Jumbo Pay In Nigeria: The Final Solution

By Banji Ojewale

Far north of Nigeria, a state governor directs all public officials to withdraw their children from private schools and move them to government-owned ones. About the same time, the celibate daughter of a former Vice-President just sworn-in as a commissioner in one of the troubled north-eastern states forswears enormous wages and allowances waiting for her. Later, a pressure group somewhere in a state down south calls on the authorities to ban those in government from travelling abroad for medicare, whether for therapy or for checkup. Let them do it here in Nigeria. Much earlier the nation’s Spartan president and his equally abstemious deputy announce a cut in their pay.

*President and two of his ministers: Amaechi

 and Fashola 

It’s all in the air; the change aura suggesting times have changed. It’s a lean dawn when you can’t lean on government again. These are days that tell you a lean government is itself seeking where to lay its own lean and languid head.

Let us comfort and heal this land, battered and violated like a woman over the decades by so-called lovers who have only milked her dry out of her beauty.

A diet of half measures won’t deliver this broke and broken nation from the salivating and insatiable palate of these public office holders and their fellow carrion eaters.