Is Abuja and its partner-states government alive to their responsibilities and are very proactive in their approach to governance? In the words of Stephen Gill, the government should solve problems for people, not participate in ‘life events’ (medium.com). “It’s definitely important for government services to be designed and run with a sense of how they fit into the lives of the people using them”, he submits. How has Nigeria, and the few thousands in government been running the public service? Are government officials and the public service employees running Nigeria in a manner that fits the lives of over 200 million people? What quality of leadership and governance are Nigerians getting for the taxes they pay and for the use of their amassed resources to render public services?
Nigerians seem to be in serious trouble. They have become prisoners, incarcerated by their governments and government employees.
Their main concern is about what percentage of the people’s money should each of them take. They are less bothered about the real owners of the resources who are their real employers to perform duties and tasks on behalf of the over 200 million people. A look at the percentage of these public servants (are they really public servants?), they are not up to ten per cent of the entire population. But the entire resource is in their custody to argue among themselves and bargain the sharing among themselves. Who will deliver Nigerians from the grip of their servants in offices?
Aeon J. Skoble, a professor of Philosophy at Bridgewater State University, in his research on issues that include theories of rights, the nature and justification of authority, classical theories of happiness, and theories of legal interpretation (Liability, Accountability, And Government Employees – libertarianism.org), declares that government employees are insulated from having to take any responsibility for even very serious wrongdoing. It is because of latitudes of this such that Nigerian employees give no qualms about fatal destructions they cause as they press for their own share of the people’s resources. Come to think of it: how commensurate is the level of productivity of these government employees to the money they earn every thirty days?
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For pay negotiation to go on for close to a year with no headway, when it is clear to both parties, is a sign of lack of seriousness and a very poor governance style. Why would the government talk about paying living wages and yet dilly-dallied for months without making a definite pronouncement about what it has capacity to pay? And why would a labour be demanding for an equivalent of another economy’s exchange rate as if Nigeria has become a satellite of the dollar economy without facing the reality of how comatose its own economy has become? Yet, it is the combination of the government’s ineptitude and the labour’s attitude to productivity that ran the country aground in the first place.
It is like Nigerians are totally helpless as it is exceedingly impossible that wrongdoers in governance are removed from their positions, and rarer still for them to be sent to prison. The hijackers of the government had made it certain that they cannot be checked by what they wrote in the constitution and other Acts of parliament. The people can only grumble and wait for a time to change a government. But how possible are they able to wield their election powers when there is already a state capture by the politicians? Local government election outcomes are pointers to how helpless Nigerians have become in their hands of politicians.
Demands that is selfish – without taking into account what happens to your real employers’ means of livelihood or their state of being able to pay. When you destroy businesses by shutting down power and other essential services, shut down hospitals and not caring how many will die because you want your own pay, this is beyond mere pay increase demands but deliberately destroying and killing just for you to have your way. Demands for higher pay for sure will cause demand-pull inflation. Prices of goods and services will go skyrocketing. The organised labour ought to have come to terms with the fact that higher pay is not the solution to their financial challenges; but that their real grouse should be able to get real value for what they earn. Solving the problem of what money commands is not to incessantly ask for higher pay.
Shouldn’t there be an exemption to how far labour, in their agitations, can go in using strike actions, picketing or shut downs? When you destroy businesses and many lives are lost, this is more than a dastardly act. It is callous, and Nigerians need to rise up to demand a change to this government-labour chess-game that has turned Nigerians to plaything in their hands. How do you have a government and their employees that turn to become absolute liabilities to a people and you expect such an economy to thrive? Labour has the penchant to push that when they earn their pay, they bring disposable income to the market. The question is what’s the percentage of the spendings coming from federal government employees or from the entire Organised Labour compared to what MSMEs and other artisans bring to the market? Who fights for the MSMEs to get reparations for the losses and damages they suffer when the public sector goes about their industrial unrests?
Has governance failed in Nigeria and are we saddled with a failed government or is Nigeria already a failed state? Wikipeadia explains this in a simple manner. “Government failure, in the context of public economics, is an economic inefficiency caused by a government intervention. As with a market failure, government failure is not a failure to bring a particular or favoured solution into existence but is rather a problem that prevents an efficient outcome. Government failure does not occur when government action creates winners and losers, making some people better off and others worse off than they would be without governmental regulation. It occurs only when governmental action creates an inefficient outcome, where efficiency would otherwise exist”. Already, government policies are causing monumental damages to the psyche of the people. The policies are causing huge cost-push inflation while the CBN’s number one tool of jerking up interest rates isn’t helping the matter. A bottle of Soda that was N100 is now N400. The liberalised and unified foreign exchange market has taken the exchange rate to average N1,500 to a dollar from N400 per dollar a year ago. A bag of rice has moved from N35,000 to N85,000 while the main driver of the market, fuel price per litre has moved to N700 per litre from N190 per litre. The twin brother of the economy’s driver, power supply is practically nonexistent.
Government officials’ display of flamboyance and uncouth spending pattern in a comatose economy is a wrong signal to the people. I wonder if government officials, the public office holders, ever reason about what these optics are doing to the psyche of Nigerians. Can they convince their public office employees and other Nigerians that truly the economy is out for the count going by the amount of money the politicians allocate to themselves as emoluments? Can you build patriotism by mere singing of the national anthem or reciting or pledging some words to the country or by giving values and making lives worth living for the people? We shall come to this in a few days’ time.
. Ola Emmanuel is a business planning consultant
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