Workersgate Scandal: FG Discovers Over 1,500 Ghost Workers on Payroll

By:Israel Adeleke

The Federal Government of Nigeria has exposed 1,500 civil servants with ‘fake/illegal’ employment letters, who are on the payment roll of the country.

OPEN TELEVISION Naija reports that this development was disclosed by the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HoCSF), Dr Folashade Yemi-Esan, during a parley with media executives in commemoration of the 2024 Civil Service Week Celebrations in Abuja mid week.

Yemi-Esan explained that the government mandate a verification exercise and over 69,000 civil servants participated.

She elucidated that after the exercise, these workers were exposed by the verification exercises of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS).

She claimed that, she did an overview of the report sent to her and discovered that a number of workers had gone out of the country and were still earning salaries.

She said that they were not even in the core ministries but mostly in the parastatals.

“There are efforts to tackle Nigerians who have relocated abroad doing news jobs, but are still under the payroll of the civil service.

She said that civil servants who are outside the country without official permission and still on the payroll will be sacked after the ongoing verification is completed.

“The Federal Government is going hard on them, as many of them are voluntarily resigning after the physical verifications,” she said.

OPEN TELEVISION Naija gathered that the head of the civil servants accused some top officials who were supposed to give information to her office of connivance, saying it was discovered that those were part of the deal to ensure that the positions were not declared vacant.

She however said that her fight against corruption in the civil service has led the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) to identify and investigate over 3,600 public servants.

Furthermore, she said that as a result of the cleaning up, many people who were not supposed to be on the payroll including retirees had been removed.

“It is a Nigerian thing. We are running hard against the culture that tolerates it. Outsiders don’t know the bashing we get every day trying to do the right thing.

“I expect that once the verification report comes anybody that is not in the country automatically losses his job.

“What we discovered in the last month of that verification is that most of them are now resigning their appointment which is a good development,” she said.

Yemi-Esan however, promulgated that as part of efforts to build the capacity and talent of civil servants, 8,905 workers were trained under the Structured Mandatory Assessment-Based Training Programme (SMAT-P) in the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan (FCSSIP 2021- 2025).