In Nigeria's social lexicon, the prefix in such expressions as ghost workers, ghost students, ghost pensioners, and so forth, has assumed a curious dimension with the recent reported case of ghost schools in Kogi State. These "ghost" phenomena are a euphemism, however, for bureaucratic crimes in which government officials collude with one another to misappropriate funds by cooking up payrolls of fictitious workers or pensioners and paying emoluments to such non-existent persons. The late Afro-beat maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, described such financial misconduct, in one of his hit songs, as 'Authority Stealing', which he argued was more heinous than robbery. Yet it is gaining currency by the day in Nigeria in one new form or the other. In almost all government ministries, departments and parastatals today, this variant of payroll fraud has become entrenched for years. Proponents of the idea that government has no business engaging in enterprises outside core governance often hinge their arguments on the fact that, in many public enterprises, it is usually at top management level that loopholes are deliberately created, through which the system could be defrauded.

As at the last count, according to some reports, the Kogi State Government had uncovered about 20 non-existent schools whose entire teaching and administrative staff were fictitious. Besides, thousands of other ghost workers are said to have been unearthed in the state's Civil Service. The reports also alleged that following a recent store burglary, relevant files had been declared missing at the Ministry of Education.

Individuals who perpetrate this racket are usually privileged officials who exploit their positions to defraud the State and cover up their tracks. It is their own way of getting a piece of the national cake. There are cases in which some workers who have resigned or died continue to "draw salaries" for years thereafter. Dead retirees who supposedly continue to receive their pensions from the grave are a common occurrence in public establishments. Owing to top-level collusion, such rackets are difficult to eliminate.

One of the root causes of the lack of accountability in the management of public finances in Nigeria may be traceable to issues of professional accounting standards. Regulatory bodies charged with overseeing the affairs of the profession, like the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), have a responsibility to rein in the excesses of their erring members.

Another fundamental cause of the systemic graft in the management of public funds is the present revenue allocation formula, which permits the various governments in the country to be dependent on unearned allocations from the Federation Account. This is antithetical to the practice of federalism and creates a psychological soil in which corruption thrives. When emphasis is placed on the need for a state to generate its own revenue rather than depend parasitically on allocations accruing from a central statutory purse; in other words, if a state was required to generate the bulk of its own revenue, then it would learn to treat such funds with a greater sense of responsibility and accountability. As a result, caution would come into play and the machinery for monitoring ghost (or real) workers would be put in place.

As long as the Nigerian society tolerates big loopholes through which government funds are drained, we may never get to the roots of corruption. And none of the successive governments in the country, at whatever tier of governance, could claim to be ignorant of the various financial crimes committed by management in the public sector. The chief executives of the three tiers of government are aware that this rot pervades the system and that it often percolates down from their respective cabinets to the bottom of their administrative structures.

The establishment of SERVICOM (Service Compact with All Nigerians) in government offices is designed to monitor the activities of government employees as regards quality service delivery to the public. Yet it is doubtful whether a watchdog system is in place to collect intelligence reports on government activities within the management cadre. Government must pay utmost attention to these issues and show the political will to address all uncovered anomalies. This is a surer way of projecting the positive image of the country than the propaganda of "re-branding".

One can rightly surmise that there are millions of cases of ghost workers and attendant criminal frauds across the nation. It is not enough to have these social ills exposed. Government must also diligently bring the culprits to book.