Buhari may mean well by reducing his salary, but that is usually not where savings will be made
One thing that cannot be taken away from President Muhammadu Buhari is his passionate interest in checking corruption in the country. Another is his disgust for the high cost of governance which he is desirous of reducing drastically, given his countenance and his electoral promises. This should be expected from someone who rode to power on the crest of his anti-corruption credentials. Apparently, it was as part of his intention to send appropriate signals to public functionaries that the era when public funds are spent anyhow is over that he announced the reduction of his monthly salary from about N1.2million approved by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), by 50 per cent. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, apparently taking a cue from this, also announced a personal reduction of his salary too by the same 50 per cent.
This can only be symbolic. It does not seem to me that it is going to have any dent on savings for the government. Indeed, if you ask me, the remuneration is small. I do not understand what the country’s First Citizen is expected to do with that. And I am being serious. Anyway, perhaps it was in consideration of how many minimum wage earners’ salaries his salary will pay monthly that the president felt he had to reduce his. He might have meant well, but he should not take the matter that far.
I am an advocate of good pay for a good job. And as far as I am concerned, we are only deceiving ourselves with the kind of salaries we pay our civil servants, even at the very top. If many of them who had retired had lived on their miserable pay alone, they would not be in a position to buy the official quarters they gave them the option of first refusal when they were leaving the civil service. That is even if they never spent a dime of their salaries in their 35 or so years in service, and even if they had been receiving the salaries they received at the point of exit right from when they joined the civil service.
So, President Buhari should continue to earn his salary as stipulated by the RMAFC. I am not going to concern myself with whether it is legal for him to reduce his salary via a letter instead of collecting the full pay first and now returning the half he has pledged to reduce it by to the government. For me, there can only be legal issues if the president decides to increase his pay himself, or directs that other people’s pay must be increased or reduced simply because he has reduced his own.
One thing I know for sure is that the president needs money to enable him fulfil his campaign promises. And quite unfortunately, many of those who are asking him to do miracle even as he is yet to settle down are those who looted the country’s treasury, necessitating the decision to slash his pay himself, as a way of sacrificing for the country. Now that it is the very people who looted the treasury that are asking for democratic dividend from Buhari, with what do they expect him to do the magic? I guess the right place to begin is to make them cough up what they stole and not the self-denial by the president of a lawful and rational salary.
If therefore President Buhari is desirous of making money for government, he already has his job cut out for him. The appropriate place to begin is to insist that those who stole public funds, especially in the immediate past, should return same or face the music. What I am saying in essence is that, as for pursue, President Buhari must pursue the public officials who stole so much for Nigerians to notice. As for catching up, he must catch up with them. And as for retrieving the country’s money that they stole, he must retrieve the stolen funds. This is the position I canvassed on this same page a few weeks back. We would be surprised at how much the country would recover from the shameless looters. It is only those of them who repent and return a substantial part of what they stole that we can be talking about forgiveness or plea bargain for.
But to be running from pillar to post, as former President Goodluck Jonathan was reported to have done last week due to his phobia for probe will not yield any result. President Jonathan cannot feign ignorance that his government was damn corrupt; all of us said that even when he was in power. But since he chose to see the massive looting as mere ‘stealing’, he should not start blaming anyone now that a king that does not think there is wisdom in distinguishing between stealing and corruption is in power.
Moreover, President Buhari should prune the number of aircraft in the presidential fleet. We do not need 10 or 11 aircraft, gulping more than N10bn annually. It is a luxury we should not have any business with in the first place but for the profligacy of the immediate past. Also, Nigerians must be ready to resist the attempt to make law making a big deal that should deserve all manner of outrageous pay and comfort. People did this same job in the first and second republics and, in spite of the financial recklessness of the Alhaji Shehu Shagari era, there was still some sanity on the question of remuneration for the country’s law makers then. In spite of the over-pampering that our present law makers enjoy, they have not performed better than those of the past. The only thing they have excelled in is the outrageous wealth that they keep making and annoyingly display at the expense of the average Nigerian. Their pay and allowances must be revisited.
Furthermore, President Buhari should study the expenses at Aso Villa; there are too many areas where he could curb wastage there. We have had cause to shout in the past when we saw some of the budgets made in the villa for all manner of items; say on entertainment and feeding, generator sets, presidential pets and all. The president should continue to send the right signals about his seriousness to fight corruption.
This is not to say that President Buhari has not been sending some signal already. He had, only on July 8, for instance, rejected five new armoured Mercedes Benz S-600 (V222) valued at N400million cars for his use. The Permanent Secretary, State House, Mr. Nebolisa Emodi, who told President Buhari of the plan to buy the cars was not doing anything wrong or new; that had been the tradition – new president; new cars! But do we have to waste money changing such vehicles that have the best of attention and care simply because the users have changed? That is part of the ways money is wasted at the seat of power.
The president would do well to peg the number of special advisers at the 15 that he had sought the approval of the National Assembly to hire, as against the 23 hired by his predecessor. He should also have a look at the Orosanye committee report on the need to prune the present number of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) from the present 541. Of course the president may slightly increase or reduce the number further in view of the country’s present economic challenges and even the need to remove duplication of functions by some of these MDAs. He does not have to punish himself for the sins of his prodigal predecessors.
