War against common sense

In recent discussions of the lean resources of state governments, a controversial issue has been whether the states are justified in owing their teachers – and other civil servants – salaries. On the one hand, some argue that employment in the civil service is a contract that is a legally binding agreement which compels the […]

In recent discussions of the lean resources of state governments, a controversial issue has been whether the states are justified in owing their teachers – and other civil servants – salaries. On the one hand, some argue that employment in the civil service is a contract that is a legally binding agreement which compels the employer to pay the wages. From this perspective, proponents argue that it is an ill-advised strategy for a state government to share the little money it has between salaries and other projects when salaries have not been paid. Pay the salaries. Period! Don’t talk about other obligations, they contend.
On the other hand, however, others argue that the negligible percentage of the civil servants in the population (sometimes less than 2 percent), does not merit being allocated 100 percent of the government’s funds in the name of salaries; there are other obligations such as roads construction and hospital management. In the words of a traditional ruler: “How comfortable would your family be, when your daughter is sick but because the government has used all its resources to pay salaries, there are no medicines in the hospital for her?”
According to this view, using all the resources to pay salaries is a zero sum game, which means to pay salary approximates not being able to finance other sectors. In sum, then, the issue is whether to pay full salaries or to be pragmatic about it, including paying half salaries or fixing limits by allocating a certain percentage for projects and another for salaries.
My own view is to agree with the pragmatists, but with a difference. Though I concede that payment of salaries in an obligation, I still maintain that government has other obligations which are more important than salaries. For example, a certain state has a N2.2 billion wage bill.  This state, I was told, received up to  N11 billion per month during the PDP years from FAAC, but now it gets as little as N600 million per month. Although some may object that the state should utilise its internally generated revenue, I reply that if the state makes N450 million per month as IGR, you can’t do much with that; and to improve on the IGR, the state needs to make investment. For example, you can’t ask people to pay more taxes without first doing something for them. You can’t ask market women to pay more when they don’t have good clinics or toilets in the markets. Of course, you can attract private investment, which many states are already doing with varying degrees of commitment. But our costly business environment (lack of electricity, etc.) stymies this prospect.
The issue is important because many schools have started sending school children home on account of the strike by their teachers.  This doesn’t make sense, because those going to public schools are children, cousins and neighbours of the teachers themselves and other public servants. While your children waste time at home, the children of those who take the decisions you’re protesting against are able to go to private schools. This group of children is already ahead of your children in every dimension of life, you then give them more head start? Are the unions thinking? Do you only consider money in making decisions? As I write this, my six-year- old son is sitting with me preparing to go to a private school.
Then I consider the secondary students I saw yesterday going back to their villages when I visited two boarding schools in Niger State and I asked myself, are the children of commissioners also going home? Whose children are these? They are the children of the poor. And in Nigeria, teachers count among the poor. Therefore, the teachers, especially those who were paid 50 to 70 percent of their salaries and yet are insisting on going on strike are waging a war on common sense. Their position needs revision.
But a greater assault on common sense is by the governors and other top functionaries themselves. I was once in a living room with a governor who bitterly complained that a trip to Abuja from Minna cost N1.5 million. He only calmed down when the protocol department explained to him that what the government spent on the governor and his entourage to Abuja and in Abuja was actually half of that. So there are some of the governors struggling to cut costs.
However, that would amount to nothing and we’ll come to serious grief if we don’t discard some of the habits that are pulling us down. One of such habits is how our governments waste money on the dead. A case in point is the recent death of Alhaji Shinkafi, the Marafan Sokoto, may Allah rest his soul. My little understanding of Islam is that you can do your ta’aziya (condolence) whenever you meet the bereaved; whether in the market or workplace. Now we even have phones, so you can make a call or send a text. For government functionaries, they may want to write a press statement or send a tweet.
But to charter a private plane (which cost $13,000 in 2015) to Sokoto just to say “I’m sorry for your loss” is a wicked witchcraft that would kill us all.  My back of the envelope calculations says $13,000 is almost N4 million.  Sam Nda-Isaiah once wrote that one could purchase a good dialysis machine (to help those with kidney problems) with that amount; an illness to which I recently lost a neighbour – sort of a younger brother.
Now imagine how many private jets flew to Sokoto and calculate how many dialysis machines we could have bought and how many lives we would have saved.
I was in Sokoto at this time. So, I saw the private jets myself. The fact that I boarded the same commercial flight from Sokoto to Abuja with Mr. Dimeji Bankole, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, means that even if we decide not to eschew the habit, there is a cheaper alternative. Obviously, the incumbent speaker didn’t travel in this manner. The Senate president, Dr. Bukola Saraki even tweeted about the visit as if that’s an achievement: @bukolasaraki: “We were accompanied by Govs Tambuwal and Bagudu as we visited the family of the late Marafan Sokoto, Alhaji Shinkafi.”
This is to say nothing of the amount of money the Sokoto State government spent on these guests; and the time – a whole week wasted on the dead.
 While the call for public school teachers and other civil servants to show understanding is in order, top government functionaries must curb their enthusiasm of spending unnecessarily.