The announcement the other day that Nigeria has removed more than 20,000 non-existent workers from the government payroll, leading to savings of N2.29bn ($12m) from its monthly payroll, is certainly no complimentary news, as it speaks directly to the corruption and mismanagement that has stunted economic growth and national development. But the fundamental question remains: how many public servants has Nigeria? It is indeed a shame that even today; the nation does not have a sacrosanct figure of the number of its civil servants. And even more shameful, is the fact that no one knows exactly how much is spent on those civil servants and for what level of productivity. This is a national embarrassment of monumental proportions and President Buhari must put an end to this shame.
According to Festus Akanbi, special adviser to Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun, the ghost workers were purged following a computer-assisted audit using biometric data and a bank verification number (BVN) to identify holders of bank accounts into which salaries were paid. This revealed the names of salaried civil servants which did not correspond to the names linked to the bank accounts. In some cases, certain individuals were receiving salaries from multiple sources. “The federal government has removed 23,846 non-existent workers from its payroll…consequently the salary bill for February 2016 has reduced by 2.293bn naira when compared to December 2015 when the BVN audit process commenced,” Akanbi noted, adding, those removed had been on the payroll of ministries, departments and agencies.
Akanbi disclosed that personnel costs represented over 40% of total government expenditure, saying the ministry was working with the financial crimes agency and the National Pension Commission to recover salaries and pension contributions related to the ghost workers. The Finance ministry said it would now undertake “periodic checks” and also introduce tougher monitoring of new entrants to the civil service to avert further abuse of the system. “The ongoing exercise, which is part of the cost-saving and anti-corruption agenda of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, is key to funding the deficit in the 2016 budget,” he said.
Beyond the empty platitudes, Akanbi failed to tell Nigerians which Departments, Agencies or Ministries were involved in the audit. Rather, he revealed that so far the details of about 312,000 civil servants have been checked and 23,846 were found to be ghost workers. Nigerians are interested to know those responsible for the fraud; for how long the ghost workers collected salaries and when charges will be brought against them and their benefactors. Besides, when will the forensic audit be extended to other ministries, departments and agencies in the federal public service? If 20,000 ghost workers were found just in one Ministry; imagine the number of ghost workers that exist in the federal public service and the 36 State governments. But even most important, Nigerians need to know the exact number of public servants on the government payroll.
It is worth recalling the ruckus that erupted during the Jonathan administration, when the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN) debunked as bloated the figure of 1.2 million announced before the House Committee on Health by the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation (BOF) to be the staff strength of the Federal Public Service. Asserting that available records on the entire public service put the right figure at about 870,000 strong, the ASCSN Secretary-General questioned the N1.8 trillion said to be spent annually on public servants as personnel costs; challenging the Federal Ministry of Finance (FMF) to make public a detailed breakdown of the personnel costs by various categories of public servants and political office holders. That the Finance Ministry failed to provide the requested information leaves much to be desired.
Year after year, the draft federal budget proposals speak copiously about progress made in eliminating ghost workers from the public service through a biometric verification exercise. After many years, the Federal Government set a December 2013 deadline for full implementation of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) and the Government Integrated Financial Management System (GIFMIS). Accordingly, and for the sake of transparency, the FMF should publish on the World Wide Web all necessary information on public servants without any further delay. The best way to fish out ghost workers is to list the employees according to the smallest administrative/operational units adopted by each ministry, department or agency to enable bona fide members of staff in such units to point out all strange and non-existent workers in their midst.
Instructively, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) biometrically registered 70 million voters in about three months just as the GSM operators captured the biometric data of about 120 million SIM card owners in about six months. Why is it then so difficult for the Finance Ministry to collect requisite data on the relatively small number of public servants? By the way, practically all public servants are duly registered with both the INEC and the GSM operators. Is it not possible for the IPPIS, GIFMIS, INEC and the GSM operators to share their data?
Whatever its true staff strength, the federal public service is overstaffed, overpaid, unproductive and wasteful. Its current output level will be unaffected even if the staff strength were cut by half. Some blame the federal character principle for the overstaffing and believe a return to true federalism and rationalization of the statutory function of the central government will prune down the public service.
Since 1999, following the return to democracy, several committees have looked into ways of carrying out necessary reforms of the public service but they have all come short and merely swelled the already excessive cost of governance which they had set out to reduce. Against this backdrop, the federal government must be held accountable for the N1.8 trillion annual provisions as personnel costs at least since 2012. Without an unbiased assessment of the exact number of public servants, the ambiguity will continue to be one issue that has made and continues to remake the thorny economic bed on which Nigerians have laid for five decades on end. It is such a shame!
