In 2008, my older sister took what turned out to be a poor career move. Fresh out of a short stint at a bank following her degree, NYSC, C++ and Java certification programs, and Lagos Business School MBA all at the ripe old age of 23, she decided that the pell-mell of the private sector was not for her. She decided to take up a role in the Lagos State Civil Service. Getting in with the benefit of unusually superior qualifications, young age and indigency was quite easy, and she got her appointment letter to resume at Grade Level 08.
Her net monthly salary? The princely sum of…just over N32,000 at the time. To put that in perspective, as a management trainee at the bank in 2007, her net monthly pay then as a 22 year-old was N120,000. Assuming one promotion every 3 years, she could expect to be approaching senior management and a 7-figure monthly salary by age 34 as a banker. At the central governing institution of Lagos State however, the same individual could only expect at the same age and rate of progress to earn less than a quarter of the equivalent private sector sum.
Unsurprisingly, she struggled to remain suitably motivated and within 18 months she resigned her role to go back to a role in the private sector. In the intervening 12 years since then, not a lot has changed. In Lagos and across the country, the wages of the Nigerian public servant who is not in political office continue to vary from anaemic to completely unliveable. This I believe, is one of the biggest structural problems with Nigerian governance.
Process Thinking vs Magical Thinking
A few days ago, I received the following payslips from active Lagos State Government employees. I redacted all identifying information to protect their privacy.
It will not have escaped the notice of a keen eye that payday loan companies and loan sharks are present on the list of automatic deductions from source. According to my source, the payslip which delivers a net payment of N13,000 after loan deductions, belongs to a single mother with children. What are the only possible outcomes of such a situation?
Process thinking dictates that the presence of stressors such as clear financial stress, huge indebtedness and significant disparity from private sector wages in roles of comparative skill and experience provide an incentive for poor work ethic and petty corruption. It also dictates that the presence of opportunities for arbitrage and black market activities abound in the civil service, which controls many essential services to citizens. Thus to the process thinker, a public service that delivers payslips like this can only be a highly corrupt one – regardless of whether the public servants employed therein are ‘good’ people or not.
Magical thinking on the other hand, ignores all of the aforementioned and focuses exclusively on the perceived lack of moral fibre displayed by public servants who engage in such petty corruption. When I raised this issue recently on social media in the context of underpaid police officers, one of the responses went along the lines of “It doesn’t matter what you pay them. They have to see it as a service to the country.” Magical thinking completely ignores the reality of selfish human nature and the need to control for adequate positive motivation. Unfortunately, Magical thinking abounds in Nigeria, which is why this conversation typically fails to reach any solid conclusion.
Solving the Nigerian public sector wage crisis
To cut a very lengthy think piece short, the obvious way of fixing the problem of terminally under-motivated public servants and the attendant institutional corruption this breeds is to significantly reduce the size of the public service and use the savings to improve compensation across board. There was no Eureka moment while writing this, because this exact recommendation was made to the Ibrahim Babangida administration by the IMF as far back as 1987 – none of this is new information.
It is well known that public institutions across Nigeria harbour a surfeit of excess staffing because Nigeria’s oil boom-era policy conditioning refuses to wear off. Nigerian state and federal governments continue to use the public sector as a jobs and rewards program for their political constituency, family and cronies. Drastically cutting off all the excess in the public sector that takes up vast amounts of budget without any corresponding value added or productivity is not an idea that I came up with – the Steve Oronsaye report from 6 odd years ago says pretty much everything in this paragraph, but in many more words.
The issue as always, is that while the solution is obvious to those who have the benefit of education and intellectual soundness, it is precisely these people who tend to be the most disingenuous on the subject for selfish reasons. At a time when the insolvent Nigerian state is effectively running a debt ponzi scheme – using new debt to pay off old debt and just about keep the country out of a ruinous default – APC national leader Bola Ahmed Tinubu recently mounted a podium in Kano and advocated for the expansion of the state by a further 50 million pay checks. Even though this number was later revised down to 50,000, it tells a clear story about how come Nigeria’s political class continually refuses to take the obvious and rational steps to solve the biggest issue with the public sector.
Once again as with so many other things, the issue is not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of political will. This means that once again, we have to hope that the Nigerian state’s ponzi scheme unravels as it did in the late 1980s, in order for common sense to prevail. Hopefully if and when that happens, it will do so peacefully.
