PSC report shows civil service has over 17,000 ghost workers.
Each Kenyan government has promised to cast out ghost workers from the public payroll. Yet every fresh audit uncovers the same schemes under different names.
Thousands of workers cannot be matched with official records, nearly 4,000 officers are being paid outside the government payroll, and hundreds of fake academic certificates have been used to secure public jobs.
These are not simple administrative mistakes. They point to deliberate schemes designed to steal public money while denying citizens the services they deserve.
Every ghost worker is created by someone, approved by someone and paid by someone. It is organised theft, not bad bookkeeping.
The billions lost each year could build classrooms, stock hospitals with medicines, improve roads or employ genuine teachers, nurses and police officers. Instead, taxpayers are financing criminals hidden inside the public service.
The greatest concern is that government already knows how to stop this theft. A single digital human resource system was introduced to ensure every public worker is properly identified and every salary can be traced.
Yet more than four out of five public institutions ignored the deadline to migrate to the system, leaving room for parallel payrolls, duplicate records and fraudulent payments to continue.
The government should stop treating payroll fraud as a
technical problem. It is a corruption problem. Every institution must migrate
to the central payroll immediately, every public officer should undergo fresh
verification, and every person who creates or protects ghost workers should
face criminal prosecution alongside recovery of the stolen funds.
Quote of the day: “To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.” —French lawyer and statesman Maximilien Robespierre, a key figure in the French Revolution, was overthrown in a coup in Paris on July 27, 1794
