Former Directors-General of Ghana’s National Service Authority (NSA), Mr Osei Assibey Antwi and Mustapha Ussif, have dismissed allegations of enrolment and payroll irregularities, describing a recent media report as misleading and selectively omitting key information.
In a press release issued on Tuesday, February 18, the former officials criticised an investigation by The Fourth Estate, arguing that it “was laden with a misapprehension of the enrolment, verification, and payment processes of the National Service Authority, as well as selective omission of information, calculated to achieve contrived conclusions of imputing wrongdoing to former officers.”
The report had suggested discrepancies between the number of personnel submitted to Parliament for budgetary purposes and the publicly available figures.
However, Assibey and Ussif contended that The Fourth Estate had relied only on data from the general posting in September, failing to account for two cohorts of nursing trainees and one cohort of teacher trainees, which are enrolled through separate cycles in partnership with the Nursing and Midwifery Council and the Teachers’ Council.
Another key allegation centred on the alleged presence of “ghost names” on the NSA payroll. The former directors refuted this claim, stating that payments are only processed after rigorous verification measures.
“The payroll is only activated after stringent verification processes, and only personnel who pass verification are paid through the GhiPPS System, a Bank of Ghana subsidiary,” they said.
The publication also cited concerns over the presence of overaged individuals, incorrect IDs, and foreign images in the NSA’s records.
Assibey and Ussif attributed these inconsistencies to errors in initial data collection, which they said are systematically resolved during regional verification exercises.
“Personnel with inconsistent information are categorized as banned or pending verification and do not draw from the payroll,” they explained.
The former directors expressed concern over what they perceived as a lack of due diligence in the investigation. “It is shocking that The Fourth Estate relied on entry data without verifying the actual number of personnel paid per year through GhiPPS.
This reliance betrayed a malicious intent to publish a sensational story rather than diligently establish facts,” the statement read.
