MINISTER of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, has announced Federal Government’s intention to move the payroll of the military to the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) before the end of this year. The announcement came just a few days after the Federal Government ordered an audit of the payroll of the Army, Navy and Air Force by its Continuous Audit Team. The investigation became imperative following revelations, in the course of the trial of the former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshall Alex Badeh, at the Federal High Court, Abuja, that the sum of N558.2 million was diverted monthly from the accounts of the Nigerian Air Force into private pockets.
We wish Adeosun and the audit team success in this endeavor. Our only regret is that the movement of the military payroll to IPPIS ought to have happened many years ago when it could have prevented much of the brazen looting that is said to have occurred in the Ministry of Defence. It is strange, indeed, that the IPPIS platform which has for many years been available to the Federal Government as a reliable mechanism to check payroll fraud and abuse has not been utilised to its full potential.
IPPIS is a tested system that has proved its efficacy as a great tool for human and financial resources management in many parts of the world. It is a World Bank-inspired Federal Government initiative, adopted to salvage the civil service from the many ills militating against the speed and integrity of its salaries and pensions payment system. It assists the service to keep track of its personnel payroll and pensions. It facilitates planning, budgeting as well as monthly salary and emoluments payment to workers. It keeps officials budget-conscious, ensures database integrity and facilitates easy storage and retrieval of data. Indeed, officials could not praise the system enough. Yet, salary rackets continue to exist at the highest levels of the public service and account for the thousands of ghost workers on government payroll.
The military has, over the years, been a difficult organisation to manage, financially. Its proclivity for financial lapses, scandalous contracts and unwillingness to subject itself to financial audits is well known. In other words, a Federal Government devoted to accountability and prudence should have made the military the first candidate for enrolment into the IPPIS platform. We understand that more than 23,000 ghost workers were removed from the civil service payrolls. We expect no less scandalous number from the military when the exercise would have been completed.
We urge the finance minister to deliver on her promise to ensure that at the end of the year, every soldier, airman and naval officer is enrolled on the IPPIS platform. Some of the recent revelations about the loopholes that can be exploited to fool the system have been widely publicized. The minister should persuade the authorities involved in the investigations into those wage rackets to expedite action. It is not enough to hear that hundreds of millions of Naira has been stolen by ghost workers. Nigerians know that ghosts don’t spend money, those millions got into certain bank accounts and into known pockets. Until there is a cleansing and the culprits are named and tried, Nigerians will continue to believe that the culprits are deliberately being shielded because they are sacred cows in the society.
We need to emphasise that for the nation to overcome its current difficulties, financial accountability should be the watchword. We recall that as late as last year, the Vice-President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, underscored the need to get the military’s accounting system into the Government Integrated Financial Management System (GIFMS) at the 21st Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja. The GIFMS ensures that budgets match expenditure, and financial managers are able to see what is coming in and what is going out, and what is being spent vis-à-vis the budget.
There is no alternative to instituting a dependable accounting and accountability system in Nigeria’s financial affairs. The plan to integrate the military into the IPPIS is an excellent idea that should be executed within the timeframe given by the minister.