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The Attorney-General is charging former officials of the National Service Authority for their involvement in the scandalous creation of thousands of ghost names to siphon more than GH¢548 million cedis from the public purse.
Two former NSS bosses — Mustapha Ussif (2017–2021) and Osei Assibey Antwi (2021–2025) — are among those set to face prosecution over a multi-million-cedi financial rip-off uncovered by The Fourth Estate last year.
They face charges including:
- Stealing, contrary to section 124(1) of the Criminal Offences Act, 1960, Act 29.
- Conspiracy to steal, contrary to sections 23(1) and 124(1) of the Criminal and Other Offences Act, 1960, Act 30.
- Willfully causing financial loss to the state, contrary to section 179(C) of the Criminal and Other Offences Act 1960, Act 30
- Using public office for private profit, contrary to section 179(C) of the Criminal and Other Offences Act 1960, Act 30.
- Obtaining public property by false statements, contrary to section 5 of the Public Property Protection Decree 1977, SMC 140.
- Money laundering, contrary to section 1, subsection 2C of the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2020 Act 1044 and conspiracy to commit money laundering, contrary to section 3 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2020 Act 1020.
The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Dr Dominic Ayine, announced the prosecution of the former officials of the NSA at a press conference in Accra. It comes on the back of months of investigations by The Fourth Estate, which revealed how the NSA officials created ghost names as a conduit to drain the public purse at a time thousands of service personnel were owed allowances.
Also under fire is former Deputy Director Gifty Oware-Mensah, accused of using national service personnel’s allowances as collateral to secure a GHC 30 million ADB loan for her private business.
The rest are:
- Kwaku Ohene Gyan, former Deputy Executive Director for Operations
- Abraham Bismarck Gaise, former Internal Auditor
- Eric Kwaku Adjei, an Account Officer
- Iddrisu Ibn Abubakar, former Head of Accounts
- Stephen Kwabena Gyamfi, former Regional Director for Koforidua
- Prince Awuku, a District Director
- Jacob Yawson, Management Information Systems Administrator in the Northern Region
- Two others have not been named
The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Dr. Dominic Ayine, also announced that vendors who conspired with officials of the NSA for a fictitious hire purchase scheme that defrauded the state would be equally prosecuted.
“This criminal enterprise was run by top-level executives of the National Service Authority and their accomplices in the private sector known as vendors or service providers. This criminal enterprise resulted in the siphoning of huge sums of public funds into private pockets,” he said.
The Attorney General’s investigations confirmed The Fourth Estate’s findings, which showed that there were wide disparities between the number of personnel announced to the public as service personnel and what officials of the authority reported to Parliament.
“Consequently, or consistently, these figures were inflated by huge numbers. During the fiscal year, the directors would write to the Minister of Finance requesting permission to utilise excess funds allocated in the budget of the National Service Authority,” Dr Ayine explains.
“Once authorised, the directors would transfer the funds into NSA’s project account at the Agricultural Development Bank, and under the pretext of executing projects, would divert the funds into private pockets.”
He continued, “Another criminal scheme hatched and exploited by the directors and staff is the deployment of ghost names onto the NSA system. Once deployed, the directors would then request that both ghost names and genuine names be transmitted by the accounts to the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GHIPPs for payment.”
The Attorney General disclosed that a six-year comparative audit, spanning 2018 to 2024, uncovered massive payroll fraud. While 587,543 verified personnel were supposed to be submitted for payment, records from GHIPSS revealed that 650,165 people were actually paid. This exposes a staggering 63,672 ghost names smuggled into the system.
Gifty Oware-Mensah’s scheme
Mrs Oware-Mensah was alleged to have pulled off her scheme by fraudulently registering a company—Blocks of Life Consult—using the personal details of unsuspecting individuals without their consent. Posing as a legitimate business, she presented the company to the ADB Bank through a middleman, Maxwell Akwesi Oforiminta. She enlisted her husband, lawyer Peter Mensah, as a fronting director. She claimed the company specialised in supplying home appliances to National Service personnel and proposed that ADB fund the venture on a hire-purchase basis, with the NSA handling deductions and repayments.
Although the company got the funds, it was not listed as a vendor for the Authority’s marketplace as a registered vendor.
The Attorney-General claimed that Mrs Oware-Mensah got a GH¢ 30.6 million loan from the ADB bank using 9,934 ghost names to siphon the funds.
On the fraud involving vendors, Dr Ayine says his office’s investigations showed that some of the ghost names were added to the list submitted by vendors, representing the number of service personnel to whom they had allegedly supplied items or provided loan facilities.
“When these vendors eventually received their payments, the directors and staff would then contact the vendors whose accounts had received payments, meet with them, and collect the additional money that had been added to the vendors’ payments,” he says.
Monies collected from this scheme were allegedly handed over to the former Director-General of NSA, Osei-Assibey Antwi, in cash and sometimes deposited into his bank account. In the 2023 service year, a total of GHC 8.2 million was deposited into Mr Antwi’s account.
A breakdown shows the vendor companies listed below and their owners received the following:
| Company | Owner | Amount |
| Alfaira Ventures | Haruna Maulaya | GHC 21.3 million |
| Marine Ventures | Rose Hamilton | GHC 50.7 million |
| Option Buy Ventures | Isaac Asamani | GHC 11.4 million |
| A savings and loans company | GHC 167.6 million | |
| Silsona Ventures | Sylvia Opare | GHC 10.7 million |
| Nyansapor Ventures | Jacob Yawson | GHC 19.1 million |
| Brainwave Ventures | Philomena Arthur & Stephen Kwabena Gyamfi | GHC 17.6 million |
| Alfarita Ventures | Solomon Dwanena | GHC 8.2 million |
| GH Ohetek Ventures | Charles Aheming | GHC 14.2 million |
| Kweku Opare Agofa & Prince Agofa Awuku | Fralisa Ventures | GHC 9 million |
The Attorney-General said none of the vendors were able to produce evidence to support the items they supplied to the NSA, matching the amount of money they received.
He revealed that while some marketplace vendors and NSA staff offered to serve as prosecution witnesses, the prosecution team rejected their offers.
“Some of them offered to be prosecution witnesses, and we rejected their offers. They came, met with my deputy, we evaluated the evidence and thought that it would be inimical to the entire prosecutorial enterprise if we accepted; I mean their offers to serve as prosecution witnesses,” he said.
Background
The Fourth Estate investigation at the NSS revealed widespread corruption and payroll fraud, where tens of thousands of fictitious names were used to siphon millions of Ghana cedis from the State.
The findings showed that individuals not enrolled in national service, including the elderly, foreigners, and deceased persons, were fraudulently listed on payrolls. In one striking case, the name of a Kenyan man appeared on the payroll as an active service person.
On December 2, 2024, hours before the first part of the series of investigative reports on the scandal, a court bailiff served the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), the parent organisation of The Fourth Estate, with an injunction order from the High Court.
This legal move followed The Fourth Estate’s public announcement that it was set to release a series of investigative stories on the National Service Scheme (NSS). Unbeknownst to The Fourth Estate, the NSS had filed an injunction application earlier that same day and obtained a court order in a manner that excluded the media organisation from the proceedings, effectively attempting to block the publication at the last minute.
The MFWA petitioned the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) and the Operation Recover All loot (ORAL) team with its findings of the scandal.
Following the petition, a nationwide audit by the State revealed that over 81,000 ghost names were on the NSS payroll, resulting in an estimated GH¢112 million in losses in just one service year.
