LABOUR ‘We’ll end delay in salary payment in Benue’
Chief Terwase Orbunde is the Chief of Staff to the Benue State government. In this interview, he speaks about what the state government is doing to end delay in the payment of workers’ salaries.
What is the state government doing on the issue of nonpayment of salaries of workers in the state?
I am concerned about the delay in payment of salaries to workers of the state. A labourer is worthy of his wages; If you don’t pay the man his wages, he goes home empty handed and his family starves. So, I am very concerned that we have that challenge. So I am glad you asked me the question. His Excellency the governor has spent sleepless nights consulting widely for a solution to the problem. So, I can tell you that we are towards the end of the issue of the challenges of salaries. And what do I mean? We took time to do various biometrics within the system to reduce the wage bill, but we discovered that whereas we were not giving new employment, yet people were retiring and some were even unfortunately dying and the wage bill was not going down.
So, it meant that there were some challenges somewhere and so we needed to take a deeper look at these challenges and that was why the governor, in his wisdom, declared the state of emergency on the issue of salary and subsequently set up the Abounu Committee which by the grace of God I am a member.
What is the work of the committee?
Our assignment is to ascertain why is it that whereas we are not employing and people are resigning - and we have those records - some are dying yet the numbers are not going down. So, we found out that the N7.8 billion per month wage bill was unrealistic and non-sustainable. So, we began to look at the indices that have made it so. Of course the popular term ‘ghost workers.’ Yes, we found out that there were many of such cases. But the first thing we discovered was 10 different names, one bank account. We solved that and that is why the wage bill is going down.
We also found out that certain allowances across the board that were not entitlements were being collected. We also saw that there were people who were on the wage bill who had no business being there. And then we also discovered that in the local governments, even in various other places, we had more people than were needed to do a job.
So having done these careful checks, I want to let you know that the figures are going down and by the grace of God, we may hover around N4.5 billion as the monthly wage bill of Benue State. So in this New Year, the deputy governor will submit the report of his committee, we just have one or two outstanding issues which we will soon complete and as you know, the last stakeholders’ meeting gave us a vote of confidence and encouragement to go on and arrest this monster that has gone haywire called salaries.
That is what we are doing. So when we submit that report and find the wage bill at around N4.5 billion, I can assure you that going forward, at the end of every month, if you are a legitimate staff of the Benue State government both at the state and local government level, your salary will be paid. This is, to my mind, ingenious because it is a labourer that is worthy of his wages and not just anybody.
After a state of emergency was declared on payment of salaries, capital projects were put on hold. How soon are we expecting constructions, which also provide jobs, to commence?
You will realize that when we made a recovery of about N4.5 billion from one of the banks, it was money for bond which was intended for some of these projects you are talking about and some of those contractors went back to site. The summary of what I am saying is that once we arrest this monster, capital projects will bounce back.
If you have maybe N5billion or N6billion at the end of the month and your monthly wage bill is N4.5billion, you have either N500 million or N1 billion to play around with. So government will return to those projects as soon as we start making some savings from the wage bill, it could be February, it could be March.
How about job creation?
The heartbeat of the Governor Ortom administration is the realization of the fact that over 80 percent of the population in this state is involved in agriculture. And so if you affect agriculture, you affect a large number of the population. So adding value to agriculture became something that was paramount to him and that’s what he has been driving. The man wants to increase production because he realized that land will never increase in quantity but human beings will increase in number. So if you want to feed a growing population, you must have a solution to making sure that you produce more food per hectarage by adding value to what is produced, by conserving what is produced, by processing what is produced and that is what the governor has been doing.