I heard workers have started receiving alerts for two months salaries and Kogi cyberspace has become a war zone with critics and defenders of the government throwing explosives at one another. The latter is gloating over payment of salaries using a feeble narrative.Let us understand that prompt payment of salaries is a PRIMARY responsibility of a government.
Workers do not deserve to be owed a day for the work they have put in. They have bills to pay, they have responsibilities to shoulder.
When a government pays workers their wages promptly, it get pass marks for taking seriously its responsibility to the people who labour/ed to keep the system running.
The government can be commended for fulfilling one of its many responsibilities to the people who put it there. However, payment of salaries is just recurrent expenditure, not a fresh project initiated and completed. It is not a capital project. Nothing to hinge a reelection campaign on, especially when unemployment is still a major problem and the achievements of the government is abysmally disproportionate to available resources.
The people have the right to cry to high heavens if salaries and pensions are not being paid, the economy of the state is so weak that salaries and pensions is the mainstay of the people. You can imagine the amount of hardship and inconveniences the citizens of a civil service state would suffer if salaries and pensions are not paid.
A reasonable person might expect that given the horror stories of suffering and death of workers, pensioners and their family members in relation to the civil service screening and owed entitlements, the government and its handlers would toe the line of empathy, humility and even apology when it comes to the issue of payment of owed salaries instead of being bullish and engaging in puerile fights with criticise the government.
It is shameless, ridiculous and counterproductive to over-hype payment of salaries and present it as some sort of groundbreaking achievement and then defend the shenanigans with: “you people were shouting about nonpayment of salaries, so we too are shouting about payment of salaries”
The good people of Kogi state deserve better than this. May Kogi State succeed!
– Alison Ibraheem
