Emeka OMEIHE
Kaduna State government and the state chapter of the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC are at daggers drawn. The bone of contention is the decision of Governor Nasir El-Rufai to cut 25 per cent of the salaries of senior civil servants in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The state government said it would deduct that percentage from the salaries of all civil servants receiving N67, 000 and above to provide palliatives to vulnerable citizens affected by the ravaging viral disease.
But the state NLC is vehemently opposed to the proposal on the ground that it was not consulted before such a decision with far-reaching consequences on the overall well-being of the civil servants was taken.
Matters were not helped given that even before the decision was made public, the state government had gone ahead to effect the deductions from the April salaries of its civil servants.
This did not go down well with the NLC which has asked the government to return the deductions or face the wrath of the union.
Citing international labour conventions on such matters, the union said though it is in principle not against the deduction of workers’ salaries for the purpose intended but their consent ought to be sought before such deductions are made. Even then, the deductions should be voluntary, it further contended.
The state chapter of the NLC is on point. They are not necessarily against salary deductions to ameliorate the sufferings of victims of COVID-19.
That much, they have said. But what they did not find funny is the very arbitrary manner the government went about the matter.
Issues bordering on the salaries and allowances of workers are generally very touchy and sensitive.
At a time workers are contending with excruciating living conditions and general increase in the prices of essential commodities occasioned by the same COVID-19 pandemic, the mere thought of salary cut, is bound to ruffle feathers in no small way.
Being a sensitive matter, the least expected of that government was to have approached the matter with great caution. That did not happen as events have shown.
The fact that the government hatched such an idea (no matter how well-intentioned) and proceeded to implement it without taking organized labour into confidence, exposes all that is wrong with the policy process on these shores .
Being a unilateral action, the NLC is within its rights to mount opposition against it. Had the government taken labour into confidence, perhaps the right percentage cut and the modalities for its implementation would have been amicably ironed out without recourse to muzzle flexing.
We are led into this conclusion given the disclosure by the NLC that it is not in principle against the pay cut to take care of vulnerable persons affected by the ravaging viral disease.
What they are against is the arbitrariness of the action. Why the Kaduna State government never deemed it necessary to factor in the feelings of organized labour in such a sensitive matter remains largely curious.
The cloudy labour atmosphere hovering over the state appears the price the government is now paying for that act of indiscretion.
And the cost could be very high if the government does not take steps to redress the situation. Given the challenges of our times, Kaduna State can ill-afford labour crisis now.
The government should hesitate no further in carrying the NLC along in whatever decisions that affect workers’ salaries.
But that is not all there is to this opposition. Underneath the opposition by the NLC is the nagging issue of mistrust.
The way governments are run on these shores has greatly eroded public confidence in the capacity of those in leadership to effectively husband public funds for public good.
Rather, we have had to contend with a leadership style that is steep in scandalous corruption, greed, reckless and ostentatious spending.
Ours is system in which ascendancy to elective and appointive political offices is the quickest and fastest route to opulence.
Little wonder the scandalous lifestyles of this category of people that contrast sharply with the existential realties of the majority of our people as hewers of wood and fetchers of water.
Corruption in public places is the reason this country has been lagging behind in all the development indicators. It is little surprising that Nigeria is now tagged the poverty capital of the world.
Ironically, our country is bountifully endowed with huge natural and human capital that should have been creatively deployed by visionary leaders to catalyze quantum development.
But such high-minded goals have largely remained illusory in a clime suffused with rapacious, selfish and amateur leadership that panders more to prebendal predilections.
That has been the source of the mistrust between the citizenry and their leaders. It is such negative sentiments that are easily evoked each time the government wants the citizens to commit to some modicum of sacrifice.
That was the sentiment at play when the Kaduna State government made public the decision to cut the salaries of workers by a whopping 25 per cent.
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Though, the NLC did not openly canvass the issue, it is common knowledge that organized labour is generally opposed to cuts in workers’ salaries because it fears such proceeds will not be properly accounted for and may end up in private pockets.
This feeling also resonated when accountability issues were raised on donations from corporate and private individuals to aid the federal government fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
The argument that is usually put forward when workers are called upon to forgo part of their pay is two-fold.
The first is that Nigerian workers are among the least paid in the world and generally reputed for their serial inability to make ends meet.
With spiraling unemployment and rising inflation, the average worker lives below the poverty line. Any cut in his salary will further push him down the poverty ladder.
Organized labour generally views such cuts as a further way of sentencing the workforce into perpetual servitude.
The other dimension which was mentioned in passing is that many of those who occupy elective and appointive political offices in this country are not trusted by their workers.
The feeling is that our leaders will generally divert public funds into their private pockets. And facts have overtime borne out this suspicion.
So resistance is evoked each time a government toys with pay cut as a way out of its financial problems.
The general feeling is that if governments judiciously deploy public funds and avoid wasteful spending, they may not have cause to tamper with workers’ salaries.
This view is further reinforced given that the salaries of workers pales into insignificance when compared with the huge national resources that are usually frittered away to service non-productive endeavors by political leaders.
The leadership must work hard to disabuse the minds of the citizenry that public good rather than self serving interests are behind their actions.
How to achieve that remains the greatest puzzle even as efforts to fight corruption by the current federal regime have been mired in putrid controversy on account of its observed shortcomings.
More seriously, the Kaduna State government should be more creative in raising funds for the COVID-19 pandemic than easy resort to cuts in the salaries of its workforce.
It is getting clearer by the day that workers face harder times as efforts are geared to ease the lockdown. Some of the measures that will come in place as the lockdown is gradually relaxed will definitely take a toll on worker salaries.
The transport system readily comes into mind as governments roll out measures to enforce social or physical distancing in the public transportation system.
That will mean a reduction in the number of passengers in commercial vehicles. This will obviously come with increase in transport fares.
Great caution must be exercised not to reduce workers as pawns in the chessboard of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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