Prince Peters Adeyemi is the General Secretary of the Non-Academic Staff Union of Nigeria (NASU). As he scores the living condition of Nigerian workers in 2021, he lists in this interview with CHRISTIAN APPOLOS, that government’s insincerity in handling agreements with labour unions and particularly the earned allowance issue, deficiencies associated with IPPIS, value of salaries to the current prices in the market, discrepancies in payment of minimum wage, etc, are among the things that make the situation of Nigerian workers worse today than it were yesterday. Excerpts.
Welfare
The question; are Nigerian workers better today than even last year? The answer is no, because if you put one or two indices together, you will know that Nigerian workers are in worse condition today than yesterday.
When workers who generate the wealth of the nation are in a state of abject poverty, you cannot say that their lives are better. This government must be concerned about the level of poverty in this system. There have been so many governments so-called intervention projects and programmes, and I ask; is there a way the government evaluates these intervention projects and programmes and sees the level of impact? It is saddening.
What is the government doing about alleviating not only the poverty of ordinary Nigerians but the poverty of Nigerian workers who grow the economy?
When we talk of poverty, it doesn’t exist with politicians. They have all the wealth and resources to do whatever they want to do. Government should really be worried about the ripple effect of the widespread poverty that is seen even among workers. The continual wallowing of workers in abject poverty literally means that the fight against corruption can never succeed because people will have to find a way of surviving.
So I would say that this year has been extremely challenging generally for the Nigerian workers, essentially for members of my union in the education sector. We started this year with great hopes but unfortunately, it seems that the hopes of our members have been dashed unfortunately; things didn’t work out the way we had wanted.
Salary
We operate in the education sector and our members are essentially drawn from both the state and the Federal Government. To be fair, I can say the Federal Government has managed up to this point to pay the salaries of our members. So we have to thank the Federal Government for paying workers.
At the State level, it is clearly not good news. We have some states that are currently battling to pay in percentages, unfortunately. The sad thing is that salary is no longer a right in Nigeria and it is very unfortunate. The issue of salary is supposed to be something you take for granted because naturally when you are employed, you expect to be paid. But in Nigeria, the reverse is the case. Salary is no longer a right.
So when you put these few points together, you will see how negatively affected the welfare and well being of workers are in 2021.
The value of N30,000 minimum wage
In terms of value, the salary is no longer what it is supposed to be because of the gross devaluation of our currency. When we participated in the tripartite body that negotiated the N30,000 minimum wage, as at that time, the economic situation and the value of the currency wasn’t what it is today.
I remember that at the tripartite we had six governors from the six geopolitical zones. We had NLC, TUC, NECA. Ama Pepple was our chairman and the demand was originally over N56,000. It is sad today that even after it has been signed into law and the President assented to it, to pay it seems to be a problem for some state governments. Upon this, the value of our currency has depreciated massively, and has eroded the worth of the N30,000 minimum wage. This is a heavy blow to the economic well-being of workers and Nigerians at large.
Recently, the Naira was exchanging for about 585 in the black markets because the other markets under the supervision of the CBN governor are not accessible by ordinary Nigerians. If care is not taken before the end of the year, we’ll be doing one dollar to N600 and if we get to that point, it will then mean that the N30,000 itself will just be about $50.
The value of our currency is so poor that one can’t help to think whether there is a need at this moment for us (labour unions) to be agitating for an enhanced salary. This is as a result of the massive devaluation of the naira. The minimum wage increase is one of the very important steps that was taken by the government to make life better for workers, but it is unfortunately not respected by a whole lot of state governments and that for me is another major problem.
NASU is a union that operates in both the public and privately owned, federal and state institutions. Our members are clearly not happy. Some of the states are not paying the salaries they are supposed to pay. In Ondo, for a while now, the government had to be negotiating either to pay 50 per cent or 60 per cent, not of current salary but of months behind. It shows you clearly that the situation is extremely bad.
Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS)
Another topical issue that frustrated workers in our sector in 2021 is the IPPIS. According to the Federal Government, they wanted to use it to check corruption and reduce ghost workers in the system. So three of the four unions in the universities and other academic centres, keyed into the IPPIS but ASUU suspected the system and sustained its opposition. As at the time we keyed into it, we got deceived by the government.
As public servants, we are expected to have some level of trust in our government. So we decided to key into that process to ensure accountability, transparency and sanity in the system. It should be seen that even trade union leaders are patriotic citizens of this country that want a forward movement against a situation where few elements at the helm of affairs in our tertiary institution use their exalted offices to hide under the personnel payment of salaries to siphon government money.
So for this reason, we keyed into IPPIS but unfortunately, it didn’t happen the way we expected. IPPIS became a disaster, a massive disaster and at a point, it vindicated the ASUU opposition. It’s like ASUU saw that IPPIS can never work, so they took that stand to oppose it.
By the time the government started IPPIS implementation in February 2020, we had had an avalanche of problems. Some of our members were not paid at all, some of them were paid lower than their actual pay, some of the things that have never happened to payment of our members salaries started happening. Some strange deductions.
It is now like; look at the government who say they want to eradicate strange things unfortunately introducing strange things into the payroll. Prior to that time, this Federal Mortgage Bank thing was not happening in our universities, inter university centres, polytechnics and colleges of education, but suddenly it surfaced.
Our legitimate allowances we were being proud of, the advent of IPPIS removed it all. In fact, our members began to attack us that we should have followed ASUU in objecting to IPPIS.
We later found out that IPPIS was ill-equipped. The IPPIS operations were not sufficiently staffed and they did not have the wherewithal and expertise to deal with the situation. In fact, it became very clear to us thereafter that what they did was like eating more than what their mouth could chew at the same time.
Rather than take all of those sectors at the same time, they should have started doing them one after the other. Maybe take the colleges of education first and see whether in the experiment they will have some problem and correct it before going to polytechnics, universities and inter university centres. Unfortunately, they were clearly over-ambitious. They carried the three major sectors, college of agriculture, polytechnic, and universities together, and they didn’t have the manpower and the expertise so it overwhelmed them and collapsed.
To say the truth, some of those victories the Federal Government claimed to have won by introducing IPPIS, were clearly something not earned on merit. This is because, you can’t tell me that because of IPPIS you have saved some billions, when in actual fact, while you are doing the implementation, you are shortchanging the workers. So the successes that you are declaring are to the detriment of workers.
If you say that when you start IPPIS in federal polytechnics and Nigerian universities and institutions you have saved one billion naira, it is not true because those savings are the legitimate earnings of the workers which you have not paid them. That is the problem that we have.
Government celebrated that in the civil service they used IPPIS to save so much and that they want to make such savings in other sectors. Our experience has shown clearly that those advertised achievements were fake; you are sitting down on our allowances, then you say you are making savings.
We have been accused on several occasions that we disrupt educational calendars, we don’t allow things to work well but this one we embraced. So ASUU has been vindicated unfortunately. And because of our bitter experience with IPPIS, we have to pass a vote of no confidence on IPPIS at our last NEC meeting. That’s one major issue that honestly we are pained by in this union. For us, it’s like jumping from a frying pan into fire.
Earned allowance
On the issue of payment of earned allowance in the university system, it is like the more you look, the less you see for the non-teaching staff unions. The earned allowance is not supposed to be a bonanza or an item designed to pacify.
Earned allowance is supposed to be something that is owned and what is owned is known. From the releases that the government had made between 2019 and now, how much have the unions collected from what is owed? What is remaining to be paid?
When the first tranche was released, it was properly distributed. The second tranche, when it was released, started generating problems because it was not done in line with the way it was first done. Payments are supposed to be dealt with by the bursary departments of the various institutions, because they have the facts and the figures, they know the number of staff both teaching and non-teaching that are there, they have records of who is owed what.
But when the government released the second tranche, the distribution in percentages was done at the Federal Ministry of Education. And the distribution was about 11 per cent to the non-teaching staff and about 89 per cent to the teaching staff. It doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t make for equality, fairness and justice.
When you look at the numbers of the workers in those three unions compared with the workers in the academics, all of these theories don’t make sense. I listened to funny one by the Minister of State for Education a couple of weeks back where he said because there are professors in academics and their money is big, that is why the academics must have the lion share of the money. Obviously, his argument lacks logic because even for the non-teaching staff, there are also highly paid workers in the system.
When all these were going on, the unions demanded that there should be a forensic auditing of the previous releases to determine what has been paid to each staff; academic or non academic. This was also to determine what remains to be paid.
But till today, we have not seen the results of the forensic audit, because the government just prefers a situation where a few people will sit at the NUC and Federal Ministry of Education and because majority of them are academics, they just sit down and say 80/20.
So the question is, if you have been paying some group at 80 per cent, are you not considering that you ought by now to be closing to the end of what you are owing them, must you continue?
Fuel Subsidy removal and proposed pump price hike
Government sells a well package lie to Nigerians. If you ask me, I will join Mr President (Muhammadu Buhari) who said that there is no subsidy. The President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria said he doesn’t believe that there is subsidy and my feeling is that some people in government are just engaged in disrupting Nigeria’s progress.
Are you not amazed that this so-called subsidy removal is not going to end? When Buhari came into office, Buhari himself who said he didn’t believe that there was a subsidy was pressurised by the bureaucrats because the government needed to generate more money and the easiest way government can generate money is to change the pump then more money will start coming.
When Buhari came we tried to resist the fuel price increase. I still remember we were freshly coming out of elections and the government used the election against the unity and got what it wanted.
On the eve of the strike, the TUC withdrew because the government had gone on propaganda that they had N500 billion which they later said was social intervention fund. That was how that struggle was killed. We were even stoned by Nigerians who said we should give Buhari some time, and we suspended that strike.
There was no N500 billion, it was a lie. Because at the end of the day, a technical committee was established as a result of the various interventions. Government asked the labour to send representatives, I was the leader of NLC delegates. NUPENG, TUC and the electricity sector were all represented and as fate would have it, I was virtually like the leader of the entire team and when we got there we found out there was nothing. No money.
We invited the NNPC and at the end, the N500 billion money was just on paper. The labour team made a presentation and told the government; if you increase the pump price, there will be an increase in house rent, transportation, etc. So you will have to put in a transport allowance and rent subsidy to cushion the effect. There were a whole lot of things we articulated. In fact at some point, the then Minister of Finance said they were building houses that they will take us there but she never did.
Government’s threat to sanction unions over ‘unlawful picketing due to lack of education’
It is clearly a lack of honesty on the part of the government that is responsible for incessant strikes and I have abundant evidence to show.
For example, the government said the payment of the arrears for the consequential adjustment of the national minimum wage will be paid to members of NASU in university and inter university centres, immediately the supplementary budget is passed and assented to by Mr President. But the supplementary budget has been assented to five months ago and the money provided, but the minimum wage arrears are not paid by the government.
This is the kind of situation that causes serious agitations because that aspect of the MoA has not been implemented. So with that level of insincerity on the part of government you say there won’t be strike, there will be strike.
2022, industrial peace, a better year for workers
2022 is just around the corner, if the situation remains the way it is, I cannot guarantee that there will be industrial peace. We have even gone to the point of saying pay the arrears of the minimum wage while you are trying to deal with the issue of the earned allowance but nothing has been done.
With all these issues and many more, there is nothing that will make one say there will be industrial peace in 2022, I don’t think so.
We already know that once it is months away from elections, attention will be focused on politicking and the mass of the people will suffer. I cannot see this one differently. The pattern and the attitudinal disposition of the politicians do not point to any direction that it will be different.
However, we are ready to follow them whichever way they want it. One thing for sure is that workers will get their voter’s card and vote them out. If they want to make 2022 better for us, we do the same for them.
and then