Now that Government is broke

Openness is supposed to be a virtue but the way Minister of Information and Culture Alhaji Lai Mohammed characterised the Federal Government’s purse last Wednesday, he might have set the cat among the pigeons. Speaking at the end of a Federal Executive Council meeting, the minister was asked about government’s decision to remove fuel subsidies. […]

Openness is supposed to be a virtue but the way Minister of Information and Culture Alhaji Lai Mohammed characterised the Federal Government’s purse last Wednesday, he might have set the cat among the pigeons. Speaking at the end of a Federal Executive Council meeting, the minister was asked about government’s decision to remove fuel subsidies. He said, “The current problem is not really about subsidy removal. It is about that Nigeria is broke. Pure and simple! It is like somebody who has been earning N100,000 a month and he is faced with a situation where his employer says henceforth, he will be earning N10,000 a month. He would need to make some very painful decisions and some very painful adjustments.”
While we have always known that the government is having financial problems, we did not know that it is broke until Alhaji Lai revealed the secret. It reminds me of a story concocted by Western diplomats in Moscow during the Cold War. They said a naked man dashed through the streets of Moscow shouting, “Brezhnev is a fool!” KGB agents quickly arrested the man and charged him to court for revealing a state secret. The custodian of Nigerian government’s information has just flouted the Official Secrets Act, which is much more popular with our public officers than the latter day Freedom of Information Act. What is DSS waiting for?
The minister might plead in his defence that he was being open, but I see several problems with Alhaji Lai’s openness. One is his use of the word broke. Broke is a word regularly used by poor and lower middle class folks in Nigeria. When a Nigerian says he is broke, it means he is koboless and cannot so much as buy himself a meal, a cigarette stick or a bottle of Coke. Surely that is not what Alhaji Lai is trying to say. The day may never come when the Federal Government is koboless, since it has a printing press called The Mint. Despite all the talk about Niger Delta Avengers-engineered low oil production and low oil prices, the three tiers of government shared nearly N300 billion from the Federation Account last month. That was very low compared to what they used to share, but it is hardly what you call kobolessness.
What the minister is saying is that the money government gets these days is not enough to fund all the things it took upon itself to fund over the years, mainly the greed of its officials. Mahatma Ghandi once said that India had enough to meet everyone’s needs but it did not have enough to meet everyone’s greed. All the money in the Federation Account is not enough to satisfy one Nigerian’s greed, if Dasukigate and Diezanigate are reliable indicators. The problem with Alhaji Lai’s declaration goes beyond semantics and grammar. Our markets depend on salary earners. The day civil servants receive their salary, activity visibly picks up at the markets and there is a lot of hustle and bustle. Once the salaries are spent after a few days, things quieten down. It is All Quiet On The Market Front, to paraphrase a popular German book.
There was this local Hausa singer who used to say that, “The day you don’t have, and the person who gives you does not have, on that day you and a thief may have the same plans.” What keeps our traders and market women going is the expectation of next month’s salary. All the people that you see hurrying into the market in mid month, they are teachers and civil servants with no money in their pockets. They go to the stalls, lower their voices and collect food items on credit. If traders now hear that government is broke, it could set off a chain reaction. The traders will stop extending credit to civil servants, wondering how they are going to pay at the end of the month when government that gives them the money to settle their credit is itself broke. If traders won’t sell on credit, then our markets would all grind to a halt. Chinua Achebe said proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten; credit is the tyre on which the rickshaw Nigerian market rolls on.
Equally regrettable was Alhaji Lai’s reference to an employer who pays a worker N100,000 but now says he can only pay N10,000. A 90% salary cut! Just when labour is agitating for a wage increase after five years, the minister is dropping hints that government, the biggest employer of labour, may be considering a drastic pay cut. We will not easily waive his suggestion away because this has happened before in Nigeria. In 1986 the Babangida regime announced a pay cut for all civil servants as part of the structural adjustment program, SAP. The percentage cut was small but the psychological impact it had on us was huge. Never mind that since 1979, the Constitution of the Federal Republic said “the salary of a public officer shall not diminish to his disadvantage during his term in office.”
Alhaji Lai’s flippant example might give ideas to Shylock private sector operators. Staff salary is the most unpopular item in a Nigerian businessman’s bills file. Wherever it suits him, the Nigerian businessman is happy to take a cue from government. In 1984, when many state governments were having trouble paying salaries, there was one episode in NTA’s popular Village Headmaster in which a shop attendant complained to his master that he had not paid him his salary. The shop owner stood up, aggressively waved his flywhisk, looked directly into the camera and said, “Government sef no de pay salary!”
In the best of times there were many things which government was supposed to do that it was not doing. One wonders what will happen now that government is broke. Even when government was awash with money, public service workers were paid paltry amounts as salary. That however did not stop some civil servants from acquiring all the choice property in Abuja, Lagos and Dubai. In the best of times too certain categories of workers, especially primary school teachers, often went unpaid for months on end. This was not because government did not have the money, but it often found one bureaucratic reason after another such as verification, computerisation, e-payment, BVN etc to delay paying genuine workers.
Even when government had money, federal and state roads were full of potholes, bridges mostly had no railings, all the milestones and traffic signs had fallen off, roadside vegetation blocked motorists’ view at sharp bends while erosion ate away most road shoulders. In the best of times government hospitals lacked drugs and dressings. Brigadier Sani Abacha famously said in his December 1983 coup speech that government hospitals had become mere consulting clinics. He thought that was a serious indictment but he lived long enough to see the situation get worse.
If we know Alhaji Lai very well, he will soon follow up on his government is broke allegation with a rendition of how a former regime created it. I, for one, will be sceptical. Some experts said last year that fall in oil prices need not lead to recession; that it is the way government responds to the situation that could lead to a recession. Since the last Economics book I read was a secondary school text book on demand and supply and factors of production, I do not know if these experts were telling the truth. However, I will like the government to at least ask them.