Myjoyonine.com is quoting two personalities – Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia and the Controller and Accountant General, Kwasi Kwaning-Bosompem, as saying that the government has successfully weeded out ghost names from the public payroll.
According to news portal, Mr Kwaning-Bosompem, whilst addressing the 2024 Controller and Accountant General’s Department Annual Conference in Kumasi recently said “Payroll database has been an active database all these years. What it means is that we’ve gone through a process of putting intervention in place to make sure the payroll database is credible and that there would not be any instance where we’ll find an unauthorised person existing on the payroll and benefiting from the government’s resources.”
And just on Monday, this week, Veep Bawumia confirmed this assertion at the Chief Justice’s forum in Accra. “I have also seen through digitalisation that you can deal with corruption. We have now eliminated ghost workers at the Controller and Accountant General’s office just by using the Ghana Card because ghosts don’t have fingerprints.
“This has saved SSNIT four hundred and eighty million Ghana cedis by eliminating twenty-nine thousand ghost pensioners. … and at the National Service (Secretariat) by eliminating forty-four thousand workers, we have saved over three hundred and fifty-six million Ghana cedis. This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Bawumia has been quoted as saying.
The Chronicle congratulates the government for achieving this feat because the issue of ghost names was a bother to every Ghanaian. Indeed, when Dr Bawumia in particular started championing digitisation and the need for Ghana to embrace it, many people did not understand him. At some point, his political opponents were even making fun of him.
But today, the digitisation policy, which gave birth to Ghana Card, produced by the National Identification Authority, has helped to remove those who were obviously using dubious means to steal from our national coffers. As the Vice President pointed out, but for the Ghana Card, the authorities wouldn’t have been able to smoke out these criminals who were illegally taking our money every month.
This is one of the reasons why every government department and agency should be digitised. But, whilst congratulating the government for finding a solution to this ghost names matter, The Chronicle is worried that both Dr Bawumia and the Controller and Accountant General were silent on the prosecution of these criminals, who have illegally taken our money for no work done.
We disagree with the school of thought that these are ghosts and should be treated as such. In our opinion, the monthly salary these so called ghosts were drawing from our national coffers each month were paid into account because the government does not pay its workers on ‘table top’. The big question is: who were the signatories to these accounts?
Clearly if the government wants to get to the bottom of the matter, all these ‘ghosts’ can be smoked out from the holes they are hiding in. This is the reason why we are surprised that Dr Bawumia, whilst touting this achievement, could not assure Ghanaians that the ghosts would be found and prosecuted.
We should not gloss over the fact that when it comes to production of airplanes and car engines among others, we (Ghanaians) are nowhere near the Europeans and Americans. But the latter cannot match us when it comes to using our brains to commit crime. This is a fact that no Ghanaian can dispute.
So whilst Dr Bawumia and officials of his government are gloating over the removal of the ghosts from our payroll, the criminals have already started devising a strategy to beat the new system. To prevent this from happening, the state must search, locate and prosecute them to serve as a deterrent. The prosecution is essential to protect the integrity of the government payroll.
