The Head of Civil Service of the Federation (HoS), Dr (Mrs) Folasade Yemi-Esan, stunned the whole country last Tuesday when she revealed that no fewer than 1,500 federal workers were parading fake employment letters. According to the HoS while delivering a keynote address at the National Policy Dialogue on Entrenching Transparency in Public Office Recruitment in Nigeria, organised by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission in Abuja, over 1,000 people with fake employment letters were discovered in just one ministry while others were found in other ministries, departments and agencies during a service-wide verification exercise will be delisted from the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS).

Although the HoS stopped short of telling us the cost of this to the nation, there is no doubt that Nigeria must have lost billions of naira, paying people she never employed. Mrs Yemi-Esan, however, explained that her administration had taken decisive steps to nip in the bud the alarming sharp practices and acts of impunity being perpetrated on the IPPIS.

But come to think of it, how did those with fake employment letters get into the system? If they manufactured their own letter somehow, did they also manufacture the copy from the Federal Civil Service Commission to the respective ministry, department or agency? How the people with fake letters managed to beat all the barriers to get enlisted in the federal civil service is a Nigerian mystery.

It would be good for the country if gatekeepers at the federal civil service could up their game and stop the hemorrhage through bloated wage bill because the incidence of ghost workers is one of the factors responsible for the country’s seeming arrested development. It appears that there are more phantom workers in Nigeria’s public sector than real ones. No aspect of the sector is spared; the federal civil service, state civil service, local government service, the police, the ministries, department and agencies are all swarming with ghost workers with billions of naira going to the wrong hands monthly. This ugly scenario has been a source of concern to governments at various levels with many of them at one point or the other subjecting their workforces to endless screening exercises with a view to fishing out fictitious names on the workers’ payroll. But more often than not, the deleted names from the workforce have an uncanny manner of either getting back on the payroll or being replaced by new ones.

The fact is that the issuance of fake letters of employment or inclusion of non-workers on the payroll cannot be perpetrated by junior or middle level officers; the illegality can only be executed at the level of very high ranking officers of government. That explains why the problem has become almost intractable; those who should proffer the solution constitute the problem.

However, as terrible as the criminality of siphoning resources from government coffers through the inclusion of phony names on workers’ payroll is, it still pales in comparison with the larger consequences of this immorality on the nation. The backwardness of Nigeria in some aspects may be traced directly to this insincerity on the part of the top hierarchy of the nation’s workforce. For instance, Nigeria is said to be one of the countries with high maternal mortality rates with its 630 deaths per 100,000 births. This high rate is a consequence of the disproportionate ratio of pregnant women to birth attendants in the country. Contrary to the claims of government that it has employed many birth attendants to stem the tide of maternal mortality, the reality on the ground is that many pregnant women still depend on traditional birth attendants, who are not properly schooled in the art of taking birth delivery. Why would the government say one thing and the people see another? It is because government’s premise is faulty. The government may be told that there is a particular number of birth attendants in the hospitals whereas the personnel figure has been padded for the benefit of some ministry officials.

According to the Library of Congress Profile on Nigeria, there are 371,800 officers and men in the Nigeria Police, but a former Inspector General of the Police, Muhammed Adamu, said not too long ago that there were as many as 80,115 ghost workers in the police. Former police chiefs had threatened fire and brimstone and assured that they would put an end to the scam. But not much has been done in this regard as there are still ghost workers in the force. The implication of this is that while the nation is releasing money to pay 371,800 policemen, only about 291,685 people are actually policing the nation. This then means that the nation is under-policed but is hamstrung to recruit more men to facilitate effective policing because its assumption is hinged on the wrong premise of having a 371,800-man police force. This could be one of the reasons criminals are having an upper hand against security operatives in the country. Imagine what 80,000 additional policemen could do in a country like Nigeria.

The same goes for employment. There are so many young Nigerians roaming the streets without any job, not necessarily because there is no room for them in government establishments but principally because the government is working on the wrong hypothesis that it has a bloated workforce whereas this is not true as some people have perfected a means of perpetually stealing from government by using names of non-existing workers.

The Federal Government in 2006 commenced the process of waging war against fake workers when it introduced the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information Systems (IPPIS), but the implementation has been painfully slow, probably because some of those superintending over it unduly benefitted from the old system which made room for phantom workers. But that can only be because those at the helm of affairs lack the political will to make it work. If they are determined to make the IPPIS work, it will work.

Government at all levels should be more serious about stamping out the incidence of ghost workers not just because of the humongous resources lost to the heist, but also because of the other effects of this systemic inefficiency which is responsible for Nigeria’s reputation as the country with one of the highest infant mortality rates, the country with the highest number of out of school children and one of the most unsafe countries in the world.