Axing Workers

Axing Workers

Sam Nda-Isaiah

In a few days, thousands of Nigerian workers will be thrown out of their jobs. They will be forced to join millions of other Nigerians who have been without gainful employment of any sort for as long as they can remember. Some who can afford it will find “gainful” employment among the many criminal gangs around the country, but many more will just go back to their villages and wait to die.

Agreed, public sector reform is necessary to move the economy forward because, as we all know, the public sector is corrupt, inefficient, slow and does not even support the private sector, which is the engine of growth. In Nigeria today, collecting payment from government for contracts and jobs done is a nightmare. Quite often, bribes are demanded for jobs done before payments are made. Getting approvals to even build industries for which many governors and the president travel around the world is slow and fraught with corruption. There are many things that need correction in the public sector.

Many of those to be sacked richly deserve it. There are those who might have been queried several times on their jobs and those who are just simply incompetent and without commitment. I can attest to that myself. I sack people very often, as many of those who work with me can confirm. When you travel to serious countries and see how seriously people take their jobs, you will know why many Nigerians are unemployable. But among many that will be sacked by the Obasanjo government in the coming weeks are innocent people who are competent in whatever jobs have been assigned to them and have been diligent on those jobs throughout their civil service career. Many of them have nothing to fall back on now, because they were loyal on their jobs. But the government must sack them because some men in black in faraway lands, working in the well-appointed offices of the World Bank and IMF, have ordered Nigerian leaders to do so.

I wonder why a government that has made so much excess money from crude oil in the last seven years will insist on “right sizing”. What is right about the sizing anyway? The only language we have heard from Obasanjo since he became president in 1999 are in dialects of words like rationalisation, deregulation, removal of subsidies and downsizing. These are World Bank and IMF standards and terminologies that even they themselves are careful about implementing in their host countries. I don’t know how long it will take for Obasanjo to know that those phraseologies are political terms masked as economics. It is their own political agenda, which they have asked many of their servant presidents around the world (like Obasanjo) to implement on their behalf. With Obasanjo, they don’t even have to push too hard, as their job has already been made easier by the man’s mean streaks. I know a man who worked closely with Obasanjo when he was head of state in the late 1970s. He said Obasanjo was always at his best when signing sack letters or ordering the execution of people.

While I was on a trip to the United Kingdom recently, a friend of mine who is a publisher asked me why our leaders speak the political language of the West more fluently than the creators of the concepts themselves. Of course, it was not meant to be a compliment and he did not expect me to laugh either. That was around the time Obasanjo delivered a speech at the United Nations criticising countries of the West for subsidising agriculture.

Governance is about the public good. It is not a profit-making institution, and it has no balance sheet to balance. It is about revenue and expenditure assigned for political expediency. It is sheer depravity to base the running of government on downsizing, removal of subsidies on fuel, agriculture, healthcare and education, as if there is a level of profit that must be achieved. Those who ordered Obasanjo to do this are not themselves doing it, as they must be sensitive to their own public opinion or else they would be voted out at the next available election. The United States subsidises agriculture to the tune of more than $1 billion daily and an average cow in Europe receives more subsidy daily than an average “rich” Nigerian spends feeding his family daily in Obasanjo’s Nigeria.

President Obasanjo has obviously not heard of John Maynard Keynes. He was one of the greatest economists that ever lived on the surface of the earth. In the 1930s during the period of the Great Depression, he suggested to Great Britain that the only way to get out of the pains of depression was to stimulate aggregate demand – that is to create more jobs, more raw materials, more spending to achieve full employment at higher level of equilibrium. He insisted that Great Britain employ every resource at its disposal, in order to break the vicious cycle of the depression.

He postulated that Great Britain should not make the mistake of managing aggregate demand and resources because of the depression and famine that was already the kingdom’s lot. In spite of opposition from critics at that time, His Majesty’s government of those days bought this idea hook, line and sinker and the result was that Britain emerged stronger from the depression. A few years later, the United States government saw the logic in Keynes’ hypothesis and introduced the Marshal Plan, which simply means pumping government money to stimulate aggregate demand. The Marshal Plan made Europe the strong economy that it is today.

The World Bank and IMF of today are only interested in the global economy and not local economies of their different victim nations. They are only interested in maintaining stability in the balance of payment by creating excess reserves so that nations can be good members of the international club and pay their debts. So they advise their victims to rationalise the workforce, remove subsidies, cut spending, devalue their currencies, etc.

Effective public sector reform should mean that the government:

• Must re-organise its activities around outcomes that are in the interest of its people;

• Must substitute parallel jobs for sequential processes;

• Bring downstream information upstream, i.e., this is like saying the obvious of moving from 090 analogue mobile telephony to 080 GSM. In those days, to get a 090 analogue line, you had to register at NITEL, pay a huge deposit and even pay bribes while waiting for days to be connected; today, you just walk into a shop and get a GSM line with international direct dialling (IDD) pre-installed.

• Fourthly, the government must provide a single point of contact for dealing with the public for every government service. This should greatly reduce corruption.
•And last but not least, the government must re-engineer and automate its processes and procedures.

Reform is not rocket science. It is about improving. It is not a bloody revolution and must never be construed as one.

It is only wickedness that will make a government, whose leading lights support themselves with stealing government funds and even had extra to bribe legislators (N50 million each) to back a criminal third term project to turn around and sack workers in the name of “right sizing”. It has been said that after God, governments are those on which ordinary people depend for livelihood; but in Nigeria, especially in Obasanjo’s Nigeria, the government and Lucifer compete to wreck the people.

These days, in more decent societies, when governments are faced with the dilemma of rationalising civil servants, they create what has come to be known as “Turkey Farms” where people are retrained and re-evaluated and sent back to other sectors of the economy. Sometime ago, the government of China had to retrench more than two million civil servants. What the government did first was to retrain many of the workers to manage their own small businesses, farms, and even cottage industries. At the end of the training, soft loans were provided for the people. Many of those two million people are today among those who have moved China to its current enviable position in the world. The entire world is today in shock and awe of what is happening in China. In Nigeria, many of those who would be sacked could sweep the streets, clear overgrown grasses, join the police to fight armed robbers or even be helped to start their own mini Ota farms, at very little budgetary costs.

Obasanjo has done nothing for Nigerians except to inflict hardship. A kind of share “my prison pains”. He has increased the pump prices of petroleum products so many times that people have lost count. This has in turn led to the astronomical increase in the prices of foodstuff and every other service. Products are more than five times more expensive today because there is no NEPA (PHCN or whatever they want to call it now), after more than N1 trillion has been spent on electricity “reform” in the last seven years; industries now depend almost totally on diesel, the price of which was quietly increased again a few weeks ago.

By 10am on May 29, next year, Obasanjo would have become a former president of Nigeria. But he would have left behind legacies of pain, poverty, injustice, sacking innocent civil servants, corruption, election rigging, third term, fuel price increases, etc. All these do not constitute reforms. They are atrocities and crimes against humanity!