MagajiFolorunsho Akuabata (not real name) is barely thirty but is immensely endowed with massive material wealth. He is generous to a fault.Akuabata is not known to have any visible means of livelihood yet he seems not to lack all the luxurious items and services that money can buy even as his house is one of the most aesthetically decorated pieces of real estate in the bustling area of the city where he stays with his small but beautiful family of two wives and two babies in their early years.One thing led to another during the course of a community development event in which I was invited to deliver a lecture and behold I was sitting next to this man of immense but suspicious means and he beamed broadly with smiles as if to say he had just been visited by a long expected messenger of fortune. We spoke for more than fifteen minutes before the master of ceremonies invited me to give my lecture. At the end of the over thirty minutes of explosive lecture on the topic of The essence of reward and punishment as the bedrock of a better society, Akuabata was so impressed that he demanded my business card and promised to send his personal assistant with a package for me.The sixth sense in me inspired me to launch an investigation to unravel the real identity of this man who most people in the community were fallen on themselves to invite as chief launcher in most fund raising events. At the end of my probe, I came up with a groundbreaking finding that the man in question was one of the most notorious ghost workers of our era in the federal civil service. In his latest scholarly book titled, Witness to Justice, Rev. Fr. Mathew Hassan Kukah, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, stated that in Nigeria, institutional chaos has produced selfishness and greed. The result is that we are a nation of the walking wounded. This institutional chaos, I do believe, has also produced a class of people who holds top civil service jobs but who manipulates the system to pay themselves huge salary package in the guise of paying salaries to legitimate workers when in the real sense, no such staff can be validly identified. This is called the ghost workers syndrome. The phenomenon of ghost workers is as old as the civil service establishment in Nigeria and the trend has occupied the minds of policy planners at all levels of civil governance so much so that several tons of millions of taxpayers funds are spent by government hunting these ghost workers who are growing in number and notoriety.Daily, Nigerians are inundated with the unverifiable story of efforts that the federal or state government is making to flush out ghost workers but this same scenario has consistently repeated itself since the emergence of civil democracy in 1999 but those ghost workers are waxing much stronger. The emergence of the late Alhaji Umaru Musa Yaraduas administration in 2007 led to a new kind of practice whereby those considered as outlaws and who have rightly or wrongly embarked on armed struggles against the state were invited for dialogue and settled. Absurdity was thus elevated to statecraft in Nigeria.The militants in the oil rich but poor Niger Delta region were the first official beneficiaries of an elaborate amnesty programme which included very juicy financial inducement schemes. YarAdua who kick- started the programme has transited to the great beyond but his then vice-president now elected President, Goodluck Jonathan, has continued the implementation of the amnesty which, to be fair, has significantly led to the reduction in youth restiveness and violence in the oil producing areas thus creating better atmosphere for the crude oil business- as-usual to continue.But another challenge has emerged from another armed splinter groups in the North-East of the country whose members have unleashed devastating violence which has so far attracted the attention of the international community with the successful bombing of the Nigerian Police Headquarters and the United Nations House, both in Abuja, recently.Members of the political elite who have come under intense threats of violence from this armed terrorist group have even called on the Federal Government to negotiate with them. The latest call for government to negotiate with the Boko Haram came from the immediate past Deputy Governor of Akwa Ibom State, Mr. Patrick Ekpotu, who was quoted in the media as calling for negotiation with the violent group.But since Nigeria has been converted into a huge drama stage by political actors who no longer pay attention to the time- tested fact that no nation ever survives that does not operate on the basis of the respect to the principles and practice of rule of law and constitutionalism, a friend just told me that it may as well be nice to advise the government to enter into negotiation with ghost workers in the civil service so that the scarce funds usually used to hunt them would be used to bring democracy dividends to the greatest number of our people who will soon be greatly impoverished if the ill-advised anti-poor policy of withdrawal of subsidy on petroleum products is implemented in 2012.Government, please negotiate with ghost workers since your business now thrives on negotiations with diverse groups of outlaws, professional law-breakers and hoodlums. For sure, these ghost workers will accept handsome final settlement of cash bonus and quit the public space unlike the armed militants who will hand over their weapons for cash and immediately buy a replacement for the surrendered weapon from the small arms markets that have sprung up in all corners of the country.If you think it does not make sense for government to negotiate with ghost workers, then read the revelation by the Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, that ghost workers usually graduate to become ghost pensioners.On October 22, 2011, the media reported Okonjo-Iweala as outlining strategies by the Federal Government to flush out ghost workers.The Minister said that several ghost workers had even graduated to ghost pensioners in governments payroll and that the biometric data capturing exercise, which the government embarked upon was designed to identify these ghost workers and ghost pensioners in the country. But Nigerians have heard these same stories all over again since 1999 with no meaningful result.With the rate at which politics and government business in Nigeria is rapidly becoming one huge racket and organised scam, will anyone be surprised if tomorrow, we wake up to find out that the government is indeed negotiating with ghost workers' Nigeria being what it is, this is a possibility.It is my conviction that if ordinary Nigerians who are at the receiving end of these harsh, oppressive, and dubious policies of government, remain docile, then our burden as a people will expand in leaps and bounds. So, lets take ownership of Nigeria and enthrone a just, fair and an egalitarian society where social evils are punished using the instrumentality of the rule of law or we should be prepared to get many more absurd policies from these actors that dominate the public space as public office holders.- Onwubiko heads Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria and can be reached on doziebiko@yahoo.com
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