A nation roiling under a carapace of blighted security and economy should not lose a day of stemming these near-existential crises and a slew of others. Yet in the case of Nigeria, not only a day, but days or even weeks or months are lost. These losses are baleful fallouts of labour crises by university teachers, medical doctors and core civil servants. Such turbulent periods in our national life are engendered by a quest for higher remuneration and improved working conditions.
The incidence of these strikes seems to present them as an intractable feature of governance in Nigeria. University teachers go on strike resulting in students losing semesters and even sessions, and a four-year course turning into a six-year course. Medical doctors go on strike while their patients suffer and wait for death. But these strikes are not inevitable. Rather, they remain a stark reminder of the failure of governance that those who desire to leave a legacy of great leadership should free themselves from their stranglehold.
The overarching need for an unbroken trajectory of industrial harmony for development demands that the government activates a mechanism that can adequately respond to labour crises with the potential of mutating into strikes.
This ultimately is a challenge that President Bola Tinubu should tackle headlong as the labour crisis over the minimum wage still smoulders. If other leaders have failed to exorcise the strike incubus, President Tinubu should see the need to discharge his leadership responsibility creditably in this regard. It redounds to his leadership acumen that apart from the current labour crisis, his tenure has not been bogged down by strikes. But this would not be automatic.
He needs to assign to competent people those who have the capacity to anticipate strikes and nip them in the bud. The government should not wait until there is a strike before running around to call labour leaders to the negotiation table. When this is the case, the government is only portrayed as lacking proactiveness and an industrial truce is only seen as victory for labour against an uncaring political class. Worse still, such industrial peace is attained after the economy has haemorrhaged in billions and decimation has been the lot of many lives.
Yes, the African landscape is besmeared with despotic governments that impinge on the rights of their citizens . Yes, such governments are not bothered by the immiseration of the citizens through miserable wages or the outright consignment of workers to a life of not being paid their due wages. Yet a government succeeds to the extent that it guarantees the well-being of its citizens. If the government workers are paid poorly and they cannot feed themselves and their families and cater to other necessities of life, that government has not succeeded. And there is the corollary that poorly paid workers would not only be denied the motivation to do an effective work, they might even deliberately sabotage the government.
Thus, an agitation for a minimum wage cannot easily be dismissed as a sabotage spawned by enemies of government surreptitiously chaperoned by implacable losers of elections. Nor can the often-bandied quibble that workers who are not happy with their working conditions should resign because there are many in the queue waiting to replace them negate the imperative of employees asking for a better wage.
However, there is the need to stress that what should be due to workers is not just a minimum wage that connotes an automatic entitlement but it demands the qualification of being fair to both parties. It is fair if it imposes on the employees the responsibility of meeting the government’s productivity expectations. The government should be confident to ask workers to justify their improved working conditions. In that case, the government should not just expect workers on their own to justify their fair wage. There should be a mechanism for ensuring that the right measure of productivity is derived from workers.
A poor remuneration system in the public service has given room to a situation where the work is done by only a few people while others just receive salaries. If others are idle because there is no work for them to do, then there is the need to trim the workforce. This would leave no room for a situation that the federal head of service alerted the nation to whereby government employees are working and earning salaries abroad while they are receiving their salaries back at home.
It is therefore right that President Tinubu has resolved to make such workers return to the state coffers what they have received as salaries and that their supervisors who apparently collude with them would be sanctioned. With the way President Tinubu spoke on the occasion, when he acknowledged the importance of the civil service to the success of a government, it is clear that he has gone ahead of any Talleyrand.
Remember Talleyrand whose full name was Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord? He was a French politician and diplomat, a close ally of Bonaparte Napoleon, who later betrayed him by clandestinely plotting against him with his enemies and when the emperor fell, he quickly joined the next government as a minister. A Talleyrand might have advised the president to appropriate the smugness of a Marie-Antoinette and tell the agitating workers to go and eat cake if their minimum wage cannot buy bread, not minding the apocalyptic consequences of such an antagonistic position.
But beyond this, there is the need to put in place a mechanism for checking a recurrence of this trend that has obviously lasted for so long in government. Besides, it is not unlikely that in the absence of a fair wage for their workers, the supervisors look away when the wrong thing is being done.
A minimum wage is not fair to the government if employees cannot give optimised productivity. It becomes crucial to consider how they were recruited. If workers without the requisite competencies and motivation are recruited through a process that is not undergirded by transparency, they cannot do much no matter how much they are paid. Enter a seasoned bureaucrat and reform czar, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, with an unexampled quest to ensure transparency in the employment of civil servants.
Beyond expressing mere intentions, as the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service, Prof. Olaopa has begun a process of advertising vacancies so that existing opportunities in the civil service can be open to all eligible Nigerians. There would be a rigorous process of recruitment that would throw up the best. Such successful candidates would value their jobs and their resolve to keep their jobs would be expressed through high productivity. Employment in the civil service should no longer be locked in a byzantine secrecy where only those with fraudulent connections secure jobs through the back door.
A fair minimum wage would not have been achieved if there appears to be a disconnect between government and the citizens. The workers and the rest of the citizens should not see the political class luxuriating in opulence, and hear of billions being stolen while they are hungry. The government should ensure there is fiscal discipline. The anti-corruption agencies should be strengthened to effectively prosecute their mandates. In a situation where public employees are found guilty of stealing, sometimes even billions of naira, they should not go unpunished.
Such fiscal impunity, especially when it goes unsanctioned, gives the impression that there is so much money in government and workers feel entitled to their own share by calling for wages beyond government’s ability.
The appropriate emphasis should be placed on the necessity of communicating the workings of government to the citizens. The citizens would not prise from government and its officials their good intentions. The citizens may not be aware of the altruism that underpins the position of government in a matter or project if this is not persistently communicated to them. If a government embarks on a seemingly gargantuan project in the midst of the citizens’ penury, it should communicate its potentially all-encompassing benefit to the citizens. In the long run, what matters is not whether the government has agreed to pay N250,000 or N1 million as a minimum wage. The public workers and the rest of the citizens need to be persuasively communicated to that the government exists to ensure their well-being. They need to be communicated to not only to stem misgivings about government’s intentions but to convincingly persuade them of the possibility of the plenitude that awaits them at the end of the tumultuous journey of national recovery.
Paul Onomuakpokpo, PhD, ex-Acting Editor of The Guardian and ex-Group Managing Editor/OPED Editor of The Daily Times, is the Special Assistant on Communication to the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission.
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