Former presidential aide, Laolu Akande, has warned that it is unfair and unsustainable for politicians to enjoy huge pay while other public workers remain poorly paid.
He stated this while reacting to the plan by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) to increase the salaries of political office holders.
He warned that increasing the salaries of political office holders without first addressing the poor remuneration of civil servants across Nigeria amounts to discrimination.
Speaking on his weekly Inside Sources with Laolu Akande on Channels Television, Akande described the wage structure in Nigeria’s public service as “warped, corroded by corruption and financial malfeasance.
“Due to the pervasive culture of corruption in the land, the salaries paid in the public service have become nothing but a joke in our beloved country. Today in Nigeria, governments pretend to pay decent salaries and workers also pretend to collect,” he said
Akande lamented that the current minimum wage of ₦77,000 is far from adequate to meet the basic needs of Nigerian workers, pushing many civil servants below the poverty line.
“Some director cadre in the civil service gets as low as ₦400,000, and the permanent secretary gets ₦1 million, a college professor struggles at times with as low as ₦300,000 monthly. Then how about the police? Oh, don’t let’s even talk about that just to save our own faces. Their take-home is not something to talk about.”
The imbalance, he argued, is more glaring when compared to the running costs of federal legislators
“A DPO, that’s a divisional police officer, hardly gets ₦100,000 a month as running costs for the office. But our senators and federal legislators are collecting over ₦20 million as running expenses per month. How that makes sense is best left to conjecture,” he added.
Akande insisted that poor remuneration fuels corruption in the public service and called for a comprehensive review of salaries across the board.
“Our remuneration and emoluments in the public service is warped and has been corroded by financial malfeasance and official grafts. If we pay people in the public service well, we should be able to morally and properly punish corrupt public officials and curb the pervasive corruption in our country. A policeman carries live ammunition and has the licence to kill but he receives a pay that makes a mincemeat of his personal dignity and then we scream of corruption in the police.”
Akande stressed that political appointees might deserve a raise, but only alongside all other categories of public servants:
“Now, political appointees deserve the salary increase that is being proposed, but so too the entire public service in Nigeria. Everybody in public service deserves the increase. Fair is fair.”
He rejected the argument that government cannot afford to pay decent wages, pointing instead to the staggering cost of corruption:
“Please, don’t be confused by those who say governments can’t afford to pay decent and competitive salaries. Here is the truth. The value of the huge cost of widespread corruption of public funds will come in handy to help. In 2023 alone, an estimated sum of $721 billion was paid in this country to public officials as bribes. $721 billion in one year. That’s an estimate.”
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