Editorial: Ghost Names Still On Government Payroll?

The Minister of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs, Ahmed Ibrahim, according to graphic.com.gh has announced a nationwide headcount of all staff at the Metropolitan, Municipal and District assemblies (MMDAs).

According to the story, the headcount is meant to ensure that all staff in the 261 MMDAs were at post and working for the development of the country.

The state owned media further quoted the minister as saying that it was worrying that although about 40,000 staff were said to have been posted to the MMDAs, through the Office of the Head of Local Government Service (OHLGS), most of them were ghost workers.

“I have not gone around the MMDAs yet, but the briefing I have from the handover notes shows that there are about 40,000 workers in the OHLGS distributed among 261 MMDAs.

If you divide that number by the 261 MMDAs, every assembly will have over 150 staff but when you go there, you will see only 20 or 30 people at work, while the rest are nowhere to be found.

“People take it that they are on payroll but they do not want to work. We have to do a headcount so that the few who are working diligently will be seen and rewarded as expected, then those who do not go to work will be seen and the necessary action taken,” he stressed.

Since the issue of ‘ghost names’ has become an albatross hanging on the neck of Ghana, The Chronicle wholeheartedly welcomes the step being taking by the minister to deal with it. Indeed, it is not only the ministry of Local Government that the ‘ghosts’ have raised their ugly heads – it has presumably permeated almost all the public sectors of our national economy.

The previous New Patriot Party (NPP) administration complained bitterly about the same ghost names and actually took steps through electronic means to delete most of these names from government payroll.

Indeed, during one of his campaign tours, the immediate past Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, revealed at Bawjiase in the Awutu Senya West constituency how digitisation, which he championed, had helped to save Ghana. According to him, with the help of the Ghana Card, his office identified 29,000 ghost names on the SSNIT payroll and the removal of these names saved GHS400, 000 for the country every month.  He also disclosed that 44,000 ghost national service personnel were discovered and this saved a whopping GHS300 million for the country.

Other government sectors also claimed to have detected and removed ghost names from their payrolls through either headcount or the Ghana Card. If, despite all these efforts, ghost names still exist on government of Ghana payroll, then the issue must be properly investigated and not just through the headcount of the staff, as is being proposed by the local government minister.

Obviously, those with expertise in computer and working in the various ministries, departments and agencies are behind this agenda. They must, therefore, be fished out and prosecuted to serve as deterrent. Until this is done, the detection and removal of the names alone would not solve the conundrum. The government must get to the root of the problem and that is looking for those behind the crime and getting the law to punish them.

Having suggested this, we must also put on record that what the local government minister is suggesting may not be ghost names. They may be human beings that exist except that they have not been reporting to work. In this case, when the decision to do headcount is announced, as the minister seems to have done, they will all rush back to work and at the end of the day and nothing will be achieved.

In our view, therefore, some of these pronouncements are not necessary – it should be rather a surprise headcount to detect the actual number of workers who are working and drawing salary from state coffers.

Yes, the minister is taking the right steps, but he must be mindful of his public statements, otherwise, he would not achieve the desired results.

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