Proposed pay rise for politicians shows FG’s insensitivity to workers’ plight – SSANU

By Johnbosco Agbakwuru, Abuja

The recent proposal by the National Salaries Income and Wages Commission (NSIWC) has continued to get negative reactions from the labour unions, as they described such a move as a sign of insensitivity on the side of the Federal Government against the productive working class of the country.

Reacting to the proposal while speaking to Vanguard, the National President of the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), Comrade Mohammed Haruna Ibrahim, said instead of increasing the pay package of the political class, the government should use such funds to provide and improve infrastructure in the country.

Comrade Ibrahim said though he did not have full details of such a proposal, the labour centres would not fail to respond to such a move if the government went ahead to implement such a proposal.

He said already the political class, which he described as the ‘unproductive group’, receives a huge chunk of the national resources, while the productive group, the civil servants, are pauperised.

He said, “The political office holders have always been in the vantage position; they are lorded over and above the civil servants, and this is what has given serious problems to the civil servants because these people take plenty of money for the little work they do.

“What do they really do? I don’t have details about their pay rise, but honestly they have already received so much. We are not talking about politicians like senators, house of reps and so on; we are talking about people taking between twenty-five and thirty million Naira a month, depending on which story to believe.

“We are talking about people who go to work maybe three times in a week. If you put the total number of hours these people… and now juxtapose it with the kind of work they even do, is it something for the government even to contemplate, and then what does it spell for us?”

He argued that the political class in the country are papered and go home with humongous sums, unlike their counterparts in other African countries and Europe.

“For example, look at their counterparts in other African countries. We have other political office holders in Ghana, in Rwanda, in South Africa, and in Mozambique, including those working in Europe. Are they earning what we are giving our own political office holders?

“The whole revenue of government is used to pamper them and take care of them. Meanwhile, civil servants who put in eight hours every day do not get the corresponding pay that will even take them home; they can’t even cater for their children’s education, and they can’t take care of their family’s health.

“You have to provide for electricity, you have to provide for water, you have to provide for security, you have to provide for transportation, and all these people that you are giving pay rises get these things free. The government pays for their accommodation because their houses are rented for them; even with the monetisation, they still get free accommodation and their offices paid for them.

“They don’t know how much the cost of electricity is; they don’t know how much fuel is being sold because the people are already being taken care of by government resources, and yet you are still pampering them by giving them more. So, what this shows is that clearly government is insensitive to the plight of the common man, especially the masses working.

“How do you justify seventy thousand that cannot even buy a bag of rice to the millions that these people take at the end of the day over what they are being proposed to be given? I don’t think anybody can justify this.”

On what labour unions will do if eventually the government goes ahead to implement the proposal, the SSANU President said: “I am not adequately informed about this proposal, but I think as the only hope for the civil servants, that’s the labour unions. If anything like this happens, naturally the labour centres have to sit, look at the situations, appraise them and then give a corresponding reaction.

“But this is not acceptable, honestly. Because you cannot continue to pauperise the working population, people who are putting their energy into the economy, the productive people; you are denying them what they are supposed to have, and you are giving it to the unproductive.

“For goodness sake, how many hours do these people spend in a week to attend to anything? They are the ones travelling out; they are the ones flying around. As I am talking to you now, I am travelling from Minna to come to Abuja, a journey that is less than 250 kilometres and is taking us almost four hours because of bad roads.

“If you look at the kind of driving that is happening around this Suleja area, you will be surprised. See the long queue of tankers, so there is not even room for manoeuvre; people are even driving anyhow.

“This money that they are going to give to these people – why can’t they even deploy it to fix our infrastructure? This is our priority, because what’s even giving workers a serious concern now is transportation and then feeding.

“You cannot travel anywhere; the cost of transport is so high, the roads are terrible, electricity is not accessible, and where you get it, you can’t pay for it. So, I think it’s not something to contemplate at this point; any responsible government should do thorough homework before contemplating this because these people are already taking so much.

“As far as I am concerned. If there are people that should be well compensated, it should be the working population, the productive population, not the unproductive population. How many are they?” he rhetorically asked.

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