A recent revelation by the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Dr. Folasade Yemi-Esan, that a male Nigerian civil servant and now a taxi driver in the United Kingdom, who left the country in 2022, was still receiving salaries despite not showing up at work, has sparked public outrage. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has vowed that the culprit and others engaged in similar criminal endeavour, with their collaborators, must refund the money and be severely punished. Yemi-Esan’s disclosure is a reflection of the deep-seated corruption that has invaded the management of the nation’s public financial system.

The 36-year-old UK taxi driver told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that, through the collaboration of his boss in Nigeria, he receives N150,000 monthly from his former place of work. Such a practice, no doubt, cannot be possible without connivance with top administrators to protect culprits. When supervision of workers is not effectively done, it is often impossible to monitor workers’ productivity. When a worker does not show up at work, yet receives salary, then, the system is thus compromised for pecuniary interests.

Unlike in developed countries where monitoring mechanisms are put in place to assess the productivity of workers, it is not the case in Nigeria where in some federal ministries and parastatals, only a register is provided sometimes for civil servants to indicate time of resumption and closure from work. This practice is mostly employed during strike actions embarked on by labour. As soon as negotiations and call-off of strikes are concluded, the routine is quickly discontinued.

Following the removal of fuel subsidies and the attendant high cost in transportation, many public sector workers are unable to report to their duty posts from Monday to Friday. The usual practice now is for workers to report to work in only three out of the five working days of the week. Even when they report to work, what they do is to engage in the personal business of selling clothes, among other commodities, to complement their meagre salaries. With collaborating bosses, workers can still be absent from work and still get paid every month.

When in June 2022, the Director-General, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, Dr. Dasuki Arabi, sounded the alarm that the federal government-backed Integration Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) had eliminated about 70,000 ghost workers in the civil service system, many Nigerians heaved a sigh of relief, hoping that the corruption-ridden salary system had been finally cleansed and made transparent.

Arabi also disclosed that the federal government had saved about N220 billion, and N10 trillion through the Treasury Single Account (TSA) since its full implementation by the former administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.

Presently, the public sector is heavily burdened with many trials, with corruption being the most devastating of them all. Apart from the billions of naira lost in payment of salaries to ghost workers, the exact number of public workers at the federal, state and local government tiers is still a conjecture.

The monster of corruption that trailed the service during military regimes has not been extricated, as workers in the accounts department have continued to be enmeshed in unfathomable corruption and rendering the nation’s public financial accounts into a quagmire of scams.

Dealing squarely with financial rip-offs in salary payment has become the only means through which the public sector can be cleansed of its self-inflicted woes. When a nation’s salary system is undermined by bureaucrats whose thirst for ill-gotten wealth is almost unquenchable, then, the hope of salvaging the system from ruins becomes unrealisable. What is required now is to ensure that these criminals and their accomplices who compromise the salary payment system face the full wrath of the law.

No doubt, the IPPIS is faced with weakening prospects in enthroning a transparent payment salary system. Some of the challenges working against the integrity of the new salary system include, among others, lack of will by political leadership, security of the IPPIS platform, high rate of illiteracy, lack of uniform platform by banks and MDAs, lack of legal framework, frequent power interruption and resistance to changes in technology, among others.

We, therefore, call on President Tinubu to walk his talk in implementing measures aimed at curtailing the deceitful machinations of these shameless thieves devoted to the undermining of the IPPIS. Apart from cleansing the wage register of fake names, workers who have relocated abroad and still collecting salaries, an act made possible by their collaborating bosses in Nigeria, must be dealt with decisively in order to serve as deterrent to others.