Certainly,
this is a trying moment for Ndi Ebonyi especially the workers. Indeed, there
could not have been another way to share in the predicament of the new and
young administration in the state under the leadership of Governor Dave Umahi
over the raging controversies surrounding the non payment of workers’ salaries.
The
current challenge bedeviling Ebonyi workers are not hopeless in the sense that
the duty of every government is to protect the interest of the masses at all
times and that includes payment of workers’ salaries as and when due. Governor
Dave Umahi could not have done any less.
This,
every good government must do and doing it is not a matter of choice or extra
goodwill as every worker deserves his wage. The governor of Ebonyi State, Chief
Dave Umahi owes the people of Ebonyi state allegiance of upholding the truth
and preserving and protecting their common heritage which by virtue of his
office were entrusted on his shoulders.
These
responsibilities he must bear, even as painful as it could be, the reversal
would mean reneging on the promises he made during his electioneering campaign
upon which the people of the state voted for him.
For
some time now, tempers have risen with many people accusing the administration
of Governor Umahi of being insensitive to the plight of the workers which they
believed led to the non payment of their salaries for two months now. Though
the state government swiftly dispelled the rumours making the round, it has not
fully settled the troubled waters in the state.
To
start with, the governor came up with a statement that there are so many rots
in the system which over the years had led to various wastages and leakages in
the state resources as regards to paying ghost workers. To achieve and record
sanity in the state, the state government introduced a biometric data capturing
exercise to firstly ascertain the actual number of Ebonyi true workers who are
still serving and were duly employed by the state government.
The
fear that greeted the state upon Umahi’s statement was expected. Few hours
after the declaration, the rumour mills went into the town, telling the people
that the state government planned to sack some workers in order to have a very
sizable workforce that could be easily paid.
Senator
Emmanuel Onwe, the State Commissioner for Information in his reaction dispelled
the rumour and said that there was no plan for the sack of some workers in the
state and described the rumour as laughable.
Yes,
one would have laughed over such rumour if the administration of Governor Dave
Umahi even contemplated downsizing Ebonyi workforce on the ground that there
were too many workers to be paid and many mouths fed from the megre and
dwindling federal allocation especially being the major beneficiary of workers’
benevolence.
However,
unfortunately Ebonyi is among the 18 states in Nigeria that are currently
struggling to meet the salary needs of their workers. Apart from the fact that
Ebonyi is one of the states that are facing these controversies, Governor Umahi
has not said he will not pay the salaries on the ground that there is no money
to pay but insisted on the completion of the exercise.
Even
at that, Ebonyians should also bear in mind that, at the inception of this
administration, Governor Umahi had cemented his marriage with the workers with
his bumper promise of not only going to consolidate on the minimum wage as
introduced by his predecessor, Chief Martin Elechi but also to improve on it
and make life more meaningful.
The
inauguration of Governor Umahi signaled a break from the past characterized by
gross inefficiency, unfulfilled promises, culture of blackmail, failure of
state and circumspect sincerity and era of political impunity and ghost workers
syndrome as he brought on board catalytic ideas that quickly got the state
working and caught the adversaries napping.
Despite
the complexity and the technical nature of many of the problems confronting the
state, the governor rose above the clouds by taking competent decisions that
effectively rescued it from the grip of malodorous ghost worker friendly state
and becoming another Afghanistan in Nigeria parlance.
Notably,
he is growing the state’s Internally Generated Revenues (IGR) from less than
N100million per month to about N300 million per month without any increase in
tax payable by citizens. Tuition Fees in all the state-owned tertiary
institutions are being considered to be slashed by close to 30% as well as
training and empowerment of over 5,000 youths in Information Technology
underway.
Sad
that Ebonyi state had become a fertile soil for politicians who perfectly
understand the manipulative ordinariness and the beggarly peculiarities of the
ordinary Ebonyian. So, while the manipulators perfect their acts with
ridiculous obtuseness of inducing the workers to hit the streets on strike, the
manipulated workers would become captivatingly consigned to licking the wounds
inflicted on them, partly, by acts synonymous with their arrogance or
ignorance; and, to a greater extent, as a result of a cabal’s sheer disregard
for posterity.
One
would have advised that though, the pains of living without salary could be
very excruciating, all hope are not lost especially with the velocity at which
the biometric data capturing exercise is accelerating and the plausible success
it has recorded since its inception that Ebonyi workers should accept the
development in the spirit of the Igbo adage that says that hunger with hope in
sight does not kill a man.
As
painful as it could be without a salary while still working, the state
government though with a plausible idea should have looked at the nity gritty
of the challenges facing Ndi Ebonyi before embarking on the biometric exercise
especially bearing in mind that the state government has an only child which is
Ebonyi worker and allowing an only child wallow in want would amount to self
infliction of political and moral infirmity.
Ndi
Ebonyi at all levels must start now to brace up the challenges that is
criss-crossing the globe of which hunger and want top the chart to fight to
diversify various means of surviving and trying to catch up in the global world
of personal independence especially in an environment where total dependence on
the government is fast weighing the system down.
As
cogent as the excuse of Governor Umahi led administration for not paying
workers salaries maybe, there must be an avalanche of people with inner minds
to actually know that the challenge of not being able to pay and be paid is not
peculiar to Ebonyi state alone.
Other
states across the country have been at the verge of cataclysmic vortex of
political doom as a result of the inability of their state governments to pay
salaries with Osun and other states in the West and Northern parts of the
country leading the pack. One thing is certain that no mater how long Dave
Umahi keeps in offsetting the workers’ salaries, there must be a way out to
identify these areas where the government is running shortage of funds to do
small needful duties of which workers’ salaries form the nucleus.
At
a time in the life of the past administration, Ebonyi was rated as among the
poorest states in Nigeria, with 42.9 per cent poverty rate. About the same time,
it emerged as one of the states with the lowest unemployment rate (12.4%).
Again, while Ebonyi State is almost 100 percent civil service state with little
or no industries to absorb the teeming unemployed, the government not only
became the only employer but financier at the same time.
Ebonyi
is also said to be one of the highest paying out of the 36 states. In fact, it
is next to Lagos! This is in spite of it being amongst the least allocated
states in Nigeria, with just about 14% of what the oil-rich Akwa Ibom State
gets from the Federation Account. For instance, if the monthly salaries of
Ebonyi worker is over 35,000.00 staff strength, it hovers around N3.6bn; and
the state government has for over a period of time since Governor Umahi
inherited the empty treasury been battling to keep afloat with less that N2.5b
monthly allocation occasioned by the dwindling economy.
Without
being immodest, close watchers of events will attest to it that our sad and
unproductive past has probably made it practically difficult for Ebonyians to
come to terms with why leaders are chosen as well as what the shape and size of
electorate’s expectations from their elected representatives should look like.
For
instance, ask Governor Umahi’s enemies why former Governor Martin Elechi was
always taking billions of naira loans by running to borrow money from the
capital market to supplement workers’ salaries. Again, ask them if anybody
would have brought any magic, had he been allowed to ‘capture’ the state during
the last governorship election.
For
a fact, the crisis on hand is an attestation to the extent to which the
immediate past administration has bastardized the resources of this fractured
polity. Do we need to repeat that the salary challenge most states are facing
today arose as a result of dwindling allocations from the Federation Account,
oil theft as well as the declaration of ‘Casus Fortuitus’ is one of the
country’s major terminals?
Also,
while the excuse that some states are suffering as a result of their inability
to develop new ways of generating funds internally is neither here nor there,
it must be emphatically stated that the goose and the gander in this
unfortunate challenge are in the same troubled ship and that it was the failure
of the past administration to provide an enabling environment for the state to
look inwards and point a direction to self sustainability with the
revitalization of the defunct Nkalagu Nigercem cement industry and
industrialize the state that has brought the state to her knees.
This
again brings to the fore the issue of Ebonyi State’s indebtedness to the banks.
Going by external debt figures from the Debt Management Office (DMO), Ebonyi
and Lagos States top the chart of 10 most indebted states in Nigeria with
$1.17bn or N233.94bn. Ebonyi is about N14.81bn. Essentially, therefore, if the
estimated total debt of 36 states and Abuja, including unpaid salaries,
currently stands at N658 billion, that is, about $3.3bn; and Lagos takes the
largest chunk (N401.44bn) of it, then, Ebonyi State owes about N480bn as is
being bandied around by some all-simply-sand adversaries, certainly, doesn’t
add up.
In
the same vein, if the capacity to borrow of each economy is a function of its
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as witnessed in the past administration, Ebonyi
State’s GDP currently stands at N1.17trillion, rational minds cannot but admit
that something is wrong somewhere and that exactly is what the current Governor
Dave Umahi is nosing around to fix before the state is further embroiled in
further debt that could lead to mortgage of our generations yet unborn.
Finally,
I share in the pains of the Ebonyi workers who have been working in an empty
stomach for a period of about two months now. I also know that no sensitive
government would be happy to see the teeming workers grudgingly work just as a
way of muscling them out. There must be a way out of the doldrums Ebonyi state
government has pushed her workers into.
There
should be a consensus reached between Ebonyi state government and labour
leaders to actually take a stand by the labour leaders to vouch and take
responsibility of an eventual ghost worker identified in the system and when
that is done, the state should pay the salaries while it goes ahead with her
revalidation and biometric exercise so as not to throw away the child with the
bad water and also not to show unjust treatment to genuine Ebonyi works on the
ground that “the fathers have eaten sour grapes and their children teeth are
being set on edge. Ends
No comments:
Post a Comment