Africa-Press – South-Sudan. <\/strong><\/span>There have been a lot of unsuccessful attempts by the previous finance ministers to remove the so-called ghost names from the paysheet. However, since his appointment in August 2023 as the national minister of finance and planning, Dr. Bak Barnaba has taken to heart the need for payroll to avoid wastage.<\/p>\nAs such, he immediately formed a committee after assuming office to pay out the salaries for July 2023 to all government employees across the country.<\/p>\n
This exercise has caused unbearable delays in the payment of salaries for government employees across the country, as those in the states will go for six months without pay and those in the capital city, Juba, will go for five months without pay by the end of January 2024.<\/p>\n
This is what the Vice President for the Economic Cluster, Dr. James Wani, described as an inhuman subjection of workers to suffering. Besides, President Salva Kiir had previously protested the endless delay of salaries of civil servants and organised forces during the swearing-in of Hon. Agak Achuil as a finance minister in 2021 and instructed him to pay the government employees monthly.<\/p>\n
Therefore, I believe President Kiir ought to repeat this call to the incumbent minister of finance and planning to reduce the suffering of our people. As the country is expected to hold its first-ever democratic elections by December 2024, since independence, the so-called political business must be activated if the Sudan People\u2019s Liberation Movement (SPLM) wants to win the polls.<\/p>\n
As the old saying goes, \u201cA hungry man is an angry man<\/b>.\u201d That said, the only important asset owned by the government employees and which they depend on to make ends meet is their labour, which they rent to the government.<\/p>\n
Schools have reopened across the country but government employees haven\u2019t been able to register their children because of no pay which is depressing for most parents. That being said, there is absolutely no point in subjecting potential electorates to these economic hardships caused by delays in payment of salaries and the sharp currency depreciation which has led to rising prices in the market. The South Sudan pound has shed 25 per cent of its external value, since August 2023.<\/p>\n
Despite the suffering caused by cleaning the payroll, the intended goal of the exercise has not been achieved by the ministry. Certainly, at least 30 percent of the ghost names may have been cleared from the payroll. This is because owners of ghost names have used many tactics to circumvent the policy.<\/p>\n
Firstly, third parties were hired to receive the salaries on behalf of the ghost employees. In other words, having been informed of the name on the payroll by the owner of the \u201cghost name,\u201d this person had to accept the name on the pay sheet as his or her temporary name and should never disclose his identity during the payment process. Moreover, this person had to get a share of the salary and give the rest to the owner of the \u201cghost name.\u201d This has been one of the most successful crafty strategies that have been adopted by most people to get around this policy and have rendered it an almost very ineffective way of weeding out ghost names from the payroll.<\/p>\n
This could have been avoided had the committee been smarter to cross-check the identities of the recipients. For example, government employees in Juba and other major cities should have been asked to provide their national identity cards. By so doing, it would deal with the issue of some people who had falsified their identities because the names on the payroll and those on the identity would have differed.<\/p>\n
The fact that this has failed could be justified by the introduction of what the minister called a financial identity card. He said that the next salaries for government employees shall be paid using the financial ID in order to weed out ghost names. Essentially, if the previous committee had succeeded, there wouldn\u2019t have been any need to waste public money to produce the so-called financial identity card and subject the civil servants to more suffering.<\/p>\n
However, the prevalence of ghost names on the payroll is not a primary issue as to why our economy has been struggling to grow and provide job opportunities to thousands of men and women who are jobless.<\/p>\n
There are myriad issues that the honourable minister ought to devote his energy and focus on, many of which are structural and some are policy mistakes committed by the past policymakers at the finance ministry and the central bank.<\/p>\n
For instance, one of these is the need to stop deficit financing beyond five percent of the previous year\u2019s government revenues as required by the Bank of South Sudan Act (2011) as amended. It can be achieved only when holistic reforms are done concerning tax administration. Secondly, we thought that he would squarely deal with the issuance of cheques and approval of the so-called medical claims and other innovative tools that have been used by dealers and rent seekers to siphon public resources.<\/p>\n
The irrational behaviour of these tenderpreneurs has been detrimental to the stability of our local currency. This is because when their claims are paid by the finance ministry, they are often paid in the SSP which they then dump into the parallel market in exchange for foreign currency and cause a mismatch between the supply of local currency and foreign currency and leaves the poor to grapple with the impact of currency depreciation. Unfortunately, one of the beneficiaries of medical claims bragged last week on a live video that her documents which had not been commented on by the previous four finance ministers had finally been approved by Finance Minister, Dr. Bak Barnaba.<\/p>\n
However, this is one of the most inegalitarian ways of distributing public wealth because the beneficiaries scheme does not benefit all South Sudanese people but only a few well-connected individuals. However, 64 tribes of South Sudan have had one or two of their sons or daughters amongst 2.5 million who had lost their lives as a cost of a struggle for an independent nation. This is also one of the tools that is massively contributing to the widening gap between the rich and the poor.<\/p>\n
In summary, if the minister uses the same committee that paid out July salaries for government employees then the so-called financial ID is not going to achieve its intended goals. He ought to disband that committee and contract out the job of issuing financial ID to a private institution.<\/p>\n
Source: The City Review South Sudan<\/b><\/p>\n
For More News And Analysis About South-Sudan<\/a> Follow Africa-Press<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Majok Deng Africa-Press – South-Sudan. There have been a lot of unsuccessful attempts by the previous finance ministers to remove the so-called ghost names from the paysheet. However, since his appointment in August 2023 as the national minister of finance and planning, Dr. Bak Barnaba has taken to heart the need for payroll to avoid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":51889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[234,265,4575,233],"class_list":["post-51891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-files","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-south-sudan","tag-ghost-names","tag-south-sudan"],"yoast_head":"\n
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