For several decades, we have frantically engaged ourselves in an unrewarding war against corruption in all its forms, beginning from capital flight which reared its ugly head in our society in the mid-nineties. This was in any case perpetrated by the highly placed, and later flowed down to the ignoble act of cheating on the state by certain individuals, through a system of ghost workers, made up of a group of people who earn salaries they are not due because they never worked for. Unfortunately in both the moral and legal contexts, it is difficult to determine which of the two constitutes a lesser evil in a society that should be striving for the best for its people.
The bottom line however remains that they are two distinct evils that are both criminal, as well as subversive acts, which no society would be so naïve to habour, and we can attest to the fact that such anti corruption instruments as CONAC, in conjunction with several other ministerial commissions to fight corruption, have not been able to do enough.
We in this Newspaper will therefore continue to appreciate every effort that government makes in the fight against corruption, being a major canker worm that has been holding back this country from progressing as it should. This time however, our attention has been drawn to the re-emergence of the campaign against ghost workers. Early this month the minister of finance announced that a head count of the civil service will be carried out to determine who actually deserves to earn a salary from tax payers’ sweat. This is indeed a very welcome initiative by Minister Louis Paul Motaze.
In appreciating the move however, we can only remind him that others before him, had done the same and had won the admiration of millions of Cameroonians and had only fallen short of crowning whoever crafted the slogan of ‘’Operation Sparrow Hawk’’ as ‘’Man Of The Year.’’ The slogan itself became a household word that raised hope for Cameroonians that the day is dawn for a new social order.
To give this campaign the booster it required to yield fruit, we remember that former Prime Ministers, Peter Mafany Musonge and Ephraim Inoni carried out surprise visits to some offices in the ministries in order to find out for themselves the true attitude of government workers towards their jobs. But behold what they found was shocking. Shocking for the fact that the Prime Ministers discovered that there were more empty seats than people to occupy them. The rest were absentees who were going about their private business. What surprises us is that after this obvious show of concern by Musonge and Inoni, the enthusiasm died, leaving behind only speculations that they might have stepped on some ‘’Big Toes’’ and that seemed to be the end the operation of that particular era.
It is on record that the Cameroon Public Service engages thousands of workers of various grades. And for such an overcrowded public service, the drains on the country’s revenue must be enormous. We certainly would want to agree that this is one way of creating employment for many, but it equally raises the question of the level of productivity capable of meeting up with required performance ratings of a dedicated and disciplined public service that in turn, can provide the necessary impetus for an envisaged emergence dream.
The situation is even made worse when one relies on statistics that have been recorded after the past head counts, in which it was discovered that there are about 5,000 ghost workers in the Cameroon civil Service whose ghost salaries run in Billions.
In 2007, Government carried out a census of State workers that revealed that there were over 18,000 fake and ghost workers, who were unduly feeding fat from the State payroll costing the state about FCFA 8 billion. The then minister of Finance acknowledged that salary for civil servant was reduced from FCFA 36 billion to FCFA 28 billion
This tallies with complaints that the private sector in our economy which is being down played in the process of our economic growth could have been encouraged to create jobs. We think if the just announced head count can bring some sanity to the public service, we could find ourselves in a situation where we can see some light at the end of the tunnel.
We therefore want to congratulate the current Minister of finance for invoking the operation back to life, but not without one point of correction. The minister has given a three months deadline for civil servants to regularise their situations. There is an oversight in the minister’s perception of the situation. Past experiences have shown that if given such a long period of three months, this only gives enough opportunities for those ghost workers out of the country to rush home, and do their gymnastics and comfortably rush back to where they find themselves and continue to earn salaries they never worked for.
We foresee a hitch here. We would have suggested a sudden and swoopy move that would take most of the ghost workers by surprise. We are certainly not claiming to be wiser than Mr. Minister, but we strongly believe that there is some wisdom in what we are suggesting. We simply want to guide the minister away from the pitfalls of the past which led others to where they failed. What we are very certain about is that if this initiative fails as it has done before, Cameroonians and the world at large may have a very low esteem of Cameroon and this may spread to all other areas of our national life.