A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS

IT is quite a surprise that Nigerians, an ungrateful lot, have not gone out on the street to celebrate the fact that the governors have bowed to their collective demand to be paid a minimum wage of N18,000. Could it be because those on the government's payroll constitute a tiny percentage of the heavily deprived population'ONLY recently the former Minister of Finance, Olusegun Aganga, had revealed how the Federal Government was able to excise some 43,000 names from its payroll by using the biometric based Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS). This is the figure in just seven out of the 36 ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs). According to him, personnel cost had grown from 850 billion naira in 2009 to 1.3 trillion naira in 2010.IF 43,000 names could be found in seven out of 36 ministries, let us leave the extrapolation to the mathematicians to conclude how many ghost workers are there in the federal, state and local governments. Nigerians may not jubilate at the revelation because nobody is talking about finding out the culprits behind the scam and what punishment will be meted out to them. Nobody is telling them how much out of the N18,000 minimum wage will be paid to ghosts and which ghosts will make away with the money saved from IPPIS scheme.THE point is, in Nigeria, it is not who is a ghost that matters. It is who is not a ghost.
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