Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican government has announced that the identification of over 18,000 “ghost workers” in the public service has opened a possibility for hiring 6,000 new employees.
On Monday, the government announced that it has found that over 18,000 workers in the public administration do not exist, but have been receiving wages through corrupt schemes orchestrated by some human resource managers.
According to Inocêncio Impissa, the government spokesperson and State Administration Minister, who was speaking on Tuesday to reporters after a meeting of the Council of Ministers (cabinet), “this does not mean that, having identified and deactivated 18,000 ghost employees, 18,000 new people should be hired; but, at the very least, over 6,000 will be hired.”
Impissa explained that the “ghost workers” were found during the “proof of life” procedure, which facilitates a thorough biometric verification of State Employees and Agents (FAE).
“We have been introducing systems that allow for better monitoring of whether public employees really exist”, said Impissa. These systems “better control wage payments, and this allows us to know effectively who exists and who does not. We also introduced the biometric proof-of-life system, in which each employee can provide proof-of-life through their terminal, or their mobile phone”.
He said the government became aware of the situation when it found that some state employees “were not claiming salaries for three or four months because they had not provided proof of life”.
“The situation caught the attention of government authorities, who then began investigating ghost employees. Imagine someone who hasn’t requested their wages in one month, two months, or three months”, he said.
“When three months pass without a claim for wages, the 45-day regularization period expires”, added Impissa. “The system simply says this individual doesn’t exist, so we deactivate them”.
The Minister said that, of the 18,800 ghost employees detected this year, to date none has come forward to claim their wages or regularize their proof of life status.
The situation is much worse than admitted by Impissa, since this is far from the first time that large numbers of ghost workers have been found to be infesting the public service.
In 2018, the existence of 30,000 ghost employees was announced. The government, then under President Filipe Nyusi, said these fake workers had been drawing pay for three years at a cost of 250 million dollars. In 2023, 7,000 ghost personnel were said to have been removed from the armed forces payroll.
Assuming that all 18,800 of these latest ghosts were only earning the minimum wage for the state administration, the cost of the fraud would be around 30 million dollars a year, and possibly much more.
The scandal of paying wages to people who do not exist is one reason why the government has been unable to recruit enough real teachers or health workers to staff the schools and health units.
Despite the repeated claims by the government that it is cracking down on corruption, no senior staff in the public administration have been prosecuted over the ghost worker scandals of the past. It remains to be seen whether the same impunity will be shown in the current case.
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