Wage Rise and Collapsed Economy
By
Veteran journalists don't suffer fools gladly. Kola Animashaun is a true representation of that group that would call a spade what it is and not
a pick axe. Today, as he runs the Abeokuta North Local Government, he is not one to be restrained from telling the world the handicaps against performance,
inherited, of course, from unreasonable national policies.
One of such policies is the Federal Government's frequent toying with wage increase, which often leads to unpleasant controversies and an ever-rising inflation.
The other is the colossal debts councils owe to banks at atrocious interest rates. When I crossed Animashaun's path recently, he moaned his inability to execute
some projects in his area of jurisdiction because of lack of funds. What happens then to the monthly or quarterly allocations of funds to councils? Animashaun
would tell you that the wage bill is too big and the staff strength too high. Besides, there is a mountain of accumulated debts. Animashaun's problem is the
same with all local governments and state governments all over Nigeria, caused by an administration that had tried to be clever by half.
The minimum wage as at the time General Abdulsalami Abubakar succeeded General Sani Abacha was N1,500 a month. It really could hardly buy anything but workers
had trimmed their needs and the economy obeyed the type of discipline it forced on the people.
The private sector paid wages reasonably above the minimum wage although Ibrahim Babangida's Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) had disorganised Nigeria's
economy. Goods, especially foods, were very affordable at the time of Abacha.
Then came Ababakar who was trying to please the IMF by devaluing the naira from 80 to one dollar to 100 to a dollar. He fixed the minimum wage at N5,000 a
month, but soon ate his words and settled for a painful N3,500. That he also could not even pay.
Then came President Olusegun Obasanjo who raised the minimum wage to N7, 500 a month, all in the search for an excuse to hike the pump prices of petrol and
allied products as advised by the IMF. Inflation has risen astronomically ever since and workers no longer get their wages all over Nigeria as at when due. He
is heading for another pay rise. Is this sane in the presence of a decline in the economy? Is he not, to use the present famous cliche, "heating the polity" by
the proposed wage hike of 12 1/2 per cent?
Public service workers all over Nigeria, that means federal, state and local governments, amount to only 12 per cent of the workforce. The remaining 88 per cent
is in the private sector.
Even if we take his speculative assumption that the installed capacity utilisation of industries had risen to 55 per cent, which is far off the real percentage
of production, has he resurrected the dead factories that are in their thousands that litter the landscape of this country? Must not Obasanjo resist such
populist moves that give more problems and consequently negatively affecting his administration's performance?
According to informed sources at the National Council of State meetings during the minimum wage hike of 2000, a foresighted governor from his own state, Chief
Olusegun Osoba, objected, saying then that the focus should be on re-invigorating the industries and reviving agriculture.
His voice was drowned by those of some of the young governors from the Midwest, same of whom, now cannot pay salaries of public servants as at when due.
Perhaps, Osoba was reacting from his antecedents as someone who had managed big corporations and had been widely circulated in the business and industrial
sectors. The tragedy of Nigeria today is that there are many people in leadership positions who were by no way prepared for their present offices by their past.
Today, Ogun does not owe public servants accumulated wages because the governor knows his onions.
Those who boasted at that council meeting cannot pay salaries now as at when due. Who really are Nigeria's state governors with enviable past apart from a very
negligible few? All Nigerians should cry out against any wage rise for public servants next year. The national needs now should be on reviving industries that
are in slumber, developing agriculture and improving communication by road, rail and water. Industries need tax holidays. Lending rate must come down. Interest
rate must drop. We really do not need the peace of the graveyard to attract industries to Nigeria. All we need to do is to prove that we are a people capable of
helping ourselves.
South Korea has been at war since 1950, yet it is today an advanced economy. Indonesia is not an oasis of peace in South East Asia. Why all these glib talks
about peace and stability. We must take our destiny in our hands.
The problem of Nigeria is that many people seek political offices without any ideology or programme. They don't even know what the offices they fight for
demand. Any Awoist, like Osoba for example, already has a political thought because he has gone through the mill. He won't publicly call himself a
free-enterprise economist in a zone whose ideology is rooted in welfarism, in short, centre left.
So if Osoba insists on free education, free health service for the young, electrification of every town in Ogun and supply of potable water to all the areas, he
is merely implementing the four-cardinal programme of the former Action Group and the Unity Party of Nigeria. He may have his own vision on how to implement the
programme. Yet, he is not operating from a vacuum.
As for many in Nigeria who parade as governors today, they are not better than the military governors and administrators that they succeeded.
Even at that, the military were exemplary during their first coming. There is no civilian administration that has reached the standards set by the Yakubu
Gowon, Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo regimes. That was the Nigeria we knew in which promises were matched with actions.
Let us recall an incident after the civil war when Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the great leader, ran Nigeria's economy. The country was spending $2 million a day to
prosecute the war. Then after the cessation of hostilities, the military were asking for $1 million more. The old man emphatically rejected it, backed by that
Oxford scholar, Prince Abdul Attah, who was his permanent secretary. Although defence was under Gowon, there were other vested interests who felt slighted.
Alhaji Yusuf Gobir, the mercurial, dashing permanent secretary in defence challenged his finance colleague. To cut a long story short, Awo had his way because
he was an organised man, a hard worker. The nation benefited from it.
A typical Awo follower like Osoba today will tell you that he constructed 27 new water schemes and rehabilitated 18 old ones after paying off an inherited
N30.40 million NEPA bill; purchased water treatment chemicals and fuel and settled all electricity bills incurred for water schemes, all running to more than
half a billion naira. And he will insist that provision of health facilities starts with availability of potable water.
Osoba will beat his chest and ask you to challenge him if his claims are wrong that he has electrified 120 communities and has constructed roads to otherwise
inaccessible areas, even to President Obasanjo's Ibogun village.
Osoba will assert that free education is feasible because in Ogun State, pupils do not pay tuition fees in primary and secondary schools. So since 2000,
government even pays West African Examinations Council (WAEC) fees for pupils. These are besides awards of scholarships and bursaries to deserving indigenes of
Ogun state at polytechnics and universities in an age when the talk has been everybody unto himself and the devil has the hindmost.
This is the way we want political and office holders in Nigeria to function; not to grope in the void holding to straws.
When members of the National Assembly and their state counterparts were awarding stipends to themselves I was horrified at their consciencelessness. The grand
finale was their fixing the salary of a councillor at N100,000 a month and that of a chairman, twice that. Their action amounted to indiscriminate looting of
the till.
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) is not helping matters. It dabbles into extraneous areas instead of producing an economic revival programme for government. It
has even bought the woolly privatisation policy of government, nor minding that it has failed everywhere in the world because it created more poverty.
President Obasanjo should shelve any plan to raise wages because the economy will collapse.
April 2003