One of my childhood moonlight stories I still remember was about a man who worked in the city. He was hardworking and rose steadily. His family, made up of himself, a wife and three fine children, was doing well. They lived in a big house with three large rooms and had a dependable servant, the story goes. One day, he was, however, handed a letter that said “We regret to inform you that, due to financial constraints, your service is no longer needed.” The man returned home much earlier than usual. His wife noticed this and asked anxiously, “My husband, you’re home early today. What happened?” No answer. But intuitively she knew something was wrong. Some hours later, when the children had had dinner and gone to bed, the man told his wife the bad news. “Woman, you see, I’ve lost my job. It means we’ve to try to adjust to the new situation. I mean we’ll have to move into a smaller apartment, the children will relocate to school where we can pay for their education. The family upkeep budget will be halved. Lastly, in few months I’ll be leaving for another city to look for a new job.”
Like that young man, many Nigerians today are being called upon to make some sort of “structural adjustment” to today’s hard times. The government too is looking here and there for a kind of elixir to a debilitating cash crunch. Someone has, cruelly I must admit, likened the government’s desperation to King Saul’s clandestine visit to the witch of Endor for a solution to an imminent enemy attack. To come to grip with a slack and brittle economic tight rope, the federal government has dug up a decade old report that recommended the pruning down of over 29 departments and agencies employing thousands of mostly idle personnel. A committee, led by Secretary to the Government, has two weeks to do the streamlining. “The whole idea is that the government wants to reduce cost and also improve efficiency in service delivery,” Mohammed Idris, the information minister explains. A slim, performing government is an idea whose time has come. Why the Oronsaye Report wasn’t immediately implemented was more a matter of lack of will powe than anything else. Fear of a clash with organized labour over potential job losses sent the report into the file cabinet where it had been accumulating dust and musk for 11 years.
This government is about to make that mistake too. Minister Idris recently told journalists that what the government wanted to do wouldn’t involve anyone losing their jobs. “It does not mean that the government is out to retrench workers or throw people into the labour market,” he said. It is “a clear demonstration of President Tinubu’s unwavering commitment to fiscal prudence and responsible governance by championing a comprehensive review of the government‘s commissions, agencies, and parastatals.”
No job loss, true? It doesn’t make economic sense. You don’t scrap a department or merge it with another, leave the staff intact and say you are reducing costs. Cost reduction means something must give, something must go under the knife. Heads must necessarily roll. If the government is persuaded that is the way to go, let it say so and tell us some people certainly will have to go. I understand the government’s uneasiness. Labour doesn’t as yet trust this government, what with many issues unresolved such as a new national minimum wage. Twice since this government too office last May the Nigeria Labour Congress [NLC] has called workers out to protest on the streets over petrol subsidy removal and the minimum wage palaver. With the heat generated already yet to cool, the government is being careful not to say Oronsaye will come with job cuts. How long it hopes to avoid having, in the long run, to admit this grim truth is something we have to wait to see.
And since the talk is about making government smaller and efficient, I believe the first place to go with our pruning shears is the behemoth called National Assembly. That bumbling beast needs to be cut to size. There are 109 senators and 360 House members, drawing salaries totalling N8 trillion a year for doing next to nothing. The Senate, in my opinion, is not desirable and should go. In the United States, considered the mother of democracy, there is a strong push for federal lawmakers to sit part time to save costs. Nigeria that doesn’t have as much money as the US doesn’t need and can’t afford to keep full time legislators.
What more, does our president need a minister from each of 36 states to work for us? Some states even have three. Yes, the constitution says so, but those who made the constitution did so at a time Nigeria still had petrodollars. Then it could be argued that more hands were required to share the national cake. But not now. We need fewer competent hands to MAKE a new cake, not more hands to share it because there is now no cake.
