News & Comment
Ghost Ideology Provides ‘Ghost Workers’

News:

Media outlets in Tanzania reported on government’s nationwide crackdown on searching for fake civil servants (ghost workers) which has led to payroll fraud in virtually every public office.

Comment:

Following this ongoing crackdown, 5,507 government ghost workers had been detected. Some 4,236 in local government authorities while 1,000 workers at the central government level.

This fraud costs the government an estimated Tsh.54billions from public funds that are pinched in the name of phantom workers out of Tsh.583 billions each month to pay civil servants' salaries.

The existence of fake civil servants in public office is not a new scenario. It is a perpetual and deeply entrenched problem with affirmed roots. In the year of 1993 in the government’s effort to curb this problem, it had conducted an extensive inspection and meticulous audit on the payroll of its civil servants to identify the genuine workers. Nevertheless, the problem persisted. Again in the year 2006 and 2011, the government did the same, yet proved failure to uproot this vice.

The gravity and breadth of this problem is far beyond to the extent that the government admitted that (ghost workers) are everywhere ... even in the President's Office, the Prime Minister's Office, the armed forces ... everywhere”.

This problem cannot wiped out by simply dealing with its trivial angle and cosmetic measures without addressing the root causes of the vice. Manifestation of this fraud does not differ from other vices such as bribes and corruption in civil servant offices. The real issue to be addressed is why civil servants or society at large are so corrupt?

There are contrubuting factors to this, such as low remuneration, as well as workers discontent and losing confidence in the system. Civil servants feel inspite of their crucial role and national contribution yet ignored and marginalized especially in terms of their income, in comparison to politicians. This situation pushed them to create any means to get away from hard time they face. It is natural, when people lose confidence in the ruling system that they act by their own hands to solve their problems. Indication of this can be seen in many instances, such that people take the law into their hands by killing thieves and criminals simply because they are no longer trust the police and judiciary.

Above all, our Muslim countries implement the filthy capitalist ideology in its transactions and propagate its thoughts. Among the dangerous capitalist thought is its criteria of interests and benefit in action that motivate people to amass interest by any means. Future civil servants when they are still at school are moulded by these thoughts where the objective of education is to increase provision and interests, once they get the job, they strive to meet their sole objective of amassing interests.

In a wider perspective, the fraud dilemma whether it is ghost workers, bribery and any vice has a direct link with the thoughts of the capitalist ideology that our country holds.

These vices cannot be fundamentally resolved by simply replacing some faces in leadership or by nationwide crackdown. This could only help in the short term. But in the long term what is needed is a radical ideological change from the current rotten capitalism to the Islamic ideology under its Khilafah "Caliphate" state (Caliphate) based on the Prophetic Methodology.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Masoud Msellem
Media Representative of Hizb ut Tahrir in Tanzania