The notice served by President Olusegun Obasanjo to the effect that the federal workforce, estimated at 180,000, would be pruned is unsettling to Labour which analysed the situation and warned that the cost of the move, if carried out, would outweigh the benefits.
All the trade unions in the National Joint Negotiating Council (NJNC) are being summoned to a meeting scheduled to hold in the next three weeks to decide an appropriate response to the retrenchment threat.
Labour sources told Sunday Vanguard at the weekend that the proposed purge may slice off about 40 percent of the federal workforce, leaving behind 108,000 workers.
Obasanjo had at the 34th yearly conference of the Civil Service Commissions in the Federation held in Abuja last Monday told civil servants to brace up for a radical cut in their number.
The President explained that there was no way government could continue to keep the current size of the service without inflicting fur-ther injury on the economy, saying “until recently, government was allocating nearly 80 percent of its resources to recurrent expenditure while only 20 percent was deployed to capital projects”.
He also accused civil servants of being inefficient and engaging in waste, misplaced priorities, corruption, outdated technology among others, the very reason which, according to him, made many of them unsuitable for the on-going economic reforms.
The general secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Public Corporations, Service Technical and Recreational Services Employees (AUPCTRE), Comrade Sylvester Ejiofoh, told Sunday Vanguard weekend that the trade unions in the Federal Civil Service would meet under the aegis of the National Joint Negotiating Council (NJNC) not only to take a common stand on the presidential notice but also send a proposal to the presidency on the on-going reforms in the public service.
Ejiofoh said: “You cannot isolate the civil service or public service from the polity. What befell the civil servants under prolonged military rule was just natural. The civil service or the public service had to work in an atmosphere in which the governance or those in power want or else they will be charged for disloyalty. As far as we are concerned, there is a need to reform the civil service.
There is no doubt about that. But the reform should not lead to retrenchment”. “I believe that there abounds wealth of knowledge and experience on reforms which have made other countries’ public service very productive, very efficient, well focused and purposeful. But where you make retrenchment a part of reform, there is a problem. Retrenchment or employment should be a consequence of reform, not an objective of reform”, the AUPCTRE scribe stated.
He continued: “To that extent, I think Mr. President should look again at the situation and he would find out that the civil service at the federal level of just over 180,000 is not too much for over 130 million people. The entire country’s public service including the states and local governments, excluding the army and the police, are a little less than three million and for a country as vast as this, a better policy should be how do we use our public service and employees optimally and efficiently in order to save cost, in order for them to perform in such a way that they can be cost-effective? But to take the easy way of retrenchment is wrong.
“If you retrench without changing the system, you will still get the same thing. In any case, the cost of retrenching now, the cost of pruning down the civil service to 60 percent or whatever number is a serious disincentive.
All the trade unions in the National Joint Negotiating Council (NJNC) intend to meet and send to Mr. President some proposals and our positions on it. Maybe in the next two weeks the notice of the meeting will be sent out”, he added.
Unions reject corruption charge
On corruption in the public service which the President accused workers of, he declared: “I said earlier, what could have happened if there was no civil service or public service? Whatever trait you find in the civil service is a trait which it derived not from its own inherent defect, but because the regimes in which they worked, were not patriotic, not transparent, not purposeful."
“So, the civil servants work under what you might call a failed state, what do you expect from that kind of public service? Why is it that the public service that functioned very well during the colonial period, functioned very well up to 1966 could not afterwards?
When the army came in, what did they do? They began to truncate the public service and decimate it gradually to the extent that when they left, what do you expect from it? “You see, the changes that have come up in the civil service in the past five years when the army disengaged are not changes which have addressed the issue of work performance in the public service. For instance, government has not stopped contracting out jobs for which it has the public service?
“These are practices that became endemic under the various military regimes that jobs for which you have competent civil servants existing, you contract them out. Have they solved the problems of tools for work? It has not. Even at the healthcare sector, you go to hospitals, there are no drugs. Is that the fault of the nurses or those who are involved in healthcare?
“These changes they brought in have not addressed the critical issue of work performance and how to make the public servants or civil servants work optimally. No public servant goes to work and is happy loitering about. Efficiency and modern management are not solely meant for private sector. They can be introduced into the public sector. But in doing that, you do not do it in abstract”.
