by Babatunde Ajileye

Every month, state governors along with the president and his cabinet gather. This gathering, the Federal Executive Council, is the highest and most important meeting of the executive arm of government in the country. Contractors fast and pray, and put their pastors, imams and babalawos on high spiritual alert for this period as the announcement of contract approvals which will make or mar their fortunes after this meeting.

But even more important to the government, this is the meeting where the revenue accrued to Nigeria is essentially shared. State governors walk away from this meeting with goody bags, which gives them the much needed funding to continue their empires within their states. Because that’s what they are in their states – emperors, with unhealthy cults of personality demanded from all within the state that want to enjoy of the largesse.

Every year, the top two tiers of the executive arm of government, the federal and state governments, go through a budget approval process. And one of the key recurring issues raised about these budgets is the high percentage share that recurrent expenditure enjoys from the budget, leaving what is considered insufficient for capital expenditure.

One of the key components of this high recurrent expenditure is the civil servant salaries of each of the state governments as well as the federal government. When we consider that the government is guaranteed a relatively stable source of revenue from oil sales on a monthly basis, it then should follow that budgeted expenditure like salaries should be a no brainer.

But trust Nigeria to turn every logic on its head. In spite of the fairly straightforward logic set out above, one of the most recurring complaints we hear of from the civil service is the fact that they are owed months and months of salaries. In every state, whether APC or PDP, and in the federal government, it is the norm for civil servants to be denied their pay. This is in spite of the fact that governors get their monthly allocations like clockwork and where there is as much as a dime missing from it, they cry to the highest heavens. But it is perfectly fine to owe your workers what they should live on from this allocation.

It amazes me that some governors even use as a campaign tool the fact that they have paid salaries promptly. It stinks to the high heavens that they expect people who have earned a wage to be grateful that they are paid their due. If the plight of the workers is bad, the pensioners are made to go through hell. Perhaps the worst part of this distasteful debacle is the fact that once elections draw near, governors find a way to clear up all the salary arrears they are owing their workers and then pay salaries like clockwork.

Some even go through the dramatics of borrowing money to meet up with these election period salary payments. But as soon as the electioneering is done, things go back to status quo and the owing cycle begins.

What this tells me is that it is possible to pay these salaries. But in our usual way in Nigeria, the workers are expected to have a “looting army” mentality of fending for themselves anyway they can since their salaries are not paid. Of course the workers find ingenious and devious ways to exploit the populace that they are supposed to serve and enrich themselves.

Sometime in 2011, I went to make a sales pitch at a state’s ministry of finance. The permanent secretary was a sweet looking middle aged woman. Before we started the presentation, we were subjected to an intense praise and worship cum prayer session. Then we when we were on the way out of town, my contact took me to a vast estate with almost endless rows of semi-detached duplexes. Then he told me that the estate was wholly owned by that permanent secretary. My jaw nearly dropped to the floor. The guy smiled and told me it was just one the about a dozen she had.

Another colleague left the private sector and got a job in an Abuja parastatal. She has been there for two years and she confidently tells me “I have never spent a dime out of my salary. That one that doesn’t come until months later?”

Yet, this young lady is living on a much, to borrow from Jenifa, faster lane than she was when she worked with us.

That is the story of our civil service. Workers paid unlivable wages, criminally late, and therefore left to plunder the populace and the commonwealth with devilish dexterity in order to fend for themselves, and overtaken by greed.

At the centre of this quagmire is the government. It should be criminal for any governor or president who gets his budgeted allocation monthly to owe even the lowliest worker salaries or retiree pensions. Whatever racket they are running with the salaries, whatever brigandage they are using the monies for monthly, we must shame them anytime it happens. Enough of this rubbish is truly enough.