A Salary means a fixed regular payment, typically paid on a monthly basis but often expressed as an annual sum, made by an employer to an employee, especially a professional or white-collar worker.
For long time there have been noises that the salary of civil servants takes major part of the government funds and as such the government, especially the state governments in most cases could not do most of the capital projects they earmarked in their budgets. This has been the songs of many State Governors especially during that minimum wage saga.
Of recent, the Kaduna state Governor proclaimed the civil servants constitute only 5% of the total population but yet they are being paid more than 50% or so of the state allocation to the detriment of the rest of the populace. There were so many such proclamations by either Governors or political leaders in the past, this prompt me to do a little thinking and analysis, I then decided to share it with you. Take note please it is my own analysis and thinking as such we may differ.
My thoughts:
The first I thought and asked myself is, what is a salary to an employee?
Answer: a salary is just a debt paid to an employee mostly in cash after rendering services for a certain period.
Of course a salary is always paid after the services are rendered, so I wonder what is the big deal about paying for the services that have already been rendered. Why the noises and sometimes even threats?
In case of the state governments civil servants for example, most of the times they are thinking they are paying few percentages of the populace a huge chunk of their state allocation to the detriment of rest of the populace, but not knowing the reverse is the case. You may be wondering why I said this I believe, but let me give you a simple example.
Take for instance Education. If you as an individual take your child to a private school, you will pay an amount as a school fees for your child, abi? Now that school fees from different parents is what the school authorities used to pay the salaries of their staff I believe, nko? I hope l am communicating.
This simply means that the school fees I paid for my child in a private school is what make the salary of his teachers.
Now in public schools where the pupils are not paying school fees, which is assumed the government is paying for them, isn’t this simply means that the salaries the various government are paying the Teachers/Lecturers are the school fees for the pupils that the government are sponsoring? So in essence the salary being paid to a Teacher/Lecturer is just just the school fees of all the indigenes that the government of that state is sponsoring, and nothing more. This is the more reason why that in tertiary institutions you will hear of non-indigenes paying more than the indigenes, because the government is paying for indigenes. This is just one aspect, education.
When you consider health workers, in a private school you pay more to the health care you desire and that what you pay is what constitutes the salary of the workers of those facilities or hospitals, in government hospital, the government is paying for you through the salary they pay to the workers. And so on and so forth.
So if the government is thinking it is paying few individuals huge amount of it’s allocation to the detriment of the rest of the populace, then I think they need to think again.
An analysis of the Salary:
Let me also do a little analysis of the Salary itself.
Start from the salary Earner himself, taking the average a household in Nigeria, if for instance we consider 5 people per household, which if the civil service size of your is 300,000, then multiply that number by 5 this will give you an instant 1.5 million individual that are directly defendants on that salary. And if you multiple that your 5% by 5 your are now talking of 25% direct beneficiaries of the same salary you are complaining about. That is on the household aspect.
Now let us look at the affect of the amount on the populace. let us assume that out of let’s say N10 billion of a state’s allocation, N7 billion is paid as salary to 25% direct beneficiaries. Now assuming the salary is paid 30th of the month. I will give you a simple assignment, by 20th of the preceding month please check with the banks to see if you will recover upto N1 billion from banks from that N7 billion paid 20 days earlier. And if this is so then, you may as well ask yourself that, where did the more than N6 billion went to? Is it not to the rest of the populace who are in the markets, in the transportation businesses, airtime sellers, petty traders, and so on, and so forth?
I can go on and on listing so many instances, but I believe there is no need of that. I just want our Governors and those political leaders that have the same mindset to stop thinking that they are paying the larger of their allocations to just small percentage of the populace to the detriment of the rest of the populace, no, this is a very wrong assumption, but rather on the contrary the reverse seems to be the case.
I will agree with them if THEY SAY THERE IS NO 15-25% CUT IN PAYING SALARY, THIS I WILL AGREE, BUT INDEED A CIVIL SERVANT’S SALARY IS FOR ALL THE POPULACE.
KABIR DALHA KABIR
A Salary Earner.
