The Xmas bonanza and matters arising

It promises to be a truly merry Christmas for thousands of civil servants in the country; perhaps the merriest in a long time. Christmas bonanza is about to land on their laps. President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the state governors to clear the salary and pension arrears of their civil servants and pensioners before Christmas.

Miracles always happen if you hold long enough to the straw and refuse to be washed down the stream. Thus has it happened that the president least expected to don the costume of Father Christmas has done what a Father Christmas could not do: make goat, turkey and chicken meat long absent from the soup pots of our civil servants in at least 27 states once more grace them. This would be a Christmas to remember. Yet, come to think of it: they say the president is an irredentist Islamic religious fanatic. Some fanatic.

Since the announcement, I am sure the law of unintended consequences has gone into play. Market women, ever the first group to respond to changing financial fortunes of workers, and always unwilling to miss a chance to earn more from pepper, palm oil, magi, crayfish, smoked fish, rice, etc., have already worked out the percentage increases in the prices of these commodities. It is merry Christmas for them too, apparently, but not so merry for those of us outside the loop of this largesse.

Would this one merry Christmas break the long chain of bleak Christmases and ensure that civil servants, teachers and pensioners are now regularly paid their monthly salaries and entitlements? Not likely. I think it would be naïve to see this as the solution to the salary question. It is a lot messier than we might think. What the president has done is to offer a palliative to what has clearly become an embarrassment to this pathetic oil rich nation.

There are obvious problems with the president’s decision. This is not the first time the states would be paid the refunds from the Paris Club. They have been paid two tranches of refunds from both the Paris and the London clubs under the Buhari administration. In December 2016, the president authorised and released N576.38 billion to the states. The second tranche released on July 18 this year brought a windfall of N243.80 billion to the states.

Each time the refunds were made to the states, Buhari made a point of imploring the governors to commit the money to the salaries of their civil servants and the crumbs that many pensioners receive as a matter of priority. But each time, the payments made no dents on the level of their salary and pension arrears. With each windfall, the arrears leaped towards the roof, suggesting that something must be wrong with how the state governors use these occasional financial blessings. Obviously.

The first thing that sticks out is that many of the governors do not share the president’s belief that a labourer is worthy of his wages. The second thing that sticks out is that the governors divert the fund to what ranks as their number one priority – the payment of contractors from which they get their generous kickbacks. The third thing that sticks out is, of course, obvious. Corruption. It is against the law of power for the pockets of a state governor to sound like mine – the muffled sound of nairalessness.

I do not think the payment of the fifty per cent of the third tranche this month would fare better in the hands of the unsupervised managers of our common wealth. Most of them would make the Christmas as bleak as it has always been for their civil servants and pensioners since they came into office. My suspicion was confirmed by Nasir el-Rufai, governor of Kaduna State. He told state house reporters after the governors’ meeting with the president on November 27 that “some states have salary arrears that are bigger than the Paris Club refund they are getting.”

You do not need to read between the lines to see that the statement carries with it the loop hole to be exploited by the more irresponsible men among the state governors as an excuse to do much less than the president expects them to. At best they will throw a pittance at the civil servants and pensioners, crow loudly about it and pocket the rest. Unfortunately for Buhari, he is constitutionally barred from enquiring into how the governors spend money due to their states. But he is not that helpless. It would be nice if he would make it a condition for first term APC governors seeking a second term to prove their competence and sense of public service by clearing their salary and pension arrears by January 2018. Meanwhile, I would like to advise the civil servants and pensioners to moderate their jumping for joy and resist the temptation to collect Christmas rice, turkeys, goats and chickens on credit in anticipation of the windfall. None of us ever knows how the wind falls.

The salary question is nothing new. It has been with us since the second republic. At that time, state governors who were able to pay the monthly salaries of their civil servants made a point of crowing about it, citing it as evidence of their praise-worthy competence in the management of their financial resources. It has progressively gotten worse and brought us to this truly sorry pass with civil servants not being paid for between eight and eleven months in most of the states; and many pensioners expiring in verification queues. The salary and pension arrears was the first problem that confronted Buhari when he assumed office as head of state in January 1984. Thirty-three years later, he confronts the same problem. Talk of bad luck.

We, certainly, cannot continue this way and expect the country to make real progress in terms of economic and social development. The civil servants constitute less than two per cent of the population; yet both at the federal and state levels, the nation spends 80 per cent of its financial resources on them. Our governments are not in office to minister to the salary needs of civil civil servants. There must be a conscious and determined effort on the part of Buhari and the governors and other managers of our economy to reverse this trend in favour of capital expenditure to move the nation forward. But a nation of unpaid and hungry civil servants and teachers is a nation unable to break out of the circle of underdevelopment.

The first thing that sticks out is that many of the governors do not share the president’s belief that a labourer is worthy of his wages