Dear reader, please take some time to study the table below. The table (civil service efficiency) shows the civil servants population, states population, the IGR generated and some ratios for the six SW sates. Please pay particular attention to Ekiti State and see how it stands with others, it will be clear to you how we are our own enemies.
I culled the above from Orebe’s Ekiti panupo colloquium – restoring Ekiti enterprise values and defining the pathway to lasting development in The Nations newspaper of Sunday 11/9/16.
Several times, I tried the reference URL(https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/profile_mask2.png.)to no avail. Each time, it returned error 404.
Now, Elder Femi Orebe is a celebrated and respected columnist. I have read his writings for years and have found him a serious writer with no frivolity and of course with enough integrity to spare.
So, I depend on his integrity to believe that this table is true, knowing that he would not have used the table if he had any iota of doubt about genuineness of the stats.
From the above, are we Ekitis not in a very serious trouble?
I am aware that the federal government and states do use most of their income in paying workers emoluments but I never knew it is this bad in Ekiti.
Ekiti state has 65000 civil servants to Lagos’s 47000 and yet we know Lagos is nearer 15million than 10million in population. Oyo’s population is twice that of Ekiti but her civil servants population is less than half of Ekiti and yet Oyo struggles to pay her civil servants. There is no where in this table where Ekiti shows any strength. It is a free fall all through.
In Ekiti, the civil servant figure is 2.4% of the population and they gulp a whopping 75% of public spending. How can a people progress like this? This is really a civil servants economy a typical ‘tomato and alubosa’ economy
What is the way out of this quagmire?
I am afraid, we all know the answer but nobody is willing to say it. Nobody is ready to bell the cat. We all sidetrack the answer pretending not to know while our state retrogresses.
The governments, the present one and the earlier ones know/knew but none had the political spine to take that decision.
The solution is not neuroscience; you do not need to be a Professor of business to entangle this. It is simple, if you are spending so much on so little, cut it.
I know a family of six here where all of them work with government. You are either a teacher or a worker in the local government or a worker in the ministry. When the government is late in paying, they are all broke, reigning curses on the government. I once asked them why they should all depend on the government.
Things cannot continue like this, Ekiti must learn to use their heads and hands.
It is our belief and this is wrong, that government is there to provide jobs. Yes, to some extent government can do that but governments are essentially to provide enabling environment for businesses to thrive.
In my local government, more than 50% of the workforce have nothing doing other than to sign and collect salaries at the end of the month and fat salaries for that matter. People cannot continue receiving 100k monthly without adding any values. It just doesn’t happen like that in sane climes.
I am not averse to civil servants being well paid but for God’s sake let every kobo be earned. Workers in the blue chips earn well but they earn it. Let our civil servants earn their pay.
So back to the question, what do we do? Simple, slash the workforce by 60%.
If Oyo state can survive with 32000, Ekiti will do well with much less. From this table, if Oyo can survive with 32000, Ekiti will not die with 16000 because Oyo is twice Ekiti State in both size and population.
In the computer world of today, nobody needs a secretary but in our ministries, a director has a secretary who in turn has a secretary. In between them they have 2 messengers and 2 cleaners in a two room office where they don’t handle five files in a day. What a waste.
We should stop deceiving ourselves; four people cannot be doing the work meant for a person and expect progress.
While saying this, the workers should not be snt home just like that. Care must be taken to reduce the pain to the barest minimum. The exercise must be properly structured and spread over a period of time. Ekiti has enough brains to set this up and implement, but we must all be ready to sacrifice. There is no baby without blood.Things cannot continue like it is.