LAGOS, Federal Republic of Nigeria. ‘Unpaid Salaries Conundrum: Imperatives Of A Bailout Option’ By Sheriffdeen Tella. Employers in Nigeria, whether in the public or private sector, hold the belief that they are assisting employees by offering them jobs. This is a misconception of the highest order. The workers provide the required labour that moves files from one table to the other or put the machinery in motion to produce the output that will eventually bring about the profits that employers crave for. These inanimate things cannot on their own take action. And, because the employers cannot do it alone, they have to engage the assistance of workers. So, it is the employees that are assisting the employers achieve their objectives. Why not pay them as and when due to motivate them to do more?
Following Karl Marx, the so-called profits the entrepreneurs enjoy are derived from underpayment for efforts of labour. If labour were to be paid full entitlement for its efforts at producing a unit of output, the employer or entrepreneur would not boast huge profits with which they live in cozy environment totally different from the workers. Looking at the same issue from the point of view of John Maynard Keynes, payment to workers creates an effective demand which boosts production and improves employment situation. So, it is not just the workers that benefit when paid but the employers themselves and the nation.
From a religious point of view, failure to pay workers their salaries is an act of wickedness because it should be the first line of payment whenever current expenditure is to be implemented. The scriptures enjoin employers to pay employees before their sweat dries. It is important to note that workers who are not paid as and when due cannot give their best in production. Recently, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that labour productivity declined by 2.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2015. Part of the fall in productivity has to do with labour unrest relating to demand for wages.
The employees look for ways of preventing the shame attached to non-payment of their salaries and the employer is the worse for it. Some employees engage in stealing time or stealing property. In terms of time stealing, a worker engages in what is referred to as “moon lighting” whereby he establishes a private business, mainly commercial or business venture, as another source of income. Though a secondary avenue at the initial stage, it soon engages the full attention of the “worker” at the expense of the primary assignment. On property stealing, a clerk or even senior store officer for example, would take stationery into the office store in the morning and sell them out to some unscrupulous buyers in the afternoon such that before long, there will be requests for new sets of stationery. The same goes for other office materials and equipment, including drugs in hospitals. They call it survival strategy but who can blame them. In fact, the declining productivity of labour in Nigeria can be tied to this phenomenon as distressed workers, if they are not on strike, just go to offices to discuss survival strategies and some other primary job-unrelated activities.
Workers, male and female, who are owed salaries face ridicule at home and in the society. The workers cannot meet up with proper and timely feeding of their children, payment of house rents, school fees and/or utility bills and other sundry expenses. Otherwise responsible parents become irresponsible in the opinion of their children, their landlords and extended family members. Many weep secretly when they send their children out of school for non-payment of school fees or when they are unable to redeem debt owed food sellers or meet health needs.
In a time past, I and some colleagues have had to use our cars as “Kabu-kabu” to meet up with such payments and avoid embarrassment when we were subjected to such a trauma. Sometimes, we had to share the proceeds with those who had no such opportunity of owning a car. That was the time when lecturers started opening tutorial and business centres near campuses for preparing students for professional examinations or even for some nefarious activities. Eventually, such lecturers spent more time in their centres than campus offices and lecture rooms. Some other lecturers engaged in turning their lecture notes to handouts or books with assignments attached for sale to students. A kind of rip-off on students that still subsists on many campuses today.
It is possible to assume that state governors who are unable to pay workers do feel bad about the situation but that is not enough. It is important to ask whether such governors did not get paid during the same period. I suspect that many governors might have not gone through such experience and cannot therefore comprehend the distress workers go through. Unfortunately, this unjustifiable situation should not happen at this time when, in the last four or more years, the country made lots of money from over-priced crude oil earnings. As it were, the country realised more money than received in the preceding 10 years! Every level of government was engaging in both developmental and grandiose programmes that favoured personal aggrandisement. There seemed to be no thought to saving or even when there was precautionary saving under the Sovereign Wealth Fund, the pressure to share and spend by all was so great that the Federal Government had to succumb. What was supposed to be a bailout in a period of distress like this had been spent or embezzled!
As a worthy digression, it is imperative that we look at some significant sources of income that have been overshadowed by concentrating on income from crude oil exports. The focus on oil sector and in fact, using of the crude oil price as anchor for the annual budget, seem to shield interests in the contributions from the Nigerian Customs Service, the Federal Inland Revenue Service and other income-generating government agencies, aside from exports of non-oil agricultural products. Annual incomes from these sources could be more than the approved annual budgets for the government in many occasions. For example, the total revenue collected by the FIRS alone since 2010 has always surpassed the target. In this connection, the agency’s actual annual tax revenues for 2010, 2012 and 2014 were N2,839.3bn, 5,007.7bn and 4,414.6bn respectively against the targets of N2,557.3bn, N3,635.5bn and N4,070.0bn in the same period. In the first quarter of this year, the agency has collected about N2tn. This is just an agency out of many income generating ones! It is not unlikely that the state governments were shortchanged in the federal allocations which focused largely on oil revenues. There is the need to investigate, among other things, revenue documentation and appropriation over the last decade or more.
Be that as it may, the urgent and important assignment for the government at all levels for now is to solve the problem of rewarding public servants for the services rendered. The Federal Government has to provide bailouts to states. But for the fact that the All Progressives Congress won at the federal level, many of the APC states owing their workers would have lost to the Peoples Democratic Party. The electorate in these states thought it would be wise to align with the government at the centre so that financial assistance could come quickly to their states.
It is imperative for the President to direct the Federal Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank of Nigeria to work on bailout loans for all states in distress, from revenues just coming in and other sources. The repayable should be with administrative costs and through direct deductions from federal allocations, over a period of six to 12 months. On no account should repayment of the loan be waved to avoid future repetition. The states on the other hand should suspend payment of severance packages to immediate past political office holders and grandiose capital projects until all outstanding debts on salaries are settled. Any governor who subjects the labour force to ridicule or inhuman treatment through half-salaries or no salaries at all cannot claim success in any other area. This affront to labour should never be allowed to happen again. The need for an immediate action on this dastardly act is not just to save the unpaid workers avoidable trauma and embarrassment but to return workers’ productivity to a positive path and consequently, the Nigerian economy to desirable growth path.
Credit: Punch (Nigeria) / Sheriffdeen Tella
