By ETHELBERT Okere
It is not entirely surprising that some people are trying to
reap political capital from an observation I made in an interview with
some Owerri-based newspapers on the pensions matter in our dear state,
Imo. I have also observed that some pensioners themselves took offense
at my comment. One actually called me to say that I was “cruel” while
another said I was “unkind”.
One political commentator claimed that it “was another page of
excuses and blames on Imo workers and pensioners for the failure of this
clueless, inept and incompetent regime to pay salaries and pensions for
many months”. Another gale of rhetoric on clichés. He continues: “But
the only worry is that it’s coming from a clergyman of a sort that
touches lives with his heart-searching and heart rending sermons”. The
fellow wrote further: “No blame at all should be leveled against the
hated and flogged unpaid pensioners and serving workers.”
I had in response to an observation by one of the reporters to
the effect that the worry about government’s efforts to get to the root
of the matter is that it “seems to be lasting forever”, I told them that
complaints about unpaid salaries and pensions did not start with the
current administration in the state and that because the matter of
delayed salaries and pensions is perennial, it has become a handy weapon
for most workers and pensioners to explain themselves out of
embarrassing financial situations.
I think the statement is innocent and straight forward enough
and did not in any way suggest that pensioners or civil servants are to
be blamed for the delays. I don’t know where that interpretation came
from. Ordinarily, my attitude to the tendency of some elements to reap
political capital out of the pensions challenges is to see it as cheap,
but now that it is becoming increasingly evident that the matter will
remain susceptible to convenient semantics, I think we would do our
state no better good than to be more exhaustive in our appraisal of it.
At no time has the administration of His Excellency, Senator Hope
Uzodimma, blamed the pensioners and civil servants for the wages and
pensions logjam. Where he has laid blame squarely on is on the humongous
and perennial financial scam that has been visited on the collective
patrimony of the people in the past eight years and even beyond.
Thus, although it goes without saying that some of the
pensioners and serving civil servants might have been, directly and
indirectly, complicit in the perennial heist, no government would use
that as an excuse to deliberately delay payments. In at least two
previous outings, I expressed the view that any governor who, knowing
full well that salary and pension bills were fraudulently manipulated
and goes ahead to approve such bills, becomes part of the fraud.
Differently put, I think we should set such a standard and the time to
start is now.
I laugh each time I read or hear that the immediate past
administration, headed by the highly cerebral and down to earth fellow,
His Excellency, Rt. Hon. Chukwuemeka Ihedioha, perfected everything
about pensions before he left office after just seven months. In at
least three articles, I had kept asking, “How?”. At the risk of sounding
repetitive, let me once again note that the former governor should feel
embarrassed with such superlatives, because it is simply impossible.
One of those who commented on my interview under reference even wrote
among inter lia, “… if Uzodimma wanted, he too should have sustained the
great pace and tempo of good works set by the governor he took over
from …” And I asked: “Great Pace?” How?
Just last week, an internal audit report in one of the most
strategic agencies of government in the state, the Imo State Universal
Basic Education Board (IMSUBEB), showed that more than sixty dead
persons are still in its payroll and that several people who are above
the retirement age of sixty are still in its employ while not less than
forty members of staff who had absconded for years are still in its
payroll. Now, if such a discovery is just being made through an internal
audit exercise, not one conjured up by Governor Uzodimma to target
Ihedioha, as some of his people would claim, then how “great” was the
previous pensions verifications exercise made under His Excellency, Rt.
Hon. Emeka Ihedioha?
In an earlier report, it had been discovered that 1000 people
who retired as far back as 1976 are still in the pensions payroll of the
state. In a rebuttal, one of the former administration’s insiders said
the figure is 14 and not 1000 and I said in my own reaction: “ show us
the fourteen because at age 104 at least, they deserve a special
attention from the state government, not just pensions”. As I noted in
the interview that is now a bone of contention, mum has been the word
since then. Ditto for the matter a N330 million which was being cornered
by just eight people. Three names sakes of the eight names mentioned in
the report came out to say that they knew nothing about the fraud and I
said in a response: “where are the other five?”
In the same rebuttal, a key functionary in the administration
admitted, in black and white, that part of the pensions verification
exercise under Governor Ihedioha were yet to be concluded and uploaded
into the server by the time that administration was terminated. I ask:
Is that not good enough reason? What is wrong in admitting that because
of the unexpected exit of His Excellency, Rt. Hon. Ihedioha, from
office, he could not complete the exercise and indeed could not continue
with the bright ideas he had on how to take the state to the next
level? Let me ask for the umpteenth time: How could an exercise that
lasted for only about three months been able to correct a monumental
pensions scam that had existed for at least sixteen years? How could,
how could, how could…!! Please somebody should give me a cup of water!
Going back to the main topic of today, however, it is a petty
that some of the pensioners felt the way they felt with my observations
in the interview in question but I as I noted earlier in this article,
it was not intended to shift the blame over the pension logjam to them.
Conversely, I think they should also repudiate any ploy to reduce the
matter entirely to that of “we versus them” or indeed, “we versus Hope
Uzodimma”. Differently put, they should resist being dragged into an
unnecessary dramatization of their plight by those who may be hell bent
on using the current challenges they are confronted with as a weapon for
political self or group aggrandizement.
Let’s face the reality as Ndi Igbo who are essentially
conservative, I think it gives a wrong signal of a family whose aged
father or mother is seen carrying a placard on the streets for
whatsoever reason. In other words, I want to assume that it might not be
true, after all, that those who have been seen protesting on the
streets of Owerri were hired by the so called opposition. I am inclined
to so believe because not one rebuttal has come from the genuine
pensioners to say that those protesting were hired.
On the matter on Tuesday August 3, 2020 during which a faction
of the pensioners disagreed on a planned protest and there was clash,
some people claimed that one of the factions was fake and was hired by
the government to “flog” the genuine ones. Yet, there has been no word
from the real pensioners repudiating the fake ones and indeed taking
measures to ensure the total elimination of the fake amongst them. Even
so, government does not need to take such extreme measures as flogging
since it is on top of the situation.
As I noted earlier, if the genuine pensioners yield to the
antics of some politicians to use them as cannon fodder, then it may
become necessary for the rest of the society – not every Imolite is a
pensioner or civil servant – to begin to interrogate the matter with all
the required rigor; which means that it will no longer be as simple as
matching out into the streets to protest since by so doing, the
pensioner may, knowingly and unknowingly, trample on the rights of the
other citizen.
As a matter of fact, some of the pensioners can, by every
measure, be described as “elder statesmen” or women; which means that,
even as hard as things are today, they are still expected to do the
things with the hesitance of age. This is why I believe that those who
went to town to say that some of the pensioners were flogged, when
nothing like that happened, are those to be sanctioned for dragging the
collective esteem of our elders statesmen to the mud.
In any case, I advise Ndi Imo that we should not make another
song and dance about “flogging” because our fellow compatriots out there
will say to us: “There You Go Again”. They would remind us that ten
years ago, we claimed that a certain Rev. Father was flogged and as a
result of which we nearly pulled down our state. Yet, less than two
years after, those who master minded the false allegation came out to
confess that there was no such thing. An entirely new song was waxed to
repudiate an earlier one that heralded the alleged flogging. The rest of
Nigeria would tell us that whatever we are suffering today, including
the pension palaver, got impetus from that fake tale about flogging. So,
let our elder statesmen and women, the pensioners, stop subscribing to
this caricature of the collective image of our dear state
Differently put, the pensioners, whether individually or
collectively, should endeavour to comport themselves better and not to
allow anybody drag their image to such a low that even a mere
contemplation of flogging their aging bodies could exist. Fortunately
but ironically, they can find solace in the wisdom of the Lagos kid:
“CALM DOWN”; and trust that the Uzodimma administration is on top of the
situation.
