Comrade Peters Adeyemi is the General Secretary of Non-Academic Union of Education and Associated Unions (NASU) as well as president of Public Service International (PSI) for Africa and Arabs Region. He speaks with selected labour correspondents on some burning labour issues in Nigeria. MOSES JOHN brings the details. Except
Challenges workers faced in 2021
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 last year with great hopes but unfortunately, it seems that the hopes of our members have been unfortunately dashed; things didn’t work out the way we have wanted.
Don’t forget that I operate in the education sector. And my members are essentially drawn from both the state and the federal governments. So what we can say is that federal government has managed up to this point to pay salaries of our members, because when you take job, you expect to be paid your salary and in our country today, it is an opportunity for salaries to be paid, something that is statutory, we have to thank government for paying workers for working.
I think it’s commendable that the federal government has been able to pay salaries up to this moment even though some of the MDAs as well as institutions are still struggling to pay even last November’s salary. But at least, it is heart-warming our salaries are paid up till this point at the level of the Federal.
Payment of salaries by states
At the states, it is clearly not something that you can say is good. We have some states that are currently battling to pay even in percentages, unfortunately. We have the state like Ondo which has been battling. They have a backlog of about five months, we also have a state like Benue with a backlog of about five months not paid at all and also the refusal of some of the state governments to even pay the national minimum wage.
Some of them started and had to stop, states like Gombe and Ekiti. It is clearly, negatively affecting the welfare and wellbeing of our members. The issue of salary itself, which is supposed to be something that you don’t take for granted, because naturally when you are employed, you expect to be paid. Unfortunately, salaries are no longer a right and that is very unfortunate. It’s supposed to be a right because when workers didn’t go to work, they’re queried, they are questioned even when salaries are not being paid and when you move from that level of uncertainty, then you contend with whether the salary is what is supposed to be. I remember that at the tripartite, we have six governors from the six geopolitical zones, we had NLC, TUC NECA, everybody, and Ama Pepple was our chairperson and the demand was originally over N56,000 and even after it has been signed into law and the President assented to it nothing is happening, so the value of the currency has depreciated massively, and have eroded the worth of the 30,000 minimum wage.
Exchange rate and N30.000 minimum wage
The Naira is currently exchanging for N585 in the black markets because the other markets under the supervision of CBN governor is not accessible by ordinary Nigerians. There are a whole lot of criteria. Forget about all these promo that if you go to one bank and they don’t give you report them but the question is report to who? The ordinary Nigerians doesn’t have access to power. So, with the unstable exchange rate, a dollar may soon be going for 600 and if we get to that point it will then mean that the N30,000 itself will just be about $50 unfortunately.
The relevance of salary is extremely very important. Even when you want to fight against corruption, you need to have a stable currency so that the salary will be worthwhile. For instance, if you have N10,000 when the currency is strong, it makes sense more than N50,000 when the currency is worthless .
IPPIS enrollment
One of the things that has been a real problem for our union is the IPPIS. According to the federal government, they wanted to use it to check corruption and reduce ghost workers in the system, and it is very obvious that three of the four unions in the universities and other centers keyed into the IPPIS while ASUU sustained its opposition. As at the time we keyed into it, we were deceived by government functionaries, they deceived us that our members, were not going to lose anything if we keyed into that system.
As public servants, we are expected to have some level of trust in our government. If we decided to key into that process to ensure accountability and transparency and there is sanity in the system, it should be seen that even trade union leaders are patriotic citizens of this country that want a forward movement as against a situation where a few elements at the helms of affairs in our tertiary institution use their exalted offices to hide under the personnel payment of salaries to siphon government money and that was why we keyed into it. But unfortunately, it didn’t happen the way we were told .
IPPIS became a disaster, and at a point it vindicated ASUU. It’s like ASUU saw it can never work for them to take that stance. When they started implementation in February 2020, we had avalanche of problems; some of our members were not paid at all, some of them were paid lower than what they are expected to be paid, some of the things that have never happened to payment of our members salaries started happening.
Earned allowances
On the payment of earned allowance in the university system, for us, 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 anyone.
Earned allowance is supposed to be something that is owed and what is owed is known; from the releases that government had made between 2019 and now, how much has been collected from what is owed? What is remaining to be paid?
When the first tranche was released and it was properly distributed, the second tranche when it was released it started generating problem 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 they released the second tranche, the distribution in percentages was done at the Federal Ministry of Education.
Then, it was about 11% to the non teaching staff and about 89% to the teaching staff. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make for equality, fairness, and justice. When you look at the number of the workers in those three unions compared with the workers in the academic, all of this theory doesn’t work.
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, be it academic or non academic so as to determine what remains to be paid. But because these guys wanted to turn this into bonanza, the federal government paid the so-called contractors, or consultants for this forensic audit, and as we speak, we have not seen the results of the forensic audit because government just prefers a situation where a few people will sit at the NUC and Federal Ministry of Education 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%, are you not considering that you ought to by now determine what you are owing them, must you continue to the detriment of other group?
Criminalising employers not paying wages
It is part of the minimum wage law that if you refuse you should be penalised. It’s not the first time that this law will be made and NLC will have to go chasing state governments for them to implement minimum wage, but most of the time they don’t succeed.
As we were doing that negotiation at that time for a new minimum wage, states like Plateau were not paying. They were paying below even 10,000 naira so if you have that type of situation, it means from the world go you are already aware that we are likely to contend with governors that will not pay.
