Maybe Some of them Really Forgot to Pick up Their Checks

Is civil service corruption on the retreat?

The Finance Ministry has revealed that for the months of June and July, there are 17,432 unclaimed salary checks as a result of the stringent verification process it conducted in various ministries and agencies.

The practice of creating ghost employees probably started about 20 minutes after the first payroll ledger was invented, thousands of years ago, like in ancient Egypt or Mesopatamia. West Africa has a long record of such connivances, no doubt inherited from crooked colonial adminstrators.