It has often been argued that Sub-Saharan Africa and Nigeria in particular is different and that it, therefore, requires innovative local solutions to solve its development problems. Thus, while speaking this week during the two-day 25th Nigerian Economic Summit (NES25), President Muhammadu Buhari gave a charge to public and private sector leaders to look inward to solve the unique challenges militating against the nation’s socio-economic development.
‘‘In your deliberations, I would request that your proposals are productive, inventive and innovative keeping in mind that N igeria’s unique challenges can only be solved by made in Nigeria solutions,’’ the president said.
Of course, the president was right to say so. For too long Nigeria has borrowed solutions from mainly the United States of America and Europe to solve its peculiar problems and for so little or never had the borrowed solutions solve our local problems, thereby necessitating the need for the country to look inward.
It is important to say that with its vast human and material resources, Nigeria must utilize its potentials to realise the dream of its founding fathers to be the leading light in Africa and black world. However, this dream can only be realised if, as the the president meant, public and private sectors’ leaders understand local solutions to mean a process where the local actors shape and share the future of their territory.
We could expand that to mean a participatory process that encourages and facilitates partnership among the local stakeholders, enabling the joint design and implementation of strategies, mainly based on the competitive use of the local resources, with the final aim of creating decent jobs and sustainable economic activities.
Local socio-economic development strategy can also be seen as the process by which public, business and non-governmental sectors come together to collectively create better conditions for socio-economic growth and employment generation with the aim of improving the quality of life for all citizens. This way of using local resources for development is, no doubt, in line with the participatory and or inclusivity approach talked about by the president during the summit.
Interestingly, working together or participatory approach can lead to checking the spread of corruption, especially in a country like Nigeria, where corruption has become widespread. Corruption is at the root of many of Nigeria’s problems and it takes many forms and infiltrates all political institutions and economic sectors.
Public officials charged with the responsibility of building the country and fight any form of corruption where, until the advent of the Buhari-led administration, stealing from the public treasury and impoverishing the people that elected or appointed them to serve.
Though it is often argued, and the argument is believable, that other than corruption, another problem Nigeria has is lack of political will, especially on the parts of previous administrations, to do certain things. The nation’s problems are known but the powers that had been have refused to address them.
Some reports and studies abound that contain local solutions to many of the nation’s problems, which are getting worse. Clearly, the previous governments, for whatever reason, have refused to effectively address the causes of the country’s problems or, in many cases, chose to import solutions to only treat symptoms of the problems.
Treating the symptoms cannot bring solutions and that is what the current government has realised and also decides to allow Nigerians to air their views on how to solve the country’s socio-economic problems so long as the proposals on how to achieve that are productive, inventive and innovative.
In a nutshell, this shows that the problems in Nigeria cannot be solved by government alone. Government must involve the communities, especially on the question of insecurity. The traditional rulers, who are the custodians of what happens in the rural areas, and their subjects, have to be involved.
Thankfully, the president pledged that his administration would continue to collaborate with the private sector in designing and implementing developmental projects that will keep Nigeria on track for sustained, inclusive and prosperity-driven growth.
Why IPPIS enrollment is necessary
Nigeria is a country bedeviled by corruption. Corruption is widespread and deeply rooted in the fabric of the country and the public service is not spared of this vice.
Different approaches are adopted by public servants, chief among which is the injection of fictitious names into payroll to defraud the country.
To arrest this ugly trend, President Muhammadu Buhari said this week that any government worker not captured on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) would not be paid his or her salary with effect from end of October this year.
The president said this while presenting the 2020 Appropriation Bill to the joint session National Assembly in Abuja.
He said government intends to manage personnel costs in line with its fight against corruption. “I have directed the stoppage of the salary of any Federal Government staff that is not captured on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) platform by the end of October 2019,” he said.
Earlier this year, the president revealed that nearly $550 million has been saved from identifying ghost employees in the federal government payroll in the past four years. Also, the Federal Civil Service Commission said over 30 percent of the workers on its payroll are phantom staff.
Similarly, almost every workers’ verification exercise carried out by agencies of government has thrown up thousands of fake workers who are on the payroll. These ghost workers have been receiving regular salaries and allowances for a long time and the sum runs into billions of naira.
Well, the president finds it unacceptable that no concrete action has been taken to get to the bottom of such fraud and bring the wrath of the law to bear on the perpetrators.
After all, the present administration was elected into office with the agenda of fighting corruption and Nigerians must see the administration to be doing that. Of course, it will not be out of place for the administration to determine how and when some of these ghost names got on the payroll and for how long they have been there.
This form of corruption, which runs into hundreds of billions of naira every year – from the federal to the state to local government – thrives because there is no willingness, previously, to tackle the menace. It is, therefore, time for the Buhari-led administration to end the ghost workers’ menace and save Nigeria billions of Naira stolen by few selfish and powerful public officials.
However, to achieve this objective, the government needs to fashion and use measures that can truly and effectively fight the problem of ghost workers in most government establishments because. Otherwise, those responsible for inflating the actual number of workers and fleecing the nation will keep smiling to the banks.
Happily, since the introduction of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), several cases of the fraud have been uncovered through the use of biometric data capture machine. Many of the fake workers who have regularly survived the pay-at-sight exercises embarked upon by Ministry, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) failed to survive the forensic scrutiny of the IPPIS.
In the MDAs today, there are reportedly several fictitious names on the payroll. Unfortunately, while unions operating in universities – ASUU, SSANU and NASU – have been proactive in championing procedural and tactical transparency in the management of workers’ data, they have remained notoriously opposed to biometric for the workers’ verification exercise.
The unions, especially ASUU, notoriously refused to allow their members enroll in the IPPIS. Of course, it is regrettable that well-intended approach aimed at curbing the menace of corruption should be opposed by those who, ideally, should be at the vanguard of the action.
Ideally too, it is the duty of labour unions and associations in the country to protect the interest of workers, and protecting such interests which include ensuring that Nigeria is not defrauded in their name.
Trade union leaders should also be at the forefront of ensuring that resources that could be used to employ the ever growing number of unemployed youth are not stolen by a few selfish individuals. And this makes their support for the enrollment of government workers across all strata of public service on the IPPIS platform imperative.
