Another source, a civil servant who claimed to have put 12 years in as a federal worker said the top echelon is to blame, as it is through their instructions to subordinates that the ‘ghost worker’ syndrome flourishes. Yet another said some of the ‘ghost workers’ were actually ghosts, as many who have died and whose files have not been updated, are co-opted in the scam. When asked if the relatives of those involved did not come for claims as next-of-kin, he replied that the tiresome nature of doing that and the bureaucratic processes involved made some of the relatives lose interest, while many others do not even come at all. A highly-placed source in the federal civil service told Daily Trust that the recent revelations by the present administration are just a tip of the iceberg, as cartels of sorts run the illicit industry. He said some of the stories bandied around sound like fantasies but are, indeed, true. He mentioned that all kinds of names are slotted into payment vouchers to draw salaries, including names of year-old children, domestic staff and even pets.

Experts believe that Ghost workers exist because every bureaucracy creates its own weaknesses. This is not peculiar to Nigeria. Evidence points to high occurrence of ghost workers in Third World countries. In 2014, Kenya discovered 12,000 ghost workers on its payroll; mainly person who continued to receive salaries after leaving government service. In 2015, Cameroon identified 10,000 ghost workers within its 220,000 civil service cadre that cost the government $12million monthly. In Yemen using a biometric system, the government detected 5,875 ghost workers in a 485,818 work force. In Nigeria ghost workers run in the hundreds of thousands, because of willful and complicit phantom paymasters. What was once an aberration resulting from minor personnel or accounting errors is now a scam that exploits lax oversight and weak enforcement of extant public service rules and regulations.

In tackling this problem of ghost workers, it is imperative to address its source, which according to experts requires: 1) Periodic review of hiring and firing policies and ensuring that they comply with establishment and appropriated recruitment figures. 2) Periodic census of public service personnel and the maintenance of records of all official and natural personnel attrition, including sacks, retirements and deaths. 3) Maintaining an organigram of every MDA that reflects approved staff strength. 4) Identifying the accounting officers, mostly in the Offices of the Heads of Service responsible for monitoring establishment quotas, and handling public service recruitment and separations and approving salary vouchers sent to banks. 5) Installing fail-safe redundancies in electronic information technology platforms that check overrides and inputs into the system used for preparing payrolls. 7) Ensuring that personnel a nd supernumeraries brought in by political appointees also depart with their principals. 8) Working with labour unions concerned that innocent civil servants, with incomplete documentation, but not necessarily ghost workers will be disenfranchised. 9) Strong internal controls that dispense with all forms of cash payment for emoluments. 10) Adequate monitoring of banks and other financial institutions including micro-finance banks used for payment of salaries.

Transparency and Accountability remain essential to solving ghost worker challenges and caging the problem. Without question, fraudulent acts by most ghost workers originate with payroll personnel. Since ghost salaries results from manipulation of payroll technology, blocking such pilfering will require blocking prospective technological loopholes. Thus caging the ghost workers require a uniform and concerted personnel recruitment and civil service census policy that must be in tandem with the payroll data management. Additional cluster of measures required include, automated mapping of payroll; disbursement of salary only to employees’ accounts; use biometric attendance devices; opening accounts for new employees tied to their BVNs from the onset; Segregating duties related to payroll preparation, disbursement and distribution; and finally, ensuring that sequenced pay slips are prepared for the employees, during pay periods. These are not original ideas and are already being used piecemeal in some establishments. Yet to be maximally effective, a holistic approach is required.

The problem of ghost workers is essentially dual-tracked; identifying correctly those who collect wages for work done and those who collect wages for work not done, or exist in the workforce only in name. The solution is surprisingly simple but requires drastic intrusive measures. This is because those executives that create ghost workers are also the ones that are routinely charged with conduct of oversight and auditing. Hence while ghost worker may be reduced through internal mechanisms, the scourge will not disappear entirely unless there is a concerted top-to-bottom effort and the political will to tackle the scourge. A singular answer is spontaneous forensic audits and reviews managed by top executives and carried out entirely by outsiders.

Zik Gbemre, JP.

National Coordinator

Niger Delta Peace Coalition (NDPC)