Mozambique: Over 18,000 “ghost workers” found in public service

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Mozambique: Over 18,000 “ghost workers” found in public service

11:56 CAT | 30 Sep 2025

Photo: O País

The Mozambican authorities have found that over 18,000 workers in the public administration do not exist, but have been receiving wages through corrupt schemes orchestrated by some human resource managers.

According to the Minister of State Administration, Inocencio Impissa, speaking on Monday, in the southern city of Xai-Xai, at a ceremony marking the international day of universal access to information, most of these “ghost workers” are people who have died, or who were once in the public service, but have left.

“Based on the systems we have been introducing”, said Impissa, “we have been able to detect situations in which wages have been stolen”. Over the past year, around 18,000 of these “ghosts” had been removed from the wage sheets.

Asked how much these frauds had cost the state, Impissa was unable to give an exact figure since “each of the employees has a different wage, depending on his category”. But a team was now working on calculating the losses.

“We have been working to purify the ranks of public employees”, said Impissa. The wage tables contained the names of people who had already died or retired, yet somebody was still drawing their wages.

Some managers had not updated the system by removing the names of the dead. “The lack of updating”, said Impissa, “allows the system to go on thinking that this person is still alive”.

He added that investigations are continuing to remove all the ghosts, and to hold the managers involved responsible for the frauds.

“It is our job to detect the problems and risks, and naturally to discover who is responsible for this”, said Impissa.

All workers in the public administration are supposed to prove, once a year, that they are still alive. This is a costly exercise, since the workers must report to offices which may be a long distance from their normal workplace.

Yet this “proof of life” has proved unable to weed out all the ghosts and fraudsters from the public service.

Source: AIM