It is a shame that today, a debate rages on the number of civil or public servants there are in Nigeria. Which is why, doubly shamefully, the nation does not have a sacrosanct figure of how much is spent on those servants and for what level of productivity.
It is more than three weeks since the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN) debunked as bloated the figure of 1.2 million announced before the House Committee on Health by the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation (BOF) to be the current staff strength of the Federal Public Service. Asserting that available records on the entire public service put the right figure at about 870,000 strong, the ASCSN Secretary-General also doubted that N1.8 trillion was being spent annually on public servants as personnel costs. But he did not volunteer any amount being expended annually on the 870,000 public employees. Nonetheless, the trade union called on the Federal Ministry of Finance (FMF) to make public a detailed breakdown of the personnel costs by various categories of public servants and political office holders.
To this extent, the FMF’s long silence and non-release of the requested information leave much to be desired. Year after year, the draft federal budget proposals speak copiously about progress made in eliminating ghost workers from the public service through a biometric verification exercise. After many years, “the Federal Government…set a December 2013 deadline for full implementation of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) and the Government Integrated Financial Management System (GIFMIS)”. Accordingly, and for the sake of transparency, the FMF should publish on the World Wide Web all necessary information on public servants without any further delay. The best way to fish out ghost workers is to list the employees according to the smallest administrative/operational units adopted by each ministry, department or agency to enable bona fide members of staff in such units to point out all strange and non-existent “workers” in their midst.
Instructively, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) biometrically registered 70 million voters in about three months just as the GSM operators captured the biometric data of about 120 million SIM card owners in about six months. Why is it taking an aeon for the FMF to collect requisite data on the relatively small number of public servants? By the way, practically all public servants are duly registered with both the INEC and the GSM operators. Is it not possible for the IPPIS, GIFMIS, INEC and the GSM operators to compare and share some data? Or has the FMF bloated the population of public servants (assuming the ASCSN figure is correct) by 40 per cent to serve some “hidden agenda” as it has been accused by the trade union?
Whatever its true staff strength is, the Federal Public Service is perceived in some quarters to be overstaffed and overpaid, unproductive and wasteful. It is claimed that its current output level will be unaffected even if the staff strength were reduced by half. Some blame the federal character principle for the overstaffing and suggest that a return to true federalism and rationalization of the statutory function of the central government will help prune down the public service. Yet others argue that the public service has much work to do and requires only retraining to effectively deliver. Under the democratic dispensation, several committees have looked into ways of carrying out necessary reforms of the public service while a particular committee recommended specific government agencies to be merged. But they have all come short and merely swelled the already excessive cost of governance which they had set out to reduce. In reality, perhaps, calls for the reduction of the size of the public service are out of place considering the high unemployment rate and the harsh production conditions facing the private sector.
Against that backdrop, an unbiased assessment should be made on the Budget Office’s charge to the House Committee on Health against acceding to the demands of striking public servants. The thrust of the BOF’s concerns echoes its 2014-2016 medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF) document. There has been annual provision of N1.8 trillion as personnel costs at least since 2012. But the BOF is uncomfortable that budget recurrent expenditure, which exceeds capital expenditure, is sprinting at the expense of the latter and, therefore, seeks to dissuade mounting pressure for increase in emoluments, pensions and so on. But why will the BOF, nay, government smack workers and ask them not to cry? With inflation rampaging at between eight and 11 per cent annually since 2009, the value of workers’ emoluments has correspondingly fallen in real terms. Because there is no inflation-linked clause in workers’ emolument agreements, the BOF should not ignore overdue calls by workers for upward adjustment of emoluments as they are bound to surface from time to time.
Very sadly, the FMF is responsible for the high inflation, the low budget capital expenditure ratio which the BOF bemoaned, the unproductive real sector and the prevailing high rate of unemployment. How? The average exchange rate dictated by the FMF via the BOF in the MTEP is the foundation of the managed float naira exchange rate regime. Its correct implementation will bring annual inflation below three per cent, collapse lending rates to mid-single digit across the board and guarantee a realistic exchange rate. With that outcome, the productive sectors will flourish, pay bountiful taxes to grow the budget size, access cheap bank credit with which to successfully execute public/private partnership capital projects that break identified infrastructural bottlenecks, create jobs that check influx into (or even drain personnel from) the public service and boost productivity generally.
However, rather than energise economic activity, the selfsame FMF, via the Federation Account Allocation Committee and the Accountant-General of the Federation, overturns the managed float naira exchange regime by causing the CBN to withhold Federation Account dollar allocations and to substitute in their place excessive deficit funds for the three tiers of government to spend. The adverse impact of the excessive fiscal deficits calls forth the CBN’s suffocating economy-contraction monetary measures that do not require any elaboration here. That is how the FMF, an arm of the core Civil Service, made and remakes the thorny economic bed on which Nigerians have lain for four decades on end. It is such a shame!
