Before the coming into office of the present administration in Kogi State, it was common knowledge that a sizeable percentage of the workforce was what has been euphemistically referred to as ghost workers whose presence in the payroll was aimed at ripping the state off. The wards and front persons were planted in the public service by those often described as high profile political characters who see it as a way to recoup their investment in the politicking process.Through that means, the state lost humongous sums of money to the tune of an estimated more than N1billion every month as wages to this category of workers. Kogi State is, by definition, a rural state without the resources to sustain that kind of waste. One implication of this is that genuine workers were at the same time owed arrears of salaries and allowances. The state was bleeding not just in revenue loss. Also, its workforce was drained of the morale needed to give the state the necessary push towards growth and development.That was the situation when Governor Yahaya Bello came into office. He vowed to reverse the trend by sanctioning a Staff Verification Exercise to know its actual staff strength. Confronting the cabal in the system was a courageous and statesmanlike decision, in our view, taken as part of an effort to build a new Kogi State. It was a win-win exercise to free funds for infrastructural development, serve over 90 per cent of citizens of the state and assure, in the process, a sustainable economic development as well as ameliorate poverty. Even more strategic, in our thinking, is its potential to help genuine civil servants enjoy regular payment of salaries, enable the government to determine the duty schedule of civil servants and which will go a long way in restructuring the service for efficiency and meaningful development.It is pertinent to conjecture that the exercise, if carried out with the expected thoroughness, the outcome will be an excellent and veritable tool for planning as the government would have achieved a fully digitalised payroll that will have a mechanism for checking graft in the system. This verification is, in our considered opinion, a litmus test for the present government to block financial leakages that impede the development of Kogi that prides itself as the Confluence State. But if the government thought that the cabal would fold its hands and allow food to be taken from their mouths, then that would have been the zenith of foolhardiness, indiscretion and complacency.In condemning the exercise lawmakers, especially of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and renegade All Peoples Congress (APC), who might have been part of the syndicate that perpetuated the graft, described it as a satanic process and insisted that it was an attempt to downsize the workforce under the guise of fishing out ghost workers. Political observers in the state see the reaction of the House to the exercise as corruption fighting to keep what it has been enjoying for a long time especially as startling revelations indicate that most of the politically exposed persons involved in the scam gained their popularity through the protection of corrupt practices and corrupt individuals such as when those who are due for retirement falsified their dates of birth to debar the youth from gaining employment.Commendably, the Governor has challenged workers who feel unjustly treated during the exercise to come forward to prove their cases and anyone who is able to prove his or her case will be paid all outstanding salary arrears. However, the government also warned that established cases of fraud will be prosecuted. It also noted that those who choose the violent path in the pursuit of whatever case they believe they have are only being used as tools of blackmail which the administration will neither tolerate nor succumb to. That, we think, is vintage social justice.What is going in Kogi State is perceptibly a model of how the ghost worker syndrome ought to be addressed. We applaud the method of first finding out if actually there are ghost workers, who they are and who their sponsors are. This is as opposed to the pervasive blanket claim elsewhere of the existence of ghost workers without specifics in terms of who they are and their modus operandi.We urge the government of Kogi, not to be deterred in its commitment to rid the state of corrupt practices in all its ramification not minding whose ox is gored.
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