One of the under-reported stories of this past year was the spate of strikes that hit the federal republic. Particularly (as usual) there was not enough said about the number of patients who died or otherwise suffered due to strikes by doctors, nurses and other hospital staff in states like Edo and Lagos.
The Nigeria media, which tends to be pro-Union (and there is nothing wrong with that) tends also to under-report and downplay the negative impact of strikes on the citizenry. There is also little attention paid to the poor, disrespectful and inefficient service citizens receive when there is no strike. For one thing, an unknown number of citizens in critical, emergency need of medical services are either turned away from hospitals or subjected to life-threatening and life-ending delays; the number is unknown because neither the government nor the media keeps any statistics or investigates the issue.
Of course this doesn't happen all the time. But then that is the problem with the federal republic, isn't it? The things that should be taken for granted are in fact rather random. Sometimes the sanitation agency clears the garbage; sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the police actually do police-work; most times they don't. Sometimes the electricity is on; most times it isn't.
But the Unions and strikes are just one side of the issue.
Thanks to Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, we spent most of the last few weeks of the year discussing how much of our federal budget is consumed by the National Assembly ... and in particular, how much of our federal budget is consumed by the salaries, benefits, allowances and other disguised payments.
There are many theories about how much salaries and other personal payments the federal legislators really receive from the federal treasury. The Senators and Representatives do a good job of covering everything with smoke and fog so no one really knows who is getting what. There is an official schedule set by the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission, which is supposed to fix the salaries and "monetization" benefits of various government officials, but their "official" pay and their "actual" pay are two entirely unrelated issues, as it has always been in Nigeria.
There is no one, and I do mean NO ONE producing independent, credible, empirically well-sourced information on what actually happens with our budget expenditures in general, and how much of those budget expenditures are absorbed by our bloated, over-expensive political structures in particular.
At the end of the day it is impossible to convince a public-sector worker that the government (local, state or federal) cannot afford a minimum wage of =N=18,000.00 ($120.00) per month.
Yes, we are already in fiscally uncomfortable deficit territory. Yes, deficits translate into rising public debt. Yes, domestic borrowing to finance deficits is crowding out the private sector and making it difficult for creative entrepreneurs to access capital. Yes, the bulk of the spending is wasteful. Yes, very little of it is capital spending or investment. Yes, most of it is recurrent. Yes, we are raising our public debt every week, month, year just to finance a wastefully bloated administrative structure.
All of that is true, but how can you ask them to do with less, when they can see the politicians and political appointees milking the treasury and living like kings? The politicians keep finding ways to pay themselves more and more money, while telling the workers that there is no money to raise their meagre wages.
Imagine that.
People who are already rich are paying themselves more even though they know the budget is already in deficit. Meanwhile they are telling people who are poor that there is no money because the budget is in deficit.
Of course the workers are not going to buy that argument. It is either austerity applies to the politicians and their political appointees as well as the workers, or we will end up applying it to nobody because the workers will not accept it ... and the politicians lack the moral authority or the democratic legitimacy to force them to accept it.
President Goodluck Jonathan, desperation to be "elected" (i.e. rigged) into office in 2011 has already promised the workers they will get their =N=18,000 minimum wage, even though he knows we cannot afford it. Before Jonathan's fans get on my case for bias, the fact is ALL of his rivals would have done exactly the same thing he did.
The state governments have been complaining because state workers are beginning to demand the =N=18,000.00 minimum wage Goodluck Jonathan has promised federal workers. The governors are going to run into the same trouble the federal government faced; the workers will not relent because they see the governors (and the governors' wives, children, relatives, associates, allies, etc) getting richer and richer even as the same governors plead poverty as a reason to avoid matching the federal minimum wage.
It is an old story. In fact, it is the one-two punch that ensures our debt is always unsustainable.
The first blow is ignorance and economic illiteracy; during the 1970s and again during the 2000s we kept hearing stupid people say we were "under-borrowed" as their excuse for borrowing in the middle of booming crude oil prices.
The second blow is avaricious and cowardly politics; in both the Second and Fourth Republics, vampire politicians kept milking the treasury even as our fiscal position deteriorated, and continued to buy the acquiescence of the masses by making expensive promises they cannot keep.
The federal executive is has too many ministers and deputy-ministers. There are too many assistants, special assistants, senior special assistants. The whole thing is too bloated.
There are too many federal legislators. An upper house of 15 and a lower house of 300 is sufficient.
If you think an upper house of 15 sounds weird, note the second tier of government should comprise 6 administrative regions instead of 36 states. These regions are to be constitutionally restricted to five activities, with exactly five "commissions" and no more.
If two members are elected to the upper house from each region, one from the Federal Territories (comprising the Abuja Municipal Council and five other city-districts around Nigeria that do not fit neatly into any of the 6 regions), and two ex-officio members are added, you get 15.
The third tier should be made of of 72 states, not 774 local government areas. Again there should be a constitutional limit to the number of cabinet positions, and a constitutional limit to the number of parliamentarians at this level.
The local government areas should be abolished (getting rid of all the chairmen, deputy-chairmen, supervisory councillors and regular councillors) to be replaced by administrative districts that are NOT a fourth tier of government but are instead scaled-down departments within the third-tier (i.e. the states, which already directly control the superfluous LGAS anyway).
If done properly, we could reduce the number of political offices across all tiers of government by half (I have done the maths). Bear in mind the reduction would apply both to those political jobs "won" in "rigged" contests and those to which a person is appointed by the aforementioned "winners". It would also apply to the number of families, clients and other hangers-on who latch their mosquito-like proboscis onto the federal, state and local treasuring through each of the officeholders.
Add to this temporary "austerity" cuts in remuneration (to last until economic growth and federal budget revenues reach certain preset benchmarks) to political officeholders. This won't work without real law enforcement (to check graft), without real elections .... or without constitutional limits on the amount of money any given candidate, political party and/or political structure or machine can spend on any specific campaign.
If the workers see that we are cutting the fiscal waste on utterly unnecessary political positions, and see that the politicians are feeling some of the pain of fiscal adjustment, maybe we can persuade them to hold off on unaffordable wage claims until such a point as the economy justifies it.
Yes, I know I am living in fantasy land.
As I have said frequently on this blog, I do not have any confidence (or interest) in the so-called constitutional review process. The number one constitutional necessity lies in cutting down the number of administrative divisions and reducing the number of concomitant (vampire) political positions.
The thing is, the politicians are in charge of the so-called constitutional review process, and they have no interest in reducing the number of nipples from which they can milk the federal treasury. If anything, they are thinking about ways to create new nipples.
All things considered, 2011 will be a year of deficits, debts and declining reserves ... exactly like 2010.
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