STRIKES FOR DECENT WAGE PROVOKED BY JUMBO SALARIES

The politicians’ lion share of salaries and allowances are paid from the same pool where sheep’s share of minimum wage is taken. The solution is to cut the number of politicians and reduce mushroom jumbo salaries at every level to pay the workers’ minimum wage. There is a screw missing in the logic where a country can afford to pay billion naira and millions US dollars to lawmakers and administrators; leaving very little for poor workers and intellectuals. Consolidation of everyone’s pay will reduce inflation, level the playing field and bring prices down so that we can all buy basic necessities and more locally.


Most of us are tired of incessant strikes by many segments of our society. It disrupts our normal way of life in an already disorganized Country where anything hardly functions without power generators. Our children miss schools and some spend more time than they bargain for in our universities missing out on opportunities, husbands, wives and job creation or placements. Politicians cannot fool our professors that can calculate the Nation’s income and expenditure wasted in various sectors and on ghost workers.


Common now, we all know the solution to these high prices. There is nobody in Nigeria that does not know how much politicians are paid. They buy in the same market like us, price beyond our means or empty the selves before the average man can buy. So what we buy, we pay through our noses. Politicians prefer foreign contracts, goods and services because they can get their cut in foreign currency. It is no wonder they are the only ones that can afford these outrageous prices. They are the root cause of inflation.


Who will cut the salaries of these suckers dramatically and plug the loopholes by which they accumulate allowances and kickbacks? So as inflation dips, pay goes far. When the market cannot endure people willing to pay any price for their goods and landlords have to pay back the banks instead of building from looted funds to keep houses empty, rent and prices would go down with less demand from high rollers. There is too much money in the hands of politicians and their contractors driving up prices in the market.


It is only Africans they can’t afford to pay, even in their moneymaking private schools. Any worker can be recruited from oyibo country, called technical expert and paid better than Africans. Oyinbo mechanic is an engineer in Africa, made boss of African graduates. Any graduate is a professor of American standard and one of them pays a million dollars a month while African professors fight for naira pay. They donate looted money abroad but undermine our universities without their kids. They hire homeless people in oyibo countries to teach English in “international” primary and secondary schools and Africans rush to send their kids there. Like politicians; cars, housing and house helps come free.


However, our salary can hardly pay for inflated prices from rent to food resulting in low purchasing power. The landlords and the traders justify their high cost pointing to operating and prevailing market values inflated by looted funds. So those who are too decent to be kidnappers, militants or robbers, register the unfairness of arbitrary salary structure by industrial actions. Saro say na poor I poor no be craze I craze O!


As much as we blame relatives and friends for laying siege at the houses and offices of politicians for favors once appointed, they are only following the money that should have been channeled to them to encourage hard work and make them independent, not turned them into beggars. If you are not moneybags or without fat salaries and are mistakenly besieged, don’t be tempted to loot. As the inflation hit harder, relatives abroad are finding it increasingly difficult to send more money home to match or buy.


The logic of some corrupt leaders and crooks is that you can steal very little from a million people and easily become a millionaire. Since everyone starting with a million, by the end of six months to a year, some people will become billionaires and others will become poor. In other words, even if they are not crooks, it will not change the position of the poor and foolish. The cunning ones will always outdo the foolish. Politicians will tell you the amount of money they steal is not enough to make each of us rich or there is not enough money to pay minimum wage no matter what they pay themselves as salary and allowances. This is the way they justify their wayward lifestyle and tell the rest of us to suck on agbalumo.


You may have heard that the population of Nigeria in terms of our total income is less than that of New York City or California. They are saying we do not make enough money to take care of our people. In that case, a country like China or India that were starving when Nigeria had more than enough to eat would be hungrier and countries like Pakistan and Indonesia would not have left us behind despite their thorny problems.


The fault in that theory is that the amount of trillions they have stole could have been spent on infrastructures at home that could have facilitated small, medium and big businesses that people as industrious as Nigerians could have multiplied into wealth generating projects at home. Most businesses are hampered by insufficient generation of power, roads, transportation and discouraging interest on bank loans. The multiplier effect of sound infrastructure is creating jobs so that graduates can be gainfully employed depending less on government jobs and their foreign contractors.


Apart from the unfairness factor of easy money for some and none for others, most of us spend money the way we make it. Hard earn money is more likely to be put into productive endeavor than “easy comes easy goes” funds. We should not be surprised that we spend easy money on consuming frivolous foreign products that bring no return to our economy rather than on machineries that generate skilful jobs at home. It is the unfairness factor that contributes to incessant strikes in every sector.


People question the sincerity of those asking them for sacrifice in a country where those asking make no attempt to lay examples. We see crooks mounting podiums at several occasions to lecture us about sacrifice, tolerance, how to move the Country forward and the ills of corruption as we are stupid. The best politicians/military have been able to do is generate more jobs for cronies from local to national level of governments to loot us blind. It is one of the reasons people go on strikes.




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Articles by thewillnigeria.com