This Day, AIT and workers’ salaries

Non-payment of workers’ salaries and allowances when they are due by some individuals, corporate bodies and governments has become a notorious fact of ill-run modern Nigeria. Some desperate job seekers may pay huge sums of money or the females among them may bribe with their bodies to secure some job but at the end of […]

Non-payment of workers’ salaries and allowances when they are due by some individuals, corporate bodies and governments has become a notorious fact of ill-run modern Nigeria. Some desperate job seekers may pay huge sums of money or the females among them may bribe with their bodies to secure some job but at the end of the day, their due entitlements may not be guaranteed at the end of the month. This makes their fate look like the man in the Bible whom Prophet Amos says was trying to run away from a lion and a bear met him! The hopelessness of unemployment is replaced by the hopelessness of the tantalizing prospect of touching money at long last and never ever having the real opportunity of doing so as at when it is most hoped for, two evils that kill almost in the same proportion, two evils neither of which any man wishes for himself.
But long before the cancer of non- or irregular payment of salaries spread from a few states, with Osun as a dubious champion, to other states until it became a threat to the corporate stability of Nigeria, the ill has been a reality in many of our media houses. A lot of them have since closed shop owing hundreds of millions of Naira of workers’ entitlements. Of those ones, I will not concern myself with any of them. Rather, I choose here to single out This Day newspaper and AIT for reprimand because they are in a position to pay their staff, but don’ do so not because of unfavourable economic climate but largely because of the character and life style of their owners.
This Day and AIT are owned by two colourful, highly ego-centric sanguine personalities who exhibit all the weaknesses of persons with that character trait: free-spending, acting on impulse, clear lack of ability for self-management not to talk of organizational one, aversion for organisation and personal discipline and an even clearer lack of ability to separate their persons from the professional and economically successful organisations they have founded which have grown beyond them because thousands of persons have become stake holders in them.
Nduka Obaigbena and High Aleogho Raymond Dokpesi (note that one is a duke and the other not just an ordinary chief but a ‘high’’ one) live large, and it is fairly obvious now, on the sweat of workers. One of them has a permanent pent suite in Transcorps Hilton; one went to open a bureau of his news organ in South Africa and tried to do what he has gotten used to doing here in Nigeria where impunity is a sign of power by refusing to pay workers’ salaries and the South Africans promptly closed his operations there; one loves to go about in hired jets ; one of them has a mansion somewhere in town that dwarfs our own Aso Rock in sophistication and grandeur; the two love one social evil that I will not mention ; the two break all the rules of business and ethics and the two are mortally feared which is why no one in government or without says ‘fim’ to them.
And that that is hardly surprising. In a country where most of those who are in a position to do something about the evil these two men are committing have skeletons in their own cupboards so no one seems to have the guts to call them to order. Everyone is afraid of the awesome weapon these men possess and the men surely know that.
The situation is so bad that some reporters who have been employed by ThisDay newspaper and the AIT in the past seven or more years do not know that in our country workers collect salaries on a monthly basis. They have not enjoyed the privilege of having their spirit sensitized by the act of waiting with eager expectation for monthly pay with days of special concentration being 20th to about the 26th. For them, irregular payment of what is supposed to be a monthly affair is the name of the game. If you have friends in these conglomerates, they will tell you in hushed tones that ‘’do you know that we have just received our December 2014 salary just yesterday and that it is all gone!
This type of situation has been on, I say, in the past 7-10 years or almost all of the life of these two supposedly successful media empires. Yet, there has been criminal silence on the parts of the government, civil society organisations, men and women of conscience and even the journalists who work in them. Please note that This Day and the AIT parade some of the sharpest analysts in the business in the country. Occasionally, the NUJ will go and picket the organisations, sing some aluta songs, pronounce some harmless curses on the establishments and that ends the matter. They wait until a noted journalist from those stables falls ill and dies of easily preventable causes before they are again moved to make some polite noise about the ill-treatment of journalists in This Day and the AIT.
In my own little corner where I do all my fight for a just, fair and well run Nigeria, I keep wondering to myself whether there are no rules in our law books that can be employed to deal with this situation especially in the media establishments.  Media work is not like any other work. It is a secular work no doubt but it has within it a religious type of calling. Its members are supposed to be engaged in a crusade for a decent society. How can a town crier be made to walk around sounding the alarm bell on an empty stomach? Will his message not be coloured? Will his vision not be blurred somehow? How can a society that says it hates corruption allow this type of situation to exist?