Cleansing the Public Service

A statement issued by the Minister of Public Service and Administrative Reforms carries the list of the workers suspected to be in irregular situation. Government wants the situation of 10,377 State workers clarified.

Those whose names appear on the list have been called upon to contact the departments of human resources and those of General Affairs of their various ministries. The government of Cameroon has conducted several sessions of public service cleansing through a medley of censuses but this has always produced mitigated results.

The publication of the list of over 10,000 State workers suspected as fictitious is to say the least, disturbing. This is even more disturbing especially as State workers are supposedly managed through the automated integrated management system covering civil servants and payroll better known by its French acronym, SIGIPES.

The publication of the list of suspected fraudsters is the result of the good work conducted by authorities of the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reforms. In a recent interview with CT, Jeanne Eba’a Zibi, Technical Adviser Number 2 of the Ministry stated inter alia that a clean-up committee had been created and is functioning in collaboration with the rest of the ministries in the country. Each year, he said, the committee meets to see which State worker is effectively at work. From every indication, this committee is permanently at work.

The question on every concerned lip is why it took so much time to come out with the list of suspected culprits. It is true, as it is always said, the administration is slow and steady, but the consequences can sometimes be disastrous for the State. If it is established that the 10,000 identified workers were all fake, it would entail the State had been making an extra expenditure of at least FCFA One billion every month if one considers an average salary of FCFA 100,000 per worker.

One doesn’t need to go behind to say this, but what is happening in the public service is simply the consequence of fraud and corruption. In effect, many State workers who have resigned or have taken off for “greener pastures” abroad continue to earn their salaries in the public service. Some are dead but their family members continue to take their pay. Some go on retirement but their normal salaries continue to flow.

Cases equally abound of graduates who after leaving school and depositing their files for absorption in the public service wait for long without any quick reaction and as such resort to dubious methods of getting their files through. Once this happens, they are surely considered as ghost workers. At this point, the question is who is to blame? Their argument is that they have been posted and cannot afford to work with empty stomachs.

As the screening enters a decisive phase, it is important to sound a clarion warning to the departments of human resources as well as those in charge of general affairs to stay clear of any corruption. It may be difficult to know how this will happen but it is necessary to take stop gap measures to ensure sanity. Perhaps the services of the National Corruption Committee (CONAC) need to be solicited.

Many other structures have been doing that, and it appears things have been working well, though not perfectly well. Eba’a Zibi complains of massive complacency on the part of the hierarchy who refuse to denounce certain abnormalities of workers under their authority. This attitude must be kept aside when those whose names appear on the list come for regularisation.

That notwithstanding, the public service itself must work hard to improve its efficiency, for, it equally has its own share of the blame. Now, we are talking about SIGIPERS II. What happened to the first SIGIPES? It surely failed in its objective. The installation of the new computerised system had as objective to make operations faster and more efficient.

But that has not been the case in many ministries where files, notably advancement files spend several months or even years without being attended to. As this is happening, corruption is deepening and the consequences telling for the State.