Nigeria’s federal government has been paying unidentified police pensioners a whopping 1 billion Naira monthly, according to Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (US$155 Naira=US$1). The minister, who was giving a breakdown of the country’s 2012 federal budget in the capital city of Abuja Wednesday, said the ‘ghost’ police pensioners were uncovered after a biometric data exercise conducted on police pension fund.
‘Due to some work by the tax force that is helping us on this issue of biometric exercise, from the Head of Service Office to the Police Pension Office, we have been able to bring down the amount paid to police pension from N1.5 billion to N.5 billion (N500 million) and we wish to continue because Mr. President wants this done,’ she said.
The minister also said that from next year, the civil service would be restructured to weed out ghost workers and pensioners.
‘We are going to restructure agencies with overlapping and duplicating functions. We are going to look at our Commissions and Committee and see whether some of them are still needed. We are thinking of restructuring the government,’ she said.
The aim of the exercise, she said, was to reduce government’s recurrent expenditure, which moved down from the current 74 percent of the entire budget this year to 72 percent in next year’s budget.