Kaduna’s no 1 citizen employs the same Divide and rule tactic as the typical divisive Nigerian politician. When he unilaterally/arbitrarily slashed 25 percent from the salaries of all civil servants in the state during the lockdown phase of the pandemic and medical staff who had been working overtime in conditions of increased risk protested the injustice, he tried to pit them against the masses by saying the steps were necessary to provide palliative to the wider population as against an ‘entitled few’. It was later discovered that the shared palliatives were those distributed by Sadiya Farouq/ international aid organizations to every state, most of which didn’t even get to the intended populace.
Now that he has laid off thousands of workers on a whim, he is trying to pit the duly employed civil servants who have given the best years of their lives in service to the state and sent packing without proper entitlements against their friends, families, neighbours by calling them derogatory words like an ‘entitled minority’ ‘barely educated employees’, while neglecting the obvious fact that the salaries they get monthly is spent on farm produce from farmers, artisans, transportation, small businesses which impacts the vast majority of the state’s population.
Read Also: Kaduna strike: FG intervenes in Labour, El-Rufai face-off
He’s trying to paint an image of the victims whose only crime is choosing to serve their state as being the blood sucking vampires who have been draining the life out of the state treasury and therefore a cancer that should be excised before it metastasizes.
A cursory look at the wagebill figures for march of 2021 given by KDSG showed that 337 political employees earned 259,137,000 which amounts to around 768,952 Naira monthly per political employee!
When the same calculation is done for the remaining 31064 civil servants on the state’s payroll who got 3.13 billion naira combined, it amounts to an average of 100,759 Naira monthly per civil servant.
From the above, you can clearly see that a single political employee earns 8 times as much as a civil servant in the state, and you begin to wonder which of the two groups the phrase ‘entitled minority’ describes better.
We have not made mention of the monthly security vote which runs into hundreds of millions monthly that is not subject to any form of accountability and spent at the discretion of one human in a state and the superfluous amounts spent on running the government house and convoys.
What about the the hundreds of millions Nay billions of Naira in salaries and obscene allowances paid to REDUNDANT states house of assembly whose budget has still not been made public to the same masses they ostensibly represent?
All these are coming against the backdrop of a recent astronomical tuition fee increase across all levels of education among Kaduna state owned institutions. This is something that is surely going to push a good number of people out of school in a country where over 40% of people live below the national poverty line of just over 137000 naira YEARLY!
These are the same people who have refused to make financial autonomy of the judiciary, and LGA’s possible in their states and even went as far taking the FG to court on issues of financial autonomy of these people.
Kaduna state also presently generates the highest IGR amongst northern states, it was over 50 billion naira last year alone which is around the same as it gets from FAAC allocation. But whenever the Gov’t tries to justify the mass sackings, they deliberately leave out The IGR as part of their income and mention only the FAAC allocations. It is simply being clever by half. With the IGR being generated, I simply see reason why people should be laid of in the thousands. If people are going to be laid off, they should be notified at least 6 months ahead of time so they can prepare adequately, and they should also be given their compete entitlements in no more than 6 months after they are laid off.
But in Kaduna, there are cases of people laid off in 2017 who have not received their entitlements to date. Some of these people have already died without compensation for their life’s work. If this is not as bad as banditry/ kidnap for ransom, then I don’t know what is. What’s funny is that, the online propaganda machine of the government of the day will deliberately remain silent on such issues, because it shows the flaws of their paymasters.
I’m deeply concerned about what has been going on in Kaduna for past 3 days, but when you have someone who views everything through a victory/ defeat lens leading a state, this is what you get.
Ahmed ‘Boroski’ Tijjani wrote from Kaduna, Nigeria.
