Gaidam’s home truths for Yobe

Holding on to this belief, the governor, speaking at the swearing-in of newly appointed special advisers and chairmen of caretaker committees of local government councils last Tuesday in Damaturu, queried how the state, with just 17 councils, would have more local government employees than virtually every other state in northern Nigeria. With 46,200 local government […]

Holding on to this belief, the governor, speaking at the swearing-in of newly appointed special advisers and chairmen of caretaker committees of local government councils last Tuesday in Damaturu, queried how the state, with just 17 councils, would have more local government employees than virtually every other state in northern Nigeria. With 46,200 local government workers, Yobe is ahead of Kano with 44 local government councils but reporting under 40,000 workers and Borno with 17 councils but averaging 38,000 employees.

Addressing his audience, the governor cited an example of a request made for the payment of nearly half a billion naira of gratuity to some recently retired local government staff at a time that the total salary figures for the councils (where the retirements took place) have not correspondingly came down. The bottom-line is that the ghost-worker syndrome must have found its way into the equation.

Given Yobe’s pioneering move to pay the N18,000 new minimum wage from September 2011, none of the 17 councils in the state could pay its workers’ salaries from the monthly statutory allocations without recourse to loans. It follows that even if a council was able to pay, no money would be left for it to provide basic services, such as diesel for community boreholes or the drilling of wells and hand pumps.

It means that something has to be done – something to clean the Augean Stable and get the local government system back functioning again. In the coming period, according to Governor Gaidam, an extensive verification exercise will be conducted with the sole target to determine genuine workers. This is not a sack exercise, as some papers have erroneously implied. No genuinely recruited worker will be sacked. But ghost names presumably inserted in the payment schedule, including possible names of infants and stay-at-home mums who never knew their parents and husbands were using them to earn illegitimately will be plugged out.

Governor Gaidam said that this will be hard on those who profited from the ghost worker syndrome – those whose sense of self made them turn a blind eye to the imperatives of community and service and fair play. But whoever’s ox is gored, the governor is determined to go the whole hog and ensure that resources are fully maximized and utilized for the greatest benefit of the greatest number of people.

Governor Gaidam also spoke the plain truth when he said that had enough ground been covered from 1991 when Yobe State was created to 2007 when his administration first came to power, the state would have been empowered to gun for bigger things between 2007 to date. Instead, his administration had to literally go back to the drawing board, laying the first major network of township roads in the state capital and major towns, say, or providing the first major consignment of laboratory equipment to the state-owned university.

The governor was not lamenting, however. This was not a gratuitous expression of self-pity. It was a wakeup call for the officials who had just taken their oath of office and also for all other government officials as well – for everyone who has public obligation and trust to discharge.

The first major requirement for public officers, the governor reminded them, is accountability rooted in the fear of God; the notion that the Invisible Hands of God (and of the Law) will catch up with those whose habit of not doing right has become so deeply ingrained.

Governor Gaidam, however, believes that the tremendous progress Yobe has made over the past four years – progress (driven by the governor himself) of laying almost a thousand kilometers of roads, of continually turning around the state’s education system and making the state-owned university the fastest growing in the north, of providing support to farmers and heavily subsidized housing to workers, etc – serves notice that Yobe can change and truly work for its people. What, then, is needed is a consistent display of discipline and a sense of commitment and accountability on the part of public officials.

And going beyond words, the governor has already set up a Projects Monitoring Unit to track budget performance and ensure that there is work of commensurate value for funds expended. With the worker verification exercise underway, Yobe is set to save money that could be used to provide more drugs in hospitals and underwrite public health emergencies.

There is just one demand that Gaidam has made of the people – that they show support and understanding. No meaningful progress can be made unless government and the people it serves work together for a common purpose.

Bego writes in from Government House, Damaturu and is reachable at [email protected]