34.8 C
Asaba
Friday, November 22, 2024

Nigeria’s Uncivil Service: Dead Workers Drawing Living Wages

BY FOLA OJO

Nigeria is blessed with innumerable citizens who love their country and seek its success, peace, and prosperity. They are men and women with a sense of loyalty, indubitable love, and a deeply felt affective attachment to the nation.  These are called patriots. Amidst our countless patriots are the corrupt who unfortunately sit up high in the echelon of government. They use their positions to rob others of their patrimonies. They are quiet, often faceless, and are men and women we may never hear their names. But discreetly, they eat up Nigeria’s economic intestinal linings like the poisonous Australian Rattus sordidus Cane Toad Rat. These uncivil servants with their accomplices have destroyed Nigeria, and nobody is stopping them!

Each time I stumble on news reports of an avalanche of evil some of these uncivil servants wreak on Nigeria, my mind gets troubled, the words of the great Roman poet, philosopher, orator, lawyer and politician, Marcus Tullius Cicero, always come to mind. “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

Last Saturday, President Bola Tinubu was represented by George Akume, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, at the 2024 Civil Service Award and Gala Night where the following presidential expression was made: “While I was away in South Africa, I monitored some of the activities and especially read the shocking revelation by the head of service about hundreds of workers who had relocated abroad, without formally resigning their appointments and who were drawing salaries from the treasury, for years…..Although, the head of service said some of these fraudulent workers have been uncovered, she should not stop there…..The culprits must be made to refund the money they have fraudulently collected. Their supervisors and department heads must also be punished for aiding and abetting the fraud under their watch….” These were the words of Mr President.

What Mr President reportedly uncovered regarding Nigerian civil servants is the tip of the iceberg in the depository of rut ravaging the civil service and the governments at large. In this specific instance, the vented anger of Mr President was aimed only at the occurrences at the federal level. The Nigerian civil service structures are also loaded with demons of corruption and padded with ghost workers. Dead workers draw living wages in Nigeria. Retrenched workers stand immoveable on the payroll. Workers who have relocated abroad are still remunerated years after they leave the shores of the country.

Who are the facilitators of this evil on behalf of the felicitating fraudsters?  They are active civil servants who still hold desks, and who get a chunk of percentages of the heisted funds fraudulent workers have not worked for. Corruption has become like a ventilator that civil servants can’t disconnect from to stay alive. Fraudulent activities are like life-sustaining medicaments that they can’t wean themselves off. It may be true that there are some of our civil servants who make us proud and work hard daily and take a strong stand against profligacy and corruption. But a big chunk of the cuddlers of corruption in Nigeria are in the civil service.

No nation develops beyond the capacity of its public service. Despite all the corrective and sanitising measures put in place over the years in Nigeria; our civil servants remain inveterate under an ambience of corruption and financial recklessness. Many of them are adamantly incorrigible, irremediable, incurable and dangerously delinquent. They are crafty, cruel and callous pathfinders who wriggle through the matrix of purloining public funds without a trace. I call them the almighty with mind-boggling mastery in the methodical manipulation of facts and figures. They are a bunch of flourishing florid excrescence which has plunged Nigeria into the River Styx.

Like lizards, they operate in the corruption cornfield that if you sunder the tails, they grow longer ones. Over the years, I have run into some of them here in the United States when they come on vacation.  From New York to New Orleans, From Houston to Honolulu, and Chicago to Colorado they purchase mansions, Bentleys and Bugatti cash down and you begin to wonder how a man who earns the equivalence of $2,000 per annum is able to perform that miracle. The bad boys and beastly girls have splattered the mud of shame and suspicion on the few good ones in service. Until these rotten eggs are fished and flushed out and punished for their wrongdoings, the malodorous behaviour will continue unhindered.

Ghost workers are in every state aided and abetted by one powerful civil servant. For every ghost worker discovered, there is one breathing, living human being civil servant behind the veil illegally collecting the remuneration. It’s the same story everywhere and many have not been uncovered. If these civil servants oversee the Atlantic Ocean they will dry up its waters if money is involved. If they control the shining of the sun by day and the radiance of the moon by night, Nigeria will be in darkness if there are pecuniary benefits. If a heavenly downpour is committed into the trigger-fingers of many of these uncivil servants, they’ll make the heavens refuse to give its rain as long as there is an outpouring of the rain of moolah on their stolen vineyards. These corrupt government officials are only mauling moles working with others to wreak havoc on Nigeria. From their behaviours, it is clear that they don’t believe that Nigeria’s success and survival are worth preserving as they continue to mortgage it with greed and graft.

Nigeria is a good idea. It is an idea that must and can work for the good of all if we are committed to working it without wearing it out with plundering. It is an idea that must be preserved and protected. Any good idea in the hands of bad people becomes a bad idea. It is only in the hands of good people that a good idea thrives and survives. These killer-whale uncivil servants who have crept their way into crevices and fissures of government must be flushed out. But who will curb the incivility of the uncivil servants? I don’t know. Do you?

Related Articles

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Stay Connected

1,200FansLike
123FollowersFollow
2,000SubscribersSubscribe
- Advertisement -spot_img

Latest Articles

×