Unending challenges of civil servants

Sir: The lives of civil servants in Nigeria can best be described as one destined for an eternal or everlasting shortchange considering all manners of ill treatments they are confronted by, and sadly for which they have no escape route or solution throughout their service years and beyond.

Apart from being among the most poorly paid in the entire world, they have no access to any of the items that make life comfortable and worse still, the pension arrangements put in place for them after retirement still put their hard-earned money in the hands of those who decide whatever to do with it without consulting them.

In all their working years, the greatest desire of all civil servants is to have a benevolent government that would look into and address all their nagging grievances and problems in a way that would put smiles on their faces. But such hope always ends up as mere illusion as year after year, successive governments play them the same hackneyed card of use and dump. During elections, politicians make overtures to them to enlist their support by dangling before them many juicy carrots that would definitely attract their attention. Soon they fall in and their unions become campaign headquarters especially for ruling parties. But as soon as elections are over, the winning candidate would then remember that the only appeal to make to all citizens including workers is to continue to make more sacrifices for the development of their beloved country.

As unfortunate as workers are, their union leaders are just as deceitful as the politicians. When they too are vying for elective offices, the usual promise is always to fight hard for the enhancement of workers’ welfare. But as soon as they achieve their aim, all they do is to settle down to whatever is in the union’s bank accounts, and then work at ways to keep smiling to the bank at the expense of workers. It means liaising with private companies ostensibly for the provision of some social services for workers which are the main fiber of the society. In order to be in the union’s good books, most companies are always ready to play ball by voting large sums of money to the union’s bank accounts and these with the workers monthly subscriptions deducted directly from salaries which run into millions of naira is what the union leaders sit on comfortably while pretending to be concerned with the issue of enhanced workers’ welfare.

Workers spend their entire working years struggling between a problem or another with no visible respite anywhere. Most times they are on loans which consume an integral part of their salaries and making them perpetual debtors in the neighbourhoods where they live. Many shylock credit firms have since sprung up which kept dangling what appears as suitable loan facilities which most civil servants find most difficult to ignore because of what looks like their simple payment patterns. Most times, it’s often after getting involved that most workers always realise that the loans are more of a trap than help. But even such realisation notwithstanding, they still would never be dissuaded from getting another one at the expiration of the former one because they often realise that there is no way to survive without those loans.

Workers pass through these harrowing experiences throughout their working years and because of it, many of them retire totally unfulfilled. Yet, whatever they are able to gather under their retirement plans is also not handed to them as they are allowed only a percentage which most times is never enough to carry out whatever plan they may have as survival strategy after retirement. The same government that never does anything to help workers to be comfortable while in service would later pretend to be their best friend by arguing that it does not want retired civil servants to become destitute after service and so, because of that, only a percentage of what accrued to them under their pension scheme is handed to them.

It means for instance that if a worker’s total savings is ten million naira, the pension managers will make only four million naira or less than that available to him as lump sum while the remainder will be kept as monthly pension payments to be spread over the years. This is the most unfair treatment meted out to workers after retirement. It is unfair because each worker ought to be given the opportunity to decide whatever he wants. If for instance a worker desires to have all his money, he or she ought to so obliged. The non-inclusion of such clause in the pension scheme is the reason why many workers die very poor and unable to fulfill their life dreams after retirement. The federal government should look seriously into it with a view to finding a way to correct the continued shortchange of workers.

Jide Oyewusi is the coordinator of Ethics Watch International, Lagos.