Last week a memo from the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation directed federal civil servants in the country to conclude the seemingly endless validation of their identities on the government’s Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).
The new deadline for the exercise was 17 February 2025, that is tomorrow, or face consequences, which include suspension from the payroll or even the sack. The IPPIS identity validation, which has lingered for over seven months since the commencement of the exercise, is the government’s latest attempt to curb the menace of ghost workers (payroll fraud where fictitious names are listed as employees and draw regular salaries) in the civil service. The exercise followed the embarrassing revelation last year that a United Kingdom-based driver who worked for the Nigerian government before his relocation still received monthly civil service salaries from the government’s payroll, two years after relocating to the UK.
A seemingly intractable challenge
I was not only nonplussed when I saw the news of the IPPIS exercise; I was angry, and understandably so. Angry that three decades after the issue first came to public knowledge and with technology readily available now to permanently tackle the scourge, our civil service is still grappling with and distracted by the ghost worker phenomenon. That is simply unacceptable because the country will never achieve real development or be prepared to take advantage of global opportunities if we still can’t solve basic problems like this.
Nations already positioning for AI future
Last week, while the country was bogged down with mundane ghost workers – who are actually real people known to the system – the rest of the serious world was hurdled together in Paris discussing the global future and the critical role artificial intelligence would play in that future. The world powers are already staking claims on the future while Nigeria chases ghosts.
We should be leading Africa and joining the rest of the serious world in the artificial intelligence conversation. We have the skills and the talents to get a voice and secure a seat at the global AI conversation table. What is lacking is the government’s inability to provide the necessary motivation in terms of infrastructure and backing for our tech sector to truly blossom.
Ghost, ghost everywhere
To appreciate my indignation, it is imperative to put the phenomenon in perspective. The problem started during the military misrule and plundering of our commonwealth. The juntas were more interested in plundering our oil revenues and less inclined to build a robust accounting system for the civil service. This gave rise to systemic weaknesses and loopholes that unscrupulous civil servants and their cohorts exploited to build fictitious names into the payroll. Since the country transitioned to democracy in 1999, hundreds of thousands of federal, state, and local council ghost workers have been uncovered. Then Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, revealed that her ministry detected over 62,000 federal ghost workers. Okonjo-Iweala’s successor, Kemi Adeosun, uncovered half that number. In 2022, the Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), Dr. Dasuki Ibrahim Arabi, revealed that IPPIS had identified and removed around 70,000 federal ghost workers and boldly claimed that BPSR’s “reforms through the IPPIS have led to the elimination of ghost workers.”
A few short months after the bold claim came the egg-in-the-face revelation of the UK cab driver. And that was not an isolated case. The former head of the civil service of the federation, Dr Folasade Yemi-Esan, revealed last year that some civil servants who relocated abroad were still on the government payroll. The number of ghost workers in the system is simply mindboggling and one tends to sometimes wonder if these figures are real – what’s the actual figure of federal civil servants – and how come thousands more seem to replace uncovered ghost workers?
Every year, thousands of ghost workers are uncovered and “eliminated”, and 29 years after the first discovery many more continue to emerge from the woodwork. The cost to the nation of ghost workers runs into billions of naira yearly. Also, one must consider the costs on genuine workers in terms of salary delays during verification rituals, loss of man hours in queues for physical verification, and attendant loss of productivity.
Can these ghosts be stopped?
And to think that the permanent solution to the problem is simple and readily available yet successive governments seemed to struggle to decisively stop it. One must question the government’s commitment to eradicate it. The tendency of the government to overcomplicate issues or situations and the lack of gumption to tackle vested interests continue to play into the hands of payroll fraudsters.
Ways to stop ghost workers
A three-pronged approach, which includes biometrics, monitoring, and punishment will tackle the menace easily if the government so desires. This is the age of technology and AI, which if deployed can help address the first two strategies.
Biometrics
This technology captures an individual’s physical characteristics like iris scan, fingerprints, and facial recognition and it is widely deployed today in the financial services, ICT, security, and entertainment industries, among many other industries. Biometrics for employee attendance management is also commonplace today because of its ease of use, accuracy, integrity of data captured, and security.
Fingerprints, faces, and eyeballs are unique to each individual and the biometrics device captures these differences and stores them in a digital file, making tampering difficult. As employees resume work daily, the device scans their faces or thumbs to take attendance. This makes it difficult for an employee to stand in for another. And if synced with the payroll system it helps to reduce payroll discrepancies. The country has a fledging biometrics subsector that the government can partner with to quickly address the ghost worker scourge. For instance, years ago, my organisation convinced ZKTeco, the world’s leader in biometrics for time and attendance management, access control, and security, to set up operations in the country.
Monitoring
This can also be automated by installing foolproof redundancies in electronic platforms to help check attempted manipulations. The employee recruitment process should be automated to accurately capture employee figures, and work history while discouraging backdoor engagements by politicians and their civil service lackeys. Automation can also be used to cross-reference employment records across government establishments. AI can help detect and flag irregular payroll activities, which can then be acted on.
Strong legal action
The most important reason the ghost worker problem persists is the fact that people are never punished for bad behaviour. Strangely, the government is quick to thump its chest for uncovering ghost workers but very clay-footed in investigating and apprehending the criminals. One way to get the criminals is to follow the money. The government knows this. The monies paid to these fictitious workers are paid into bank accounts making it easy to determine who operates those accounts, especially with the unique Bank Verification Numbers assigned to all bank account owners.
And where there are no bank accounts, who signed for those salaries to be released, who released them, and to whom? Any cursory independent forensic investigation would unearth this. Once the criminals are caught strong legal actions should be taken against them to deter others. It would be disingenuous to claim the perpetrators are unknown. The UK cab driver said it was an arrangement with his boss. Was his boss a ghost too? Dr Yemi-Esan revealed that some permanent secretaries and CEOs give wrong information, necessitating a circular to warn them.
The government can completely stop ghost workers and end the nation’s hemorrhage if it mustered the will. We need to stop these ghosts as quickly as possible to enable us to focus on more critical and relevant global development issues and tap into available opportunities to grow the economy.
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