We are grossly under-policed yet there no fewer than 80,115 ‘ghost officers’ in the Nigeria Police Force according to data obtained from Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation.
With this revelation, it means the figure of 371,800 that is usually bandied around as the number of police officers in the country is highly inflated. According to the data from the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, the full integration of payrolls of the country’s 42 police commands and formations into the federal government Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) last February, staff count stood at only 291,685, with gross salary of about N22.3 billion.
The salaries and emoluments of the over 80,000 ghost officers are drawn and pocketed by top hierarchy of the Force. This must have been going on for years.
The staff count of para-military agencies, namely Nigeria Immigration Service, Nigeria Prison Service and Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps under the IPPS to date stood at about 100,822, with a trial payroll cost of over N11.5 billion as at February according to the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, who disclosed this at the Federal Executive Council in Abuja last Wednesday.
The minister also said, 469 MDAs, with the staff count of 316,158, and gross salary of N43.98 billion were from MDAs whose payrolls have been captured under the IPPIS as at March 20.
