NSS Scandal: The inside story

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, Dr Bawumia used the case of the  National Service Scheme as a classic success story of how digitalisation 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 Personal Identification Numbers (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 on 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’s 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 for Development Studies (UDS), University of Education, Winneba (UEW), Tamale Technical University, Valley View University (VVU) and some colleges of education. 

For example, born on January 1, 1963, Abubakar Fuseni was listed in the NSS database as a graduate of UDS in the 2022/2023 service year. 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, and all with identical degree qualifications – Bachelor of Arts in Integrated Development Studies. On the NSS posting list for the 2022/2023 service year, 2,338 names with index numbers similar to Abubakar’s and inconsistent with what the University officially issues can be found.

Similarly, in the same 2022/2023 service year, 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 issuing fraudulent index numbers extends across multiple educational institutions – private and public, 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 personnel

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 in the 2022/2023 service year.

In the same service year, 91-year-old, Ruth Abdulai, supposedly a Development Studies graduate from UDS, was posted to Adakura Primary School in the Upper East Region. There is also an 82-year-old Mahamadu Ali, another UDS graduate, who was posted to Anyinabrim Anglican School in Sefwi Wiawso in the Western North Region.

Fake IDs and manipulated biometric data

Despite the NSA’s claim of using the Ghana Card for biometric verification, The Fourth Estate found that multiple forms of identification, including doctored school ID cards, Ghana National Fire Service ID cards, provisional voter ID cards, and even private company ID cards, were used to register fake personnel. 

For example, a supposed student ID card from Bagabaga College of Education in Tamale, bearing the name Nnifant Joel Sateen was used to register at least two different people. First, it was used to register Iddrisu Fatima, 34, a purported KNUST graduate. Again, the same ID card was used to register 34-year-old Iddrisu Zakaria supposedly from KNUST who was posted to Sakogu Senior High School in East Mamprusi District in the North East region in the 2022/2023 service year.

Alhassan Salamatu, 44, a supposed UCC graduate, registered using a Ghana National Fire Service ID card bearing the name of Ophilia Akolgo, 41, who joined the Service in 2016. 

Kwame Donkor, 72, was registered without any ID card. In place of an ID card, a photo was used. When The Fourth Estate run a reverse image search, it was revealed the photo was a certain Emmanuel Mutio, a Human Resource Manager of a private IT company in Kenya.

NSA’s legal attempts to suppress publication

When The Fourth Estate requested an interview with the Directors of the NSA on November 27, 2024, the Director-General, Osei Assibey Antwi, said he would not be available until December 10, 2024.  The NSA also said it would need more time to respond to an RTI request for data it had earlier shared with parliament.

Upon learning of The Fourth Estate’s impending publication of its investigations, the NSA took a legal action to block the publication of the report. On December 2, 2024, a day before the scheduled publication, the NSA secured a 10-day injunction to prevent the story from been published. When that injunction expired, they sought another, arguing that publication without their response would cause “irreparable harm.” 

However, on December 19, 2024, an Accra High Court struck down the NSA’s injunction request, after The Fourth Estate’s lawyers described the NSA’s legal manouvres as a SLAPP lawsuit (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) intended to silence investigative journalism. The court awarded costs of GHS6,000 against the NSA in favor of the Media Foundation for West Africa, which runs The Fourth Estate as a non-profit, public interest and accountability investigative journalism project.

A digital ruse that stole millions

Rather than eliminating ghost names, digitalization at the NSS has been used as a cover for one of the most sophisticated financial scams in Ghana’s public service. The scheme has resulted in financial losses to the country amounting to millions of cedis while allowing fraudulent actors to exploit a system designed to ensure transparency.

With the NSS refusing to release additional data under the Right to Information Act, The Fourth Estate has now filed an appeal with the RTI Commission to force disclosure of further records.

Part two of this story will reveal how the NSS bypassed systems monthly to pre-approve ghosts names who are paid monthly