Jeanne Eba’a Zibi, Technical Adviser No 2 in the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reforms, talks on efforts to curb corruption and laxity.

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What is being done to curb the problem of ghost workers in the public service?

There is a clean-up committee at the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reforms which functions with members from all the other ministries in the country. Each year, the committee meets to see which public servant is at work and who is not at work. There are civil servants who travel abroad and continue to earn their public service salary.

While working with other ministries, such workers have been exposed and measures taken to correct the situation. Usually, we start by cutting the salary of such a ghost worker and later request him/her to reimburse all the money earned as a salary while abroad or working in a private or para-public sector.  

The situation seems to persist. What are the challenges encountered?

The real problem faced is with hierarchy who refuse to denounce absenteeism workers. Some bosses protect their collaborators and do not expose the fact that they are not at their duty post. But now, we have sensitised everybody in the public service. So any worker in the public service can denounce the existence of those who earn a monthly salary but not at their duty post. This method seems to yield fruits because each year, when the clean-up committee at the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reforms meets to evaluate their work, there is always a good number of ghost workers that are being denounced.

With such a method, many civil servants are aware and the number of ghost workers keeps reducing. More difficult is the fact that the civil service is a dynamic process with changes each day as some people go on retirement, others being integrated into the system and others asking for permission to go and work elsewhere. These changes make it difficult to set up a figure to operate within the public service.   

What is being done to get rid of ghost workers within the public service in the future?

There is a project to put together the Antelope and SIGIPES operations of the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reforms. The Antelope operation is the computerisation of the salary of public servants while the State Personnel and Payroll (SIGIPES) operation handles the career of the civil servant. When this project will be put together, it will be called SIGIPES 2 and it will treat both salaries and career profile of all civil servants.

When this new project will go operational we will know who civil servants are and what they earn. In this way, ghost workers will be quickly detected because they will not have a career profile besides their names. When SIGIPES 2 will go operational by the end of the year, many more ghost workers will certainly be detected. However, we will continue to carryout projects to modernise the public service in Cameroon.

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