State bailout money can’t be “sak” bonanza

This is one of the three-pronged steps designed by the Federal Government to help financially distressed states. Other reliefs are the sharing of the $2.1 billion (about N414 billion) 2014 Income Tax/Education Tax; and dividends paid to the Federation Account through the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) by the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Limited, […]

This is one of the three-pronged steps designed by the Federal Government to help financially distressed states. Other reliefs are the sharing of the $2.1 billion (about N414 billion) 2014 Income Tax/Education Tax; and dividends paid to the Federation Account through the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) by the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Limited, and the rescheduling of payments of the loans the states owed respective banks.
When President Muhammadu Buhari announced that government was taking this step to bail out the states from the crisis in which they found themselves, it was a relief that however came with tremors of anxiety amidst the applause. It would be recalled that President Buhari, about three weeks ago, directed the CBN to package the loan to enable the states pay the backlog of salaries owed their workers.
Civil servants at the state level no doubt deserved the sympathetic intervention. It is an understatement to say that things are hard. The salary crisis could spark off a series of workers’ strikes, a situation that could not be afforded given the country’s existing cocktail of challenges.
Reasons abound for the predicament of the states. First of course is the sudden crash in the global prices of oil, the nation’s single revenue earner. Revenue accruing to the states also nose dived relatively. Were there fiscal discipline, adjustments could have been made such that a crucial budgetary component such as personal emoluments of workers would not have been jeopardised. Many states did not operate consolidation savings from their allocations and always spent almost to the last kobo until the new month’s allocations came through. In most Northern states also, Governors operated their governments with a parallel “civil service” of unwieldy numbers of special assistants who earned higher pay than civil servants whose duties were usurped and albeit abandoned.
In other states, the Federal Government abdicated its responsibilities for roads construction and maintenance, vital infrastructure such as airports, basic facilities for Federal Departments operating in the states, and in fact security expenses to the extent that Police, Military and paramilitary operations were dependent on budgetary incursions into State finances. Some governors have blamed the Federal Government, which they alleged owed them backlog of billions spent on all of such and constructing and maintaining federal facilities in states.
As the states await the disbursement of the CBN package, you could not help but scratch a twitching nerve of concern, for must highlight and underline the genuine fears that this bail out largesse could just sink down into the abyss and only for states to pile up fresh debts anew unless there is a new protocol of fiscal discipline. In most cases governors and Legislatures have connived to subvert the appropriations signed into law. Legislators are “bribed” to debate and pass even the appropriation bill and indeed the clearance of state executive council members. The Independent Corrupt Practices Commission is always the last to know that wealth derived from such acts of corruption is showing in lifestyles. Without strict fiscal discipline, obviously this bailout may just be a “sak” bonanza.
Need we observe that there are major cover ups going on? One such is the commercial banks who enjoyed lending to the states and never to the real sector to reap easy profits. In my State of Adamawa, service on debts owed commercial banks is said to be in the region of over N300 million each month (N3.6 billion per annum). In this case, the structured bail out is a mere finger in the dyke and President Buhari may just have played into the hands of the lecherous cartel of commercial banks. I am convinced that all States should once more, be compelled to run Central Bank accounts only until the full purpose of the bailout is consummated.
The other major cover up is of the funds that outgoing regimes helped themselves to leaving the gaping salary holes of debt burdens. Should the bailout not be attached to recoveries of stolen revenues?
Bappa and I
Going to Gombe from Yola, at a spot right after Kumo, I stopped briefly for some vehicular check. I left the spot and discovered later that my phone, a blackberry overloaded with “my office”, a library of my writings, a treasure of reminders, emails and stuff, was missing. Days later, an associate of mine called me to report that one Bappa had called him picking one of my called numbers to say that my lost but found phone was with him. He had left his own contact.
I was overjoyed and called him in excitement. He narrated to me how he saw the phone fall off as I shut the vehicle door and zoomed off. As agreed, I visited him in his little homestead in Gadawo between Kumo and Gombe after two weeks of our talk.
Bappa said to me apologetically that there was N1785 worth of credit on the phone when he found it. He had used up N90 before he found someone who could reach me. Then sadly, he crashed his motorbike and I could see he was bruised all over. Without credit on his own line, he was forced to use up N80 to talk to his family to come and rescue him. He was terribly sorry.
I swallowed hard, tears welling in my eyes, as I stood defeated by the rare and overwhelming occurrence of selflessness in this young lad in Gadawo which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. What does he do now? Nothing, he said. He has secondary education. 5 credits without English. I wished I could do so many things right there and then. First things first, I decided. Gratitude, and my token offering for his treatment. After that followed my words of encouragement on the benefits of honesty and the certainty of reward. At the promise of a solution to being idle through a job I would help find, he shrugged and told me of hundreds like him in just this small village.
This represents hunger that burns and converts to anger. Are we really ready to address the radicalisation of our offspring and their subsequent conversion to haters of society? Gadawo is a replica of hundreds of thousands of villages with unemployed and unskilled idle youth. Suddenly my robes felt like filthy rags that needed the washing of this flood of Bappa’s sincerity. Bappa baba shares my address now. And I have a new family in Gadawo.