At the inception of the current administration, we were horrified to see the country flailing in the scandalous official confirmation that 27 of the 36 states were unable to meet their statutory obligation of paying the salaries of their civil servants. Most of them were owing arrears of between six and eight months. Perhaps, we […]
At the inception of the current administration, we were horrified to see the country flailing in the scandalous official confirmation that 27 of the 36 states were unable to meet their statutory obligation of paying the salaries of their civil servants. Most of them were owing arrears of between six and eight months.
Perhaps, we found nothing strange about this. Since the second republic, our civilian regimes have had a poor reputation for prudent management of their financial resources. The visible face of this failure has been the pile up of unpaid salaries of civil servants and pensions. Each time a state managed to pay the salaries of its civil servants, it crowed about it as an achievement worth celebrating. I would posit that it was the beginning of the erosion of confidentiality between employers and employees. The day civil servants were paid was the day of reckoning for them and their book-me-down creditors. Mama-put and other creditors beat the path to the payee’s door at the same time. The chaos is best imagined.
It should be possible for us to see this as evidence of the poor governance that has afflicted us all these years. It is the abdication of responsibility and crass cynical attitude to governance. Salaries come under what is technically known as first charge decreed by the Financial Instruction. This means that priority accorded the payment of salaries is a convention cast in stone. I wonder how many states in the country observe this simple expedient of putting money in the pockets of their civil servants before paying contractors. I think the contractors now come first.
When we officially learnt of the suffering of civil servants in those 27 states who could not be paid for at least six months, we did not stop to ask how it happened. Instead, we saw it as our collective shame, a messy scandal that we did not need. We joined our voices in asking the federal government to fix this embarrassing problem. President Buhari agreed. He doled out some money to the states in a gesture technically known as a bail out.
It is not indisputable that the bail out turned out to be a drop in the empty buckets in the states. No single state cleared its arrears of salaries and pensions with it. Most of them diverted a large chunk of the bail out fund to meet other exigencies, such as the payment of contractors. The situation today is not better than when the bail out fund was given to the affected states. I am willing to bet it is even worse now.
The situation, as was only natural, has gotten progressively worse for the civil servants. In Benue State, governor Samuel Ortom introduced a four-day working week. He freed Friday for civil servants in the state to go to the farm. He must have forgotten that farming requires funding. I guess he reasoned that anyone who has food in his store can at least keep hunger outside the door even if his pockets show no sign of life. It is, clearly, a cynical attempt at solving a messy and fundamental problem but it shows his desperation for a solution. Let us keep an open mind. If his formula works it would be evidence that Obasanjo is a wise man and that if his successor, President Shagari, had not replaced his Operation Feed the Nation with Green Revolution, our civil servant-farmers would be feeding us today with more nutritious rice than the Thai rice farmer could dream of.
Any way, let me return to my point. Our editors seem to have taken it granted that all is going swimmingly great, salary wise, in the states. I do not think this is the truth. I believe, and I am not alone, that the poor management of our financial resource at the state level has never been seriously interrogated by the citizens and the news media. I have faith in the ability of the editors of the Trust titles to dig for the truth and tell us: a) the current state of salaries and salary arrears of civil servants in the 27 originally affected states b) the share of each state from the bail out fund c) how much each state paid to clear the arrears and d) show proof of non-full use of the money for what it was meant.
We should push for transparent and accountable governance. If we do not get this right, nothing would be right in our country.
