Nigeria’s youngest government official

This gives new meaning to the phrase cradle-to-grave benefits:  A one-month old baby, said to hold a diploma, was on the Nigerian government payroll, officials have discovered, exposing the levels to which corruption runs in Africa’s most populous country. The name of the infant was recently found on the payment voucher of a local government ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

This gives new meaning to the phrase cradle-to-grave benefits: 

This gives new meaning to the phrase cradle-to-grave benefits: 

A one-month old baby, said to hold a diploma, was on the Nigerian government payroll, officials have discovered, exposing the levels to which corruption runs in Africa’s most populous country.

The name of the infant was recently found on the payment voucher of a local government council in northern Nigeria during an exercise to fish out ghost employees from a bloated workforce, Garba Gajam, justice commissioner for Zamfara State told AFP late Wednesday.

"In the on-going verification exercise of the payrolls … in the state we discovered that a month-old baby was among the employees of one local government who is paid a salary," Gajam said.

"What is even more astonishing is that it was indicated in the payroll that the infant holds an ordinary national diploma," said Gajam, revealing that the discovery is a "widespread trend in the local government service where senior officials stuff payrolls with the names of their wives and children".

Smart baby! On the bright side, at one month old, he couldn’t have been that corrupt yet. 

 

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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