With the pesisting inability of many states to pay their workers’ salaries even after the bail out fund from the Federal Government, President Muhammadu Buhari has rightly expressed concern over the plight of civil servants. Coming shortly after the bail out fund was supposed to have enabled the governors clear arrears of salaries, it portends an inevitable collapse of the federating units. Local government employees are faring much worse. Most of them are being owed up to seven month’s salaries or more.
In expressing concern over the situation, however, Buhari missed the big picture. The emphasis on the welfare of workers unwittingly gives the impression that if the governors are able to keep paying the salaries of civil servants who constitute less than one percent of the population, then all is well. Even in times of extreme emergencies, including war and civil strife, governance is not about running the machinery of government. It is about providing relief, services and succour for the greater majority of the people. The failure of states to pay salaries should not make the welfare of workers the major issue on the front burner. The real danger here is that the people may have lost the government which has become distant and esoteric. With that, the connection between the two will only be seasonal – during the elections when politicians, the face of government, will come asking for votes.
Beyond that is a more troubling scenario – the cementing of the paternalistic relationship between states and Abuja. By dishing out what it called bail out fund, a new level of subservience to Abuja has been created. And for good measure, the Independent Corrupt Practices and related offence Commission (ICPC) undertook an examination of the way and manner the bail out was disbursed. The findings surprised no one. It was damning of the states. So when he summoned the Nigerian Governors’ Forum to meet in Aso Rock last Thursday, President Buhari could afford to wear the garb of concerned benefactor. Every governor is now expected to prove to the president that he is managing his resources judiciously so that Big Daddy will be disposed to being nic.
My concern is that Buhari may not see the opportunity in the situation all the states are presently mirred in. In the lead to the presidential election, Buhari’s minders cleverly shielded him from scrutiny and interaction with the press and critical Nigerians. He never declared his stance on the state of the federation and there was no forum to ask him his perception of what a future federation should be. But Buhari is not a stranger to such issues. Given his military background, he loves the command and control structure of the federation where Abuja not only disburses goodwill as it deems appropriate but determines the pace and trajectory of growth of the entire country. It is a mentality that inspired the promoters of the National Grazing Route and Reserve Commission Bill to think that somebody will sit in Abuja and seize lands anywhere for the excusive use of Fulani herdsmen and their cattle.
That is the trajedy of the options available for Nigeria at a time the moment would have been seized to chart a fresh course. Contrary to the trending line in Abuja that states need bail out and, perhaps, more bail out, they alongside local government councils are rapidly becoming irrelevant to the people. Before it got to the point where salaries could no longer be paid, any thought of providing services and amenities to the people had long been forgotten.
The domestic debt profile of states which the Debt Management Office (DMO) put at N1.7 trillion makes future outlook very grim. Most of the governors inherited huge debts that accumulated from repeated borrowings. With their federal allocations grossly whittled down by the irrevocable instruments for the payment of the loans through direct deductions from statutory allocations, the governors equally resorted to fresh borrowings. What has emerged is a cycle of mortgaging of the future and finances of the states.
Rather than play the Big Daddy to the governors, it is time for President Buhari to eke his name in immortality by instituting the process of reforming the federation. As the federating units, states ought not to be subservient to Abuja. The path to development is not cast in operating a command and control political and administrative structure. The failure of the former Soviet Union remains ever green.
In the wake of the suspension of dedcution of states’ from their statutory allocations, some people saw it as spoon feeding the states and making them lazy. But that line of thought presupposes that one party is productive. Is the Federal Government productive and the states lazy? Only the defective structure has wrongly conferred on Abuja the status of a godfather. It is just as guilty. The oil producing states cannot be classed as unproductive, a stance that is not invalidated by that fact that oil is a natural and merely exploited. Between them and the Federal Government, Abuja is the lazy asset and land grabber.
Buhari may not believe in the concept of true federalism, he may not subscribe to the idea that competition among states will engender genuine growth, he may think that states beside the oil producing states may no longer thrive which is untrue, he may think the present structure favours the north, its been this way since the civil war and the north is still lagging behind on most indices of development, but he cannot deny that the present system is not working, has never really worked and there is no future in it. Now is the time to put aside mundane and primordial sentiments that have continuously held the country down. It is time to be a statesman think Nigeria on the long term.
Pius Mordi
