Good afternoon. Is the news that 18,000 so-called “ghost” employees have been removed from public sector payrolls (see below) evidence that President Daniel Chapo’s government is cracking down on corruption, as Chapo promised to do? Not necessarily. Under Chapo’s predecessor Filipe Nyusi, the government also removed fake public servants whose pay was being embezzled by corrupt managers. In 2018, the existence of 30,000 ghost employees was announced, who the government said had been drawing pay for three years at a cost of $250m. In 2023, 7,000 ghost personnel were said to have been removed from the armed forces payroll.
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Hiring ghost employees is evidently very lucrative for those corrupt bosses who pocket the money. At an absolute minimum, assuming that all 18,000 of these latest ghosts were only earning the roughly MZN105,000 ($1,640) a year minimum wage for civil servants, that would cost around $2.5m a month, or $30m a year. The real figure is most likely to be higher. It hardly needs saying that the cash-starved Mozambican government desperately needs this money for legitimate expenses, like paying the wages of real employees, something it struggles to do on time. The government continues to run a budget deficit and to rely on expensive domestic borrowing (some of which it has restructured because it was unable to repay on time) to pay its bills.
