Matters miscellaneous

It is sometimes difficult for a columnist to keep up with the sheer dynamism that characterises our social relations and national politics. Stories, serious and inconsequential, compete for his attention. As he is trying to deal with one story, a new story flashes across his word processing screen and makes what was currently only a minute or two ago simply stale news.

What to do? Professor Tunji Dare came to our rescue a few years ago when he invented the basket of columns, he christened matters miscellaneous to accommodate the flood of news begging for comment in one column. Thus, readers enjoy two or more columns in a single basket of matters miscellaneous. In this matters miscellaneous, I offer you three short takes on what I found disturbing, amusing or disappointing or all three.

Abuja Municipal Area Council pension edict

I thought this council was a civilian outfit. Perhaps I am wrong because things change so fast in our country and in such strange ways that none of us can keep up with the changes, let alone make some sense of them. As you may or may not know, the chairman of the council, Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu Candido, recently issued a signed edict setting the precedent, I think, of placing former chairmen, vice-chairmen and speakers of the council on pension for life.

Two things baffled me here. One, why would Candido resort to issuing an edict as the supreme law of his council? Edicts were laws made by state military governors. I did not think they had a place in a local government administration in a democracy. How did this happen?

Two, under the said edict, a former chairman of the council is to receive an annual pension of N500,000; a former vice-chairman would be paid N300,000 annually and a former council speaker is to receive N200,000 per annum. By the chairman’s calculation, the pension would cost the council a piddling N6 million annually. Perhaps chicken feed for the council.

I wonder which oga at the top authorised this pension scheme for the council. Candido called the law a gesture “meant to honour past heroes of the council who sacrificed their talents and energy in building the council” in the past 35 years of its existence. Heroes? The nerve. He must be made to rescind his edict lest other chairmen follow his lead and complicate a confusing situation. I know of no law in this country that permits local council chairmen to award themselves pension by decree. It is rather painful, to put it mildly, that our former elected political office holders believe they must remain the responsibility of the Nigerian state for life because they served the people.

Perhaps I should not be hard on Candido. He is following the footsteps of other elected public officeholders. State governors have, through similar laws, granted themselves generous severance pay and pension. I suppose the gander too is entitled to what is good for the goose. Let the madness go on.

The minimum wage palaver

It is one of the longest-running stories in the land – the minimum wage palaver, that is. I thought the matter was finally put to rest last April when President Buhari signed the national minimum wage bill into law. Labour won its agitation for the N30,000 minimum wage. Naturally, there was wild rejoicing in the labour camp.

I thought then that labour celebrated too soon. I did not think that workers would have new figures on their pay cheques that soon. It came to pass. It has been some six months since the law supposedly took effect, but the pay cheques remain the same. Labour is angry. Its leaders and Dr Chris Ngige, minister of labour and productivity, are engaged in another round of a protracted negotiation over something called “consequential” adjustments before the minimum wage could be implemented. There are irreconcilable differences between them. Labour wants ‘consequential’ 29 per cent increase in the salaries of officers on grade levels 07 to 14; 24 per cent for officers on grade levels 15 to 17.

This is unacceptable to the federal government. It finds the labour position “unrealistic.” It has offered instead to pay a consequential 11 and 6.5 per cent for the first and second category of officers respectively.

As I write this, labour is beating the drums of a general strike to bend the will of the government to its demand. Labour is in a stronger position than the federal government here. Its weapon is a general strike. If labour carries out its threat to call its members out on a nationwide strike, the people, as well as the economy, would eventually pay a painful price. That would not be nice. Ngige offered this gem, in case the rest of us are rather obtuse about the issue at hand: “Collective adjustments is like collective bargaining but has its limitation. Let’s look at the issue and we will resolve.”

I am sure the labour leaders know what he meant. But we can heave a huge sigh of relief. I was putting finishing touches to this when I received the news that the government and labour reached an agreement late Thursday. The looming spectre of a crippling nationwide strike must now give way to the sunshine of a renewed hope for the workers. But they would do well to remember that it is not over until it is over. The rest of us must prepare for what the combined forces of the new minimum wage and market women would do to the prices of foodstuff.

Fuel subsidy

In an editorial sometime last April, the Daily Trust asked the federal government to “come clean on fuel subsidy.” I wish to unhappily report that after trying so hard to hide the ugly facts in plain sight for so long, the government came clean at last on fuel subsidy. Fuel subsidy remains. It is going nowhere.

According to the minister of finance and national planning, Zainab Ahmed, there is a N400 billion provision for it in next year’s budget. The minister of state for petroleum, Timipre Silva, told reporters last week: “This government is not about to remove subsidy because it is difficult; we believe as a government that our people are going through a lot. We cannot as a responsible government heap another issue of petroleum price hike or removal of subsidy on Nigerians. It is not on the cards at all.”

How considerate. I need say no more except to express my disappointment that President Buhari too has been defeated by the fuel importing cartel.