Social salary

By 

Kole Omotoso

There is this issue to look at first before going into any other subjects of current interest. Nzeribe makes a press statement nailing his flag to the future fortunes of two candidates he would love to call 'sole' for the next presidential and vice-presidential elections of year 2003. It is always difficult what Nigeria makes of anything or any issue, no matter what is made of the same matter in the rest of the world. One did think that the fact that we now know the date the present government terminates its life should, would move us to work towards achieving some targets and planning ahead. Not that Nzeribe's is not some kind of planning ahead. It is simply that it is the wrong type of planning ahead. One had expected that there would be some more positive rivalry in the political arena. Instead, Nzeribe begins a campaign for the present incumbent and his deputy as the sole candidates for 2003. It was good to read President Obasanjo's repudiation of Nzeribe. Yet, how fair is it to Nzeribe? If in the nature of things Nzeribe cannot propose himself to the people of Nigeria as their next potential president, and wants to continue in public life, how else to ensure his own neck except by clearing the field of all other contestants for his own candidates? And from whence comes this idea that there are only two main candidates come 2003, Babangida and Obasanjo? It is impossible sometimes to give intelligent responses to public issues when you do not have all the contending issues at hand? It is at this point that one feels sometimes that one is writing fiction hoping it would turn to faction and become fact years later when the last pieces of the puzzle are supplied. Until then, can the present government continue to work for the good of the people, please!

Which is the issue waiting for attention this week. How do you work for the good of the people, make better their social and economic conditions without creating inflation and the devaluation of the quality such amelioration should entail? The shortest possible answer is that you do not. You cannot increase material for consumption without ensuring that such increase, if not properly and scientifically monitored would achieve the very opposite of what it is supposed to do. Without thinking of this implication in the campaign for a better life for all, our politicians make it easy for the controllers of better lives for their people to continue to fence us off, keep us off side of where the goodies are stored.

To make our lives better we need to work harder. Our lives cannot be better if we do not work harder. But such work must not exceed the good it delivers. Work that is harder than its worth is not worth the work. To ensure that this is not the case, we need to work at two levels: we need to work at the individual level and we need to work at the collective level. What we earn then could be divided into the individual salary and the collective salary or the social salary as it has become in the jargon of the writings on the new welfare state. This means that we must distinguish individual salary from the social salary. Decisions that affect the quality of our lives would then have to be taken weighing the needs of our individual salary with the imperatives of our social or communal salary. Things like the Udoji award would be put to individual salary, while totally ignoring the social salary which would have benefited much more if spent in that direction.

It should be clear now that what is meant by the social salary is the infrastructure, the roads, the railways, the airlines and airwaves, the energy and the power generations all resources that would improve the quality of the lives of all individuals of the society. If democracy means anything as clean as the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number it means creating infrastructure from which the greatest number of the people would benefit. Of course, it has always been much easier to pay the individual salary than to pay the social salary. It has always been more compelling to succumb to its demands than to respond to the needs of the collective. The argument for giving way to the payment of the individual salary is the notion that somewhere along the line the earnings of so many individuals will amount ultimately to the social or collective salary. First of all, like the luxury of dreaming which is only vouchsafed to those who sleep, individual salary is paid to those who have or find employment. Those who do not have employment cannot benefit from it. Which is not the same case as far as social salary is concerned. Everybody benefits from the collective infrastructure built.

In order to ensure that when attempts are made to enrich the lives of individuals, inflation and devaluation do not greet such efforts, it is necessary that more than adequate infrastructure should be in existence.

But the situation, as usual with Nigeria, does not pan out so simply. The choice is not between individual and social salaries. In between comes corruption which is usually basically individual rather than collective. There have been collective corruptions such as we see in apartheid and other forms of discrimination but these are always fought on a collective basis. Most corruption operates on individual basis and so go against the collective interest.

This means that the journey towards making the lives of Nigerians better must of necessity go through first a process of stopping corrupt individuals. This is a task that no-one seems able to fight to finish. The more it is fought, the more it re-appears in new and hardy forms. There was the story last week or so of how persons in banks cream off small sums of money from thousands of accounts without anyone being able to do anything about it! Against this background, should politicians such as Nzeribe play hooky with time that should be spent dealing with the problems of the community?