In February 2022 when former Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia visited the National Service Authority (NSA), its management led by the Director-General, Osei Assibey Antwi, claimed they had implemented a digitalization process that had saved the country GHC 112 million.
Mr Antwi, the 59-year-old former Mayor of Kumasi, said the introduction of an app called ‘Metric app’, which combines facial recognition technology and identity card checks for verification and validation, had blocked the enrolment of some 14,027 potential fraudsters onto the scheme for the 2021-2022 service year.
“We had them (ghost names) on our list as potential service persons, but they ran away and could not register because the system raised red flags and weeded them out,” he boasted.
A highly impressed Dr Bawumia applauded the management of the NSA for thinking outside the box and saving the country millions of cedis.
“This achievement is massive by any stretch because if we replicate this in ten institutions, we are talking of saving the country almost a billion cedis,” the NSA website quoted him as saying. “You can understand why it is so important to link the payroll with the Ghana Card which in your case has chased 14,027 people away.”
Since this development, Vice President Dr. Bawumia used the case of the National Service Scheme as a classic success story of how digitalization can prevent ghost names and enhance the fight against corruption.
However, The Fourth Estate’s months-long investigation has exposed a vastly different reality. Rather than preventing fraud, the NSS’s digital system has been co-opted to facilitate one of the country’s most brazen financial scams, where fake identities (some belonging to non-existent individuals and even 90-year-old “graduates”) regularly receive national service stipends.
Ghost names, fake index numbers, and inflated personnel data
At the beginning of each service year, the NSS announces the number of personnel to be deployed. However, internal records show that thousands of additional names are added through the creation of fake index numbers and PINs linked to nonexistent students.
A comparison of NSS figures released to the public and those submitted to Parliament’s Select Committee on Education in June 2024 reveals consistent and significant inflation of personnel numbers.
The figures in the table below show that in the first year of President Nana Akufo-Addo (2017/2018), the authority announced that 91,871 personnel were eligible to be enrolled in the scheme. The data for the same year shows that in the end, 88,939 personnel were deployed, indicating that 2,932 of the eligible personnel did not enroll in the scheme that year.
Experts say this is a normal pattern since it is impossible to have all persons eligible for national service in a particular year undertaking the service.
If we are going through the advertised processes of the NSA for personnel deployment religiously, there shouldn’t be much discrepancy in the data,” Dr Peter Anti, Executive Director of Institute for Education Studies, said. “‘Normally about a range of one to three percent do not take up the positions when they are posted, and there are others who return to do their service. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to have a large discrepancy between the number that’s announced and what’s given to parliament.”
In all the subsequent years after the first year of President Akufo-Addo, the announced figures of eligible service personnel shot up by tens of thousands.
The Fourth Estate investigation found thousands of names assigned fake student index numbers supposedly linked to institutions such as Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), University of Development Studies (UDS), University of Education, Winneba (UEW), Tamale Technical University, Valley View University and some colleges of education.
For example, Abubakar Fuseni was listed in the NSS database as a graduate of UDS, born on January 1, 1963. His index number, 591GHA-725913201-2, was flagged by UDS officials as fake. More shockingly, the 2022/2023 NSS list contained 226 other individuals named “Abubakar Fuseni,” all supposedly from UDS, all with identical degree qualifications – Bachelor of Arts in Integrated Development Studies. On the NSS postings list for the 2022/2023 academic year, 2,338 names with index numbers similar to Abubakar’s and inconsistent with what the University officially issues can be found.
Similarly, Collins Benneh, supposedly a BA Linguistics graduate from UEW, was assigned an index number VL09T/0002/09T. However, UEW’s Acting Registrar, Wilhelmina Tete-Mensah, confirmed that “this is not a UEW index number. We do not use alphabets in our numbering.”
This pattern of fraudulent index numbers extends across multiple institutions, from KNUST to Valley View University, with fake identities inserted into NSS postings every year over the past eight years.
80-year olds and 90-year olds “serving” as national service
Among the most bizarre discoveries was the inclusion of individuals well past retirement age in the NSS database. 93-year-old Nimatu Salifu was listed as a UDS graduate, deployed to Kpiyagi D/A Primary School in the Upper West Region. Another 91-year-old, Ruth Abdulai, supposedly a Development Studies graduate, was posted to Adakura Primary School in the Upper East Region. Both individuals should have been decades into retirement, but according to the National Service Authority, they are well and strong enough to be deployed on national service. Then there is 82-year old Mahamadu Ali, another UDS graduate, who was posted to Anyinabrim Anglican School in Sefwi Wiawso in the Western North Region.
