Using Biometrics to eliminate “Ghost Workers” in the Civil Service in Zimbabwe

Dr Samuel Chindaro

In his 2019 budget speech, the Minister of Finance Mr Mthuli Ncube lamented the continuous existence of “ghost workers” in the Civil Service and made a proposal to introduce biometric registration to weed them out. According to the Minister, the existence of “ghost workers” is contributing to the “the burgeoning public service wage bill which accounts for over 90% of total revenues.”

The introduction of technology to stamp out economic sabotage, malpractices and corruption is in tandem with the call by President ED Mnangagwa in his maiden speech for the use of “e-government programme not only as a means to keep in step with the ICT revolution, but also to fight corruption.”  It is a refreshing acknowledgement, that when it comes to tackling corruption, we need to critically engage with the role of technology.

Despite Civil Service audits undertaken by Government in 2011 and 2015 which revealed the possible existence of ghost workers, minimal effort has been put towards eliminating this menace in the public service and the practice has remained unabated with millions of tax payer money pumped out annually from the government treasury through salary payments to non-existing employees. While corruption takes different forms in the public service, ghost workers fraud inflates the cost of governance to the detriment of overall development. Not only does the incidence of ghost workers fraud bloat the wage bill, it reduces employment opportunities for qualified applicants.

Ghost workers are people who are on the payroll while not doing any work; this includes people who claim a salary for people who have died, retired civil servants, relatives who do not work for the public service, or even people who never existed in the first place. Therefore, a ghost can be a real person who knowingly or not is placed on the payroll, or a fictitious person invented by the fraudster. This is payroll fraud, the government paying for employees who no longer work for the public service or who were never employed.

Other forms of ghost workers include staff that receive unearned salaries through false means; for example, staff who have multiple jobs in the civil service, receives multiple salaries using different names, staff who collect pay or allowances that is above their entitled right, staff who still receive full salary while on leave of absence, and employees who have been transferred or retired yet their names are in the payroll.  There are also workers who are duly employed but have absconded and never report to work. Many of them have other means of livelihood outside their workplace, but still collect their government salaries and allowances by working with other corrupt “insiders”.

Another fraudulent activity similar to ghost workers is “time theft”. Time theft at works occurs when an employee accepts pay from their employer for time they have not actually put in. It occurs in different ways such as “buddy punching” (your friend clocks you in), over extended breaks and excessive personal time. On a small scale, this might seem insignificant, but once you look at the big picture attendance fraud can have serious repercussions on government expenditure.

The high occurrence of ghost workers’ syndrome in Zimbabwe is obviously a worrisome situation in which cost of governance is high and annually, budgetary provision for government’s recurrent expenditure is excessive. This leads to paucity of fund which is required by State and Local Government for provision of critical infrastructure in education, health, power, water, roads etc.

Ghost workers’ fraud impact government and governance negatively by compensating idleness; that is government is paying for inactivity. It is a form of economic sabotage and drain to scarce resources of different tiers of government. Funds lost to this fraud are potentially huge and capable of derailing and distorting government’s developmental plans.

As the technology world evolves, challenges to implement secure personal identification protocols with biometric technology are increasing and the need for accurate human identification is higher than ever. As more governments around the world try to figure out a solution to the ghost worker issue, many are adopting biometrics for identification of employees. Biometric technology isolates and captures unique human physiological characteristics to identify a person. The main advantages of using a biometric system is that it identifies a person by who the person is rather than what the person has, unlike most traditional authorization systems such as personal identification numbers or ID cards. Unlike these solutions that rely on “what you have,” biometric credentials such as a fingerprint or facial image cannot be lost, forgotten, guessed, or easily cloned. It thus eliminates fake employee registration into the payroll system.

In Kenya biometric registration of employees uncovered 12,500 ‘ghost workers’.  In Nigeria the government used fingerprint based biometric identification to eliminate an astonishing 43,000 ghost workers from the public payroll, for a saving more than $75 million dollars. In India, within a week of introducing the system, employee attendance rose from 60 to 96 per cent. These examples prove the effectiveness of implementing biometric technology to establish accountability and punctuality.

The Zimbabwe government should therefore be commended for their plan to adopt biometrics to

establish accountability and eliminate ghost worker fraud. The country is already using biometrics ID and voter registration (to eliminate among others “ghost voters”); so its implementation for eliminating ghost workers should not present major challenges. Zimbabwe should draw lessons from these various experiences and take advantage of the latest biometric technological advances to improve efficiency and obtain higher rates of success.

If biometric attendance is implemented, the chance of fake time sheets or clocking for a friend will be reduced to zero. Also, during salary and benefit distribution, biometric identification will ensure accurate disbursement to the right employee and additionally create clear audit trails for employee punctuality which will in turn, improve service quality.

Biometric identification technology should also be embedded in the government workplaces’ practice to combat time theft and increase productivity of the workforce. A biometric attendance solution integrated with a workforce management system improves the efficiency and accuracy of timekeeping systems while saving payroll costs.

It is acknowledged that technology by itself cannot eliminate corruption. It would therefore be folly to conclude that the issue of ghost workers can be eliminated by biometric technology alone. In a multi-faceted issue like corruption technology alone cannot be a panacea. It is political will and transparency, rather than biometrics, that will exorcise corruption in general and ghost workers in particular.  However, adopting biometric registration for civil servants will go a long way in eliminating this vice.  

Dr Samuel Chindaro is an Electronics Engineer, biometrics expert and researcher, trained at NUST in Zimbabwe, the University of Birmingham and the University of Kent in the UK. At Kent, he was part of a specialist research group on biometrics technology. He can be contacted at S.Chindaro@gmail.com

Social Media and Zimbabwe Politics

By Dr Samuel Chindaro

The 2018  Zimbabwe elections saw an unprecedented use of social media for political campaigns, debates, discussions, disseminating of information, and news provision.  The internet and social media, supported by the revitalised democratic approach by the new dispensation, created a level of transparency in the election process that has never existed in Zimbabwe before. It was evident that social media will continue to play an important role in the future political discourse of the country.

Zimbabwe’s political landscape has changed significantly in the last year with the exit from the political field of the two main actors, Mugabe and Tsvangirai, and the fresh approach by President Mnangagwa; and the internet has played a significant role in this transformation. Social media is now a serious factor in political campaigns in the country and in the way people think about issues.

Taking the lead, in an unprecedented move by a Zimbabwean President, was the President himself who interacted directly with people via his official Facebook page and Twitter handle. He took time to respond to questions posted on his page; providing previously unimaginable access to the country’s leadership.  The opposition leader, Nelson Chamisa was also active in this respect, using the platforms to mobilise his support.

Zimbabweans embraced the opportunity to interact more easily with candidates and officials without attending live events which were streamed live by different online media outlets, individuals and organisations. Some politicians availed themselves temporarily on various Whatssupp groups in question-and-answer sessions. It was proof that the availability of alternative ways to ensure coverage of political parties have evolved so much that access to “state media” as a judgement of election fairness is not only retrogressive and unreasonable, but also irrelevant in this digital age!

For political leaders, it was an incredibly efficient way to quickly explain events, ideals and plans. Unfortunately, at the same time, social media offered false comfort to some politicians; as evidenced by events that unfolded. Several candidates were lured into a false sense of comfort and popularity by the number of followers, number of re-tweets and ‘likes’ neglecting the high likelihood that most these were from either diasporans, people outside their constituencies or simply unregistered voters, and got the shock of their lives when elections came around! Additionally; there were also several politicians and activists who were caught “offside” by the unforgiving digital footprint; as their previous posts came back to haunt them when they shifted positions or contradicted themselves.

The unprecedented attention given to the Zimbabwe elections under the new dispensation brought with it a mixture of participants which included international observers, self-exiled politicians and self-appointed political commentators, experts and armchair critics, most of whom were very active in social media. It was apparent that even though social media platforms are extremely powerful with a huge reach, they also have the potential to be used by political mis-contents and criminals to cause political harm and social disturbances.

Even though social media can enrich the political process, it also comes with dangerous possibilities. Following in the footsteps of the Trump-Russia-Facebook fake news scandal; it was evident that political and social harm could be inflicted on Zimbabwe by the misuse of social media to spread fake news. The election process witnessed a flurry of fake news, sensationalisation of issues and incitement of violence among other vices. It was proof that Facebook and Twitter are no longer just social networks, but information media that is dangerously easy to use as a weapon.

The platforms offered a rich environment for those who wanted to increase polarisation and incite violence; with self-exiled politicians who had fallen out with the new dispensation, and opposition activists playing a prominent role. For example, social media activists; whilst hiding behind their keyboards and/or their diaspora bases, were able to abet the incitement of some people to start violent protests in the guise of “defending their vote” even though the election results had not yet been announced.

Nothing online is always exactly as it seems and Whatssupp, Facebook and Twitter platforms were the most prevalent source of fake news before, during and after the elections in Zimbabwe. Like accusations of witchcraft, some of the fake stories got repeated often enough that they appeared to be legitimate. It was often difficult to distinguish articles that were misinformed from those that had been carefully researched on fact. The constant stream of links and rumours about political leaders and candidates was a mixture of truth, lies, satire and speculation with several of them being based on pure fabrications.

Typical examples of fake news were a video purporting to prove ballot stuffing, which was letter identified to be one from Kenya; and another one which was being promoted to prove post-election violence which was letter discovered to have originated from Nigeria! A lot of fake pictures and videos were also circulated and shared with the various observers and organisations through tagging, mostly of violent scenes from incidents far away from Zimbabwe, which formulated opinions of some of the gullible individuals, especially those that had pre-conceived perceptions of Zimbabwe. The opposition were caught in this web of fake news and fabrications to an extent that they tried to unwisely use it as evidence in their election challenge!

This brings us to one of the hidden forces that operated on social media; which was “confirmation bias”.  “Confirmation bias” is defined as the tendency of people to seek out only information they agree with. It limits people’s ability to question information that confirms or upholds their beliefs and people are inclined to interpret new evidence in light of beliefs associated with their social groups.

Listening to one Georgina Godwin on Sky News presenting opinions based on her Twitter feed as facts reinforced the “confirmation bias” phenomenon. Some of the observer reports were also based on unverified reports from their Twitter feeds which they accepted as facts most likely based on the “confirmation bias” syndrome. They became part of small, deeply polarised groups of individuals who tended to believe everything they heard, no matter how divorced from reality. Surely how would you expect an observer from a country that had pre-judged the elections by imposing sanctions on the country before the elections not to suffer from “confirmation bias”?  

The majority of followers on social media probably share common outlooks with the majority of feeds within these groups tending to express the same point of view. Inevitably some people became fuelled by the belief that only their views existed as they were never exposed to contradictory ones. Confirmation bias limited people’s ability to question information that confirmed or upheld their beliefs, unfriending and blocking people who posted contradictory opinions, creating an echo chamber.   It was common to be told “to go and play with your friends” if you did not echo the views of the group. It is this pre-selection and confirmation bias that fake news exploited with precision!

For this reason, social media reinforced opinions and made it more difficult for people to entertain

alternative points of view. It helped to make people more opinionated and less tolerant of others. The result was social media with a political discourse that was devoid of real ideas and broken into several polarised groups, which were deeply divided on partisan grounds, even on fundamental political issues.

The Zimbabwean experience reinforced the notion that social media can be a threat to the public’s political knowledge by constraining contact with diverse viewpoints and alternative beliefs. To overcome some of the negatives of using social media, one should make an effort to connect with an assortment of people with diverse viewpoints. Politicians should continue to embrace the opportunities that social media brings as a valuable source of information and use it to manage their own campaigns, publicise and initiate important socio-economic issues. It is incumbent upon everyone involved in the political process to make sure social media power is used to harness everything good about the Zimbabwean political system, rather than to hasten political trends that are hurting the country.

Without sufficient regulation, there is a clear danger as social media can be powerful enough to brainwash, incite, misinform and polarise Zimbabweans. This should of cause be carefully balanced with allowing open debate and protecting the freedom of expression.

Despite concern about this new information warfare and its potential negative impact on Zimbabwean politics, there are reasons for optimism. Knowledge of how fake news and confirmation bias affects us can ultimately change behaviour, helps us to not succumb to the manipulation, which ultimately strengthens democracy. It is easy to be influenced by misinformation posted by friends, leaders and followers, even if they do not intend to mislead you. It is therefore necessary to use a great deal of discernment before believing anything you read on social media.

We can use social media as a medium for common ground on important issues plaguing the country and as a place of healing.  At the very least, we should use social media to better understand those who voted differently than we did. However, this requires commitment to civility and tolerance of disagreement and self-control.

If we use our social networks to promote objectivity and civility, instead of partisanship and volatility, then we turn social media into truly one of our most important and powerful tools. If your posts are expressions of ridicule for those who support opposition politicians, ask yourself how much value you are getting from the time spent writing those tweets or comments.

Dr Samuel Chindaro holds a PhD in Electronics (University of Kent), MSc in Electronics and IT (University of Birmingham) and a B.Eng. Hons in Electronic Engineering (NUST). He is also a Chartered Engineer (Institution of Engineering and Technology). He can be contacted on S.Chindaro@gmail.com