Joe Abah: How private sector operators enrolled ghost workers on IPPIS

Joe Abah, a former director-general of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms, says politicians and the private sector are the major perpetrators of corruption in Nigeria.

Abah said this in a series of tweets on Tuesday. 

The tweets were in response to Osaretin Victor Asemota, entrepreneur and investor, who posted that the “root of all Nigerian corruption is the civil service”.

The IPPIS is a government account system that manages the payment of salaries and wages to federal government employees. 

Questioning the roles of banks in the perpetration of fraud in Nigeria, the former DG cited how private sector operators enrolled ghost workers on the Integrated Payroll and Personal Information System (IPPIS).

I will respond to this thread by my bother @asemota and say that the major perpetrators of grand corruption in Nigeria are the politicians and the private sector, with the civil service playing a small role. Let me explain. Thread… https://t.co/3tp8LXdcpO

— Dr Joe Abah, OON (@DrJoeAbah) August 23, 2022

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“What about private sector consultants? Isn’t the suspended Accountant General accused of siphoning funds through the use of bogus consultancy contracts? Were the consultants’ victims, or did they produce proposals? I say no more, as the matter is sub judice,” he said.

“Let’s look at the mantra of privatise everything if you want to avoid corruption. I won’t talk about electricity privatisation and how the DISCOS were shared. I would be interested in the role of Civil Servants in it and who was the victim in that case.

“But I will talk about IPPIS. IPPIS is the system through which the government pays salaries.”  

According to Abah, if the IPPIS system was working effectively, having ghost workers would be difficult. 

“When we got IPPIS up and running, people came with the same mantra of privatise it all. We gave IPPIS to the private sector to run. Do you know what happened? The private sector operators started collecting money to enrol ghost workers. You could go to a fish garden in Nyanya and get enrolled on IPPIS if you pay N500k. We didn’t know where the money was going. The link to BVN made it a bit easier to trace,” he said. 

“So, this sanctimonious notion of the private sector and politicians as victims of civil servants is bunkum. Civil servants do as they are told by their political masters. No civil servant will dare the first approach a politician in government with corruption.” 

Recently, the federal government inaugurated a presidential steering committee to review government account systems.