Ireneaus Chia Chongwain
The Minister for Public Service and Administrative Reform, Benjamin Amama Amama, has announced the discovery of the illegal injection of more than 300 workers into the payroll of his ministry.
Although the minister remained evasive on the question pertaining to the origin of these workers, there are certain indicators that these workers are students who recently graduated from the National School of Administration and Magistracy.
The Minister made the revelation during a press conference which he granted in the conference hall of his ministry. Benjamin Amama Amama regretted that at the time the state is struggling to clean its payroll of ghost and fraudulent workers, such a discovery should be made.
He added that the discovery was made following a routine control which detected more than 300 new workers who had illegally been added to the payroll of his ministry without his authorisation in June 2006.
He stressed that all investigations carried out at the level of his ministry, had failed to reveal any documents concerning the contested workers, especially so, as no new matriculations had been done or authorised at the level of his Ministry since the last which was carried out by the Interministerial Committee in charge of cleaning the state payroll.
He then moved on to state unequivocally that the recruitment had been done at the level of the Ministry of the Economy and Finance. Mr. Amama described the move as criminal and said he had made a formal request to his colleague of the Ministry of the Economy and Finance that a joint team should be set up to throw more light on the disturbing situation.
The criminal dimension of the act could further be explained the minister added, by the fact that the pay sheet forwarded by his ministry to the treasury had been tampered with and modifications made to the list pushing up the number up from 12,491 to 12,816.
The Minister therefore concluded that certain errors made with regards to the state payroll do not come about as result of the weaknesses of the ANTILOPE system, but by the deliberate manipulation of those who are called upon to manage it.
Incisive as the minister's arguments may be, its timing puts the true criminal dimension of the move to question.
It comes at a time a corresponding number of students from ENAM have just graduated, and have been forcibly integrated into the public service. Their recruitment, training and graduation have been the cause of a long standing battle between the Minister of Public Service on the one hand, and the Director of ENAM and the Prime Minister on the other.
The Minster had previously accused the director of ENAM of organising the entrance exam into ENAM unilaterally, of fraud and corruption, ordering the rewriting of the examination, suspended the results, refused to sign the mission orders and integration decisions of these students, moves that have not prevented the director of ENAM and the Prime Ministry from pursuing their present cause of actions ignoring the minister completely.
But for the service notes that have been coming in from time to time from the Prime Ministry calling the minister of Public Service to order, the presidency has never officially taken any position on the conflict.
Mr. Amama states that he is driven on by the philosophy expounded by Albert Einstein which states that," the world will not be destroyed by those who do wrong, but by those who see evil being done and refuse to act."
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