The Oronsaye Report that the Tinubu Government recently committed to, holds many possibilities, but also many unintended likely consequences. The Report, issued in 2012, is already twelve years unprepared for so many realities that have encumbered governance in Nigeria. Most importantly however is the issue of rationalisation that is taken to be the key to gaining institutional efficiency. But then, institutional rationalisation carries the burden of redundancy management that is often attended inevitably by the pain of retrenchment and downsizing.
And if, by some governance miracle, the government is able to restrict the report to the elimination of overhead cost for the government, it will still have to confront the redundancies induced by the intended rationalisation, and the attendant inefficiency in capacity utilisation and associated productivity challenges. It is thus between this need to enhance (labour) productivity while limiting government expenses that labour and government often generate the adversarial industrial relations conflict that inevitably further undermine productivity efficiency. The argument of labour unions is simple – and this is of course the raison d’etre of unions – if past government in its wisdom or unwisdom is lax in recruiting people, successive government is bound to respect such employment contract whatever current reality dictates.
What is significant is that both the labour unions and the government cannot be unproductively locked in an adversarial industrial relation that neglect the more fundamental roots of the conflict. One of the most significant is the conversation labour and the government need to have around the role of the state in national development, and what implications a redefinition of the role of government in managing the development process would have for structure, function and service delivery business model of the entire public service.
This is the starting point for a comprehensive reengineering that will ignite the paradigmatic shift in the national productivity profile. The productivity movement will be facilitated by two correlative institutional reform projects. The first is through a waste management strategy that is managed with new productivity metrics that compel each sector of the economy to set productivity targets that is embedded in the national development plan and managed within framework of performance bond.
Indeed, if each MDA expenditure is scrutinised and recalibrated so they focus on their core functions while the non-core performed using alternative service delivery models, funds and resources could then be freed for significant investment in real development programmes and projects.
The second urgent institutional reform both labour and the government need to focus on is critical unbundling of the public sector workforce through deep-seated reskilling, re-professionalisation, and the injection of high-end skills that appropriate funds hitherto expended on external expertise and consulting services. The public service is presently in the grip of a bureaucratic culture that seems to have fossilised the energies for efficiency and effectiveness.
It is only through a sincere commitment to the institutional reform that transforms the workforce skills composition through reform to redress the low public service organisational intelligence quotient (IQ) that the government and labour can achieve the joint objective of national productivity.
The collective bargaining that will hammer out the intricacies of these issues and deliver a living wage must not be taken out of the context of fiscal federalism that has become a contentious constitutional matter in Nigeria. There is no iota of fairness for example in any attempt to fix a national minimum wage within the context of federating states that are fiscally the same. It does not make any sense that workers in Lagos, Gombe, Rivers and Osun states will be earning the same minimum wage. And then imposing that wage on local government areas that are still enmeshed in a governance palaver with states drives the unfairness deeper. Government and labour must necessarily take heed to the principle of affordability that conditions wage negotiation in a federal system.
Finally, the negotiation cannot also be taken out of the context of technical-rational practices of collective bargaining, especially within a developing context like Nigeria that is struggling to deliver the dividends of democratic governance. This is to say two things. One, industrial actions like strikes must be circumscribed by constitutional legality and reasonability.
The current adversarial or “aluta” militant labour unionism bothers on treasonable criminality that allows a small percentage of a nation’s workforces to hold the entire nation to ransom. It is only a lack of humanity that will allow an industrial action to totally paralyse essential services like healthcare and electricity via the shutting down of the national grid, one that eventuate unnecessary deaths and paralyses. However, if government must initiate legislation that will rein in this sort of excessive industrial action, it must also come to equity with clean hands
This implies that government must approach the collective bargaining table with a genuine policy action to undertake the unbundling of the overall government costs and expenditure structures through productivity audit.
This will not only put the labour unions on a footing of mutual understanding (outside of the political undercurrents of the justified labour activism), but also articulate a distinct template that correlate the state of Nigeria’s economy with the demands for increase wages.
It is not axiomatic that if waste management system is installed, the almost unproductive and bankrupt Nigerian economy will automatically be able to pay a N250,000 minimum wage. The capacity to reach a consensus depends on coming to the collective bargaining table with full disclosure.
Concluded.
Olaopa is a Professor of Public Administration and Chairman Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja.
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