Saturday 23 April 2016

65,000 ghost workers in civil service discovered

65,000 ghost workers in civil
service discovered


– Dr Joe Abah


 The director-general of the
Bureau of Public Sector Reforms (BPSR)
said at least 65,000 ghost workers were
found out to be among the federal
government work
– The salary collected by government
workers are not based on equity
– The DG of BSPR said the government is
setting up machineries in motion in order to
mitigate against future occurrence and he
also bared his mind on the yet to be
implemented 2016 budget
The director general of BPSR, while speaking
about the plans of his agency in the next
few years, he said: “One of the most
significant things we have achieved is the
introduction of the Integrated Payroll and
Personnel Information system (IPPIS) which
has saved the government in the region of



N185 billion so far, the IPPIS wielded out
about 65,000 ghost workers.
Dr Joe Abah , the director-general of the
Bureau of Public Sector Reforms (BPSR)
“We have started to link the bank verification
numbers to IPPIS. This will expose about
23,000 fraudulent pay accounts. The federal
government has put in place a monetisation
policy. Government used to pay huge staff
housing for people, pay for gardeners, cooks,
watchmen and all that and the heavy payment
became a big burden to government in the
past but with the monetisation policy in 2007,
the cost was drastically reduced.


“We have also put in place a tenure policy that
means that anybody that stays for four years
as permanent secretary or director can only do
an additional four years before they leave,
which would stop stagnation and enable
people to advance their careers. It is four
years renewable for permanent secretaries,
eight years for directors. For the wider public
service, we have seen huge improvements in
things like regulation of fake drugs. As at
2000, 80 percent of the drugs bought in Lagos
were fake and 41 percent nationally but it is
now down to 4 percent nationwide.”
There have calls in the past regarding
merging some federal government ministries,
departments and agencies. As this bodies
perform almost similar functions. Dr Abah
spoke about the recommendations, which
were tabled by the Stephen Orosanye
committee set up by the previous
administration and the reasons for the delay
in implementing the proposals. He stated:
“The committee was set up to look at
restructuring of all the ministries but we
realised that the two weeks period given the
committee was not enough to do that huge
work and therefore focused on the six
ministries that were affected by merger-the
Power, Works and Housing, Interior,
Information and Culture, Youth and Sports,
Budget and National Planning, Transportation
and Aviation. The committee realised that work
required technical organizational work because
the work involves job descriptions, workforce
plans, mandates and all of that.





“What the committee did was to do enough for
the merged ministries to take off and then
recommended that BPSR being the technical
experts, should lead a team of technical
experts from the Office of the Head of Service
and the Office of the Secretary to the
Government of the Federation and l can assure
that that work is going on now.
“We are actually in the ministries, every one of
those ministries as we speak now, are doing
more detailed technical work, after which we
will then look at all the other ministries. We
have a deadline of end of April to produce
what we call the functional reviews which is
called the functions of all the departments
within each ministry, to make sure that we rid
them of any duplication, to ensure that the
functions of the ministries are contributing to
the mandate and the vision this administration
has for them.”
While the DG of BPSR was asked germane
questions on the yet to be assented 2016
budget by President Muhammadu Buhari, he
said: “It was a combination of factors. The
first is that we did not start the budgeting
process on time so we had a combination of
limited time to do the work and putting in
place a new system which takes a while to get
used to.
“There were also some allegations of
unwholesome practices by some people in the
budget office, but government has acted
swiftly on that by posting out the people
involved. There were also issues of errors
which were avoidable. A combination of those
factors led to issues.”

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