The Zambia Congress of Trade Unions – ZCTU has expressed concern at the slow pace to detect ghost workers in various institutions which is depleting government coffers. ZCTU president Chishimba Nkole said it should be every citizens worry as to why it’s taking too much time to detect and investigate ghost workers, such that by the time they discover and close the loopholes, there is a lot of damages to the treasury already inflicted .
‘‘The Government administration team is supposed to be alert. Efficiency and good administration demands that we are on the job every day. Other than only waking up when there are some whistle blowers or after you have incurred significant losses and then that’s the time you start waking up to check?, it is good that this issue has been uncovered, but in future let’s not go to sleep and only wake up when it’s too late. It should not take that long, it is something that is supposed to have been discovered the moment it happened,’’ he said.
Nkole added that in a proper administration set up, there are a lot of stages and the last stage is signing the cheques or payments, but before the cheques or transfers are signed, responsible people must know what they are signing. He said it should not just be the question of having a team of officers and append the signature, people must be concerned and must be in the culture of checking and counter checking their work. Even the officers that authorized these payments must be made to take responsibility.
‘’So there are a lot offices tasked to detect that, and each one at every stage must understand what they are doing because they supposed to have a proper database to show that these are the people that are in respective stations, that is; those who are transferred, those who have passed on and those that are non-existence. All of them are supposed to be detected,’’ said Nkole.
The ZCTU president further said the country is well developed in terms of ICT, saying all that is needed is to have good technocrats who are able to help keep the database so that each month, government can understand and know how to deal with human beings only and not ghost workers.
Nkole said it all officers in the payment process should take responsibility for their assigned tasks that they are given. The ZCTU president was speaking in an exclusive interview with Zambian Business Times – ZBT in Lusaka, on November 11, 2019.
The issue of ghost workers drawing salaries from government coffers is long-standing and a payroll clean-up exercise carried out recently on the Copperbelt revealed that 4,000 employees were unaccounted for while K60 million ( about US$4.6 million) was being lost monthly through fraudulent activities on the payroll.
According to Secretary to the cabinet Simon Miti, the recent clean-up exercise for the public service payroll, the Farmer Input Support programme (FISP) and the Social Cash Transfer revealed glaring cases of abuse and fraud. The government is yet to fully complete its investigation and advise what actions apart from recovery of the funds will be taken on the staff found wanting.
