Tag: state governments

STATE governments owing backlog of salaries are not the only ones ignoring the lessons and perils of the current economic crisis. Everyone, including the progressively conservative Muhammadu Buhari presidency, is holding on stubbornly to the unworkable structures and habits of the past. The economy is not what it used to be, and will not be for many generations to come except revolutionary disruptions to the world economic system occur. The Nigerian political substructure has bred and fed the ogre of oppression, confusion and stagnation, yet governments and politicians have carried on blithely, gorging on the benefits of the past few decades and capitalising on the lassitude of incompetent officials. Until political iconoclasts, who are by the way few and far between, meet the great and grand demands of the times, retrogression and mediocrity will be the order of the day.

Last week, the Oyo State governor, Abiola Ajimobi, resigned himself to hopelessness over the state’s salary crisis. There was no way he could pay the N5.2bn wage bill from a N2.2bn income from the federation account, he groaned. Mathematically, he is right, for even if the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) were shot up to N3bn, it would still be impossible to pay. The state owes its workers about seven months salaries. The governor did not say it, but he implied that for decades, the country’s lack of fiscal federalism and the abysmal and suffocating unitarist structure gifted the nation by backward-looking military dictatorships had wreaked unquantifiable havoc on the country’s sense of innovation and experimentation. He did not also say it, but he implied that even he had become unimaginative and unsuited for the complex demands of the moment.

Mr Ajimobi is not alone. Even before the Oyo governor yielded to frustration and paralysis, and labour unions had begun to give him constipation, Osun State under Governor Rauf Aregbesola had become the poster child of unpaid salaries and stymied development, with the state pockmarked by unfinished but ambitious projects. Much more than Oyo, Osun presented a curious economic conundrum. Oyo does not pretend to any ideological cover for its stasis. The state economy was and still is a simple, uncomplicated arrangement located gingerly somewhere between mixed economy and ad hocism. Whatever comes from the federation account is added to the little IGR they can rake up, and a few development programmes are thus initiated to justify eight years or so in government with all its garish panoplies. Their ambition is moderate, their governing template is simple, and their future hangs precariously and wistfully between Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Osun, on the other hand, though its salary difficulties are not less complex or profound or disruptive, has managed to design a governance structure that vaults to the progressive and globalising future as pretentiously as it harks back to a socialist past. Not only was sufficient attention not paid to the state’s revenue base in anticipation of a possible general economic downturn, the state also embarked on such catatonic social re-engineering, especially in its educational sector, that it is hard to imagine anything more convulsive or more stiffening. But the state bristles against critics who insist that rather than reclassify or restructure, what the state needs is attention to quality, and that that quality can be achieved without the disruptions that have seemed to aggravate religious sensibilities and paint the governor in unflattering sectarian colour. The state thinks the future will underscore the far-sightedness of the reforms being carried out under Gov Aregbesola, and prove sceptics wrong. This is a tough verdict to coax out of posterity.

Perhaps the most frightening response to the economic crisis being faced by the country is the one inspired by the gaudy Gov Rochas Okorocha of Imo State. He is probably the most charismatic governor of the three used as examples of the paralyses debilitating the states. He may even be the most charismatic governor in this term. He is intelligent, eloquent and sometimes oratorically profound. The media reports many of his giant developmental strides favourably, and applaud his social finicalness and savvy. But, like many others, he suffers frequent bouts of flights of fancy. A week after he flirted with the unusual and befuddling idea of a three-day working week, the rest apparently to be invested in agriculture willy-nilly, even by those averse to farming, he simply presented the state with a fait accompli. That is his own ingenious way of solving a problem that is deep and systemic, a problem that requires profundity, not capriciousness. Does he by any chance hope to cut their salaries to accommodate their new work schedule? Would the unions entertain such driveling resort to arithmetic frolic?

The three states in discourse are not exhaustive of the lack of profundity in statecraft. They are merely an indication of what is almost a total Nigerian experience, as more than two-thirds of the states have met cash flow problems with near total lack of imagination. Unfortunately, the voters are themselves unable to distinguish between the many distorted realities politicians confront them with, between truth and falsehood, between genuineness and chimera. There is, therefore, no serious effort to interrogate those who present themselves for elective posts to find out how suitable they are, what the amperage of their temperament is, how their secularity rate, whether the depth of their knowledge can be plumbed, and what the scope of their wisdom is in comparison with the wisecracks and homilies of the ancients. It is indeed galling that most states are afflicted by poor leadership, just as the national level, in more than 50 years, has not found even one man worthy to be called a leader in the truest sense of the word.