WITHHELD SALARIES: ADELEKE’S FAULTY STEPS

Mutatis mutandis, politics is not the same as repudiating the ethics of public administration. To say that the executive governor of a state has the right or power to stop the payment of workers’ salary – what they earn legitimately – is, to say the least, an evolution throwback! That the society could not be bothered, due to political reasons or factors, is also a tragedy!

The Governor of Osun, Ademola Adeleke, has done the unprecedented by withholding the November 2022 salary and allowances of public servants (political appointees) in the state. Not only that, he has also refused to pay the half-salary arrears of the same category of people! If those people were not entitled to the salaries and allowances in the first place, that would have been a different matter entirely.

Section 15 of the Labour Act states that “wages shall become due and payable at the end of each period for which the contract is expressed to subsist (daily, weekly or at such other period as may be agreed upon) provided that where the period is more than one month, the wages become due and payable at intervals not exceeding one month.” Without doubt, this and other relevant statutes are equally ingrained in various international human rights instruments to which Nigeria is a signatory.

Well, it’s not only Adeleke who’s guilty of this wrong act. The technocrats and the administrative staff working with and/or for him are also to be blamed. Give it to him! The public may be asking for too much if it assumed that the governor should be versed in public administration. But what about the paid professionals, who’re working for him? In sane climes, at least, one of them should have told him that doing such was against the norms of public service; and that, if the abnormality was allowed to stay, it’d become the norm. If, per adventure, Adeleke is booted out today, another governor that comes in will also do whatever pleases him, not necessarily according to the dictates of the ethics of public administration. So, somebody needs to tell the governor that withholding the people’s salary, illegitimately, is not a civilised way of flaunting power in the 21st century.

With the helpful service of hindsight, that members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the Osun State House of Assembly (OSHA), even with a clear majority in the House, failed woefully to stand for the people, is no longer news! Come to think of it, salaries of functional public servants – some of them apolitical – whose only crime was that they worked for former governors of the state from another political bent were withheld! Still, our Honourable Members kept mute! People who were previously employed by the state were also sacked but, instead of siding with the dispossessed and the distressed, OSHA members were busy fighting over Christmas gifts, with rumours of impeachment proceedings flying hither and thither like loose papers. Is it any wonder they were ramblingly using former Governor Rauf Aregbesola as a cover-up for their inadequacies? Well, the good news about Nigeria’s emerging democracy is that elected representatives who fail to fulfill their election promises can now be booted out during elections. Thankfully too, the barometer of politics is now easier measured when one understands how to measure the street credibility profile of a candidate.