Kwaku Krobea Asante, Programmes Manager at the Independent Journalism Project under the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), has revealed shocking irregularities in the National Service Authority (NSA) payroll following an investigation by The Fourth Estate.
Asante noted that one name showed up as a beneficiary on the NSA payroll as many as 226 times.
The Fourth Estate initially revealed the ghost names controversy in November 2024, but publication of its findings was initially blocked by an ex-parte injunction obtained by the NSA.
Nevertheless, the court subsequently removed the injunction, permitting the publication of the report. The analysis included documentation from 2017 through 2023, incorporating the 2024 national service year.
During an appearance on The Point of View with Bernard Avle on Channel One TV, Asante characterized the discrepancies as concerning, highlighting abnormal entries in the payroll system, such as people in their 80s and 90s and fabricated index numbers.
“Ghost names in the sense that what the NSA tells us as the number of personnel is different from what they have in their data. Which data we believe eventually gets into the payroll and is paid. Now the government has come to confirm.
“Beyond that, we see how they do this, how they pack the ghost names, which is what the story is trying to say. How they use over-age people—80-year-olds and 90-year-olds—to put their data in there. How they create fake index numbers in the name of universities so that they can justify them.
“Funny names popping up, a single name could be repeated 226 times—such a person has completed the same university, read the same programme, the same year, and been deployed. A lot of odd happenings in the data, pointing to the fact that some people have intentionally done that.”
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