Curiously, a recent gesture to improve the earning capacity of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria employees through a 50 per cent salary increase, reportedly approved by the Federal Government with the recommendation of the Minister of Power, Prof. Bart Nnaji, following negotiations with the PHCN labour leaders overseen by such Nigerian labour veterans as Chief Hassan Summonu and Dr. Timiebi Agary, has been greeted with attrition.The cause of the attrition, more curiously, is that the Minister of Power has instructed that due diligence be done in the form of staff audit to ensure that the N9bn which government has made available to defray the salary increase is actually paid to real and serving PHCN workers and not also to ghost workersfor work they have not done. The attrition is reflected in a story titled, "PHCN workers protest use of biometric exercise for pay rise", published in a national newspaper on November 2, 2011. According to the story, Ajaero, the General Secretary of the National Union of Electricity Employees, one of the PHCN labour unions, has petitioned the minister objecting to a memo sent to the Chief Executive Officers by the Managing Director of PHCN, Mr. Hussein Labo, "citing biometric exercise for staff as a precondition for payment of the negotiated 50 per cent salary increase." One is left to wonder what message Ajaero intends to convey through his opposition to the biometric exercise. Is it that he would prefer that just anyone who presents oneself as a PHCN worker should be paid or that he would be right to scuttle the exercise in spite of its prospects of preventing ghost workers from receiving part of the funds meant for real PHCN workers, thereby short-changing the latter' Why would a labour official who ordinarily would not raise an eyebrow when required by a bank teller to properly identify himself before cashing a cheque oppose proper identification of "workers" about to receive payment from the employer' Is it his way of showing interest in accountability or the judicious spending of public funds' Incidentally, I worked in the National Electric Power Authority, which metamorphosed into the PHCN, from 1985-2000. For that 15-year period, I underwent staff audit several times; and I can say unequivocally that even the PHCN pensioners are also subjected to similar procedures to revalidate their status regularly, as they did most recently in 2008, and serving workers in 2009. So, the insistence of the Minister of Power for an audit of PHCN staff actually falls in with a long-standing tradition in the organisation. He has merely added the dimension of collecting biometric data of the audited staff to this tradition. And the possibility of this innovation stamping out the phenomenon of ghost workers cannot be overemphasised, since ghost workers are not likely to generate biometric information and so may be "exorcised" conclusively from the PHCN system by capturing such data.Perhaps, if Ajaero ever worked in PHCN, he would have seen no point in opposing the staff audit. However, this opposition may be another symptom of the desperation to find fault even with every of the ministers actions, as part of a misguided agenda to scuttle the Power Sector Reform which the Jonathan administration has charged him to oversee. In a country like ours, where ghost workers persistently undermine the integrity of wages paid in the public sector, nothing, I dare say, can be wrong in occasionally requiring workers to properly identify themselves in order to receive their wages, except for someone who has something to hide.Besides its poor image for inefficiency, the PHCN is plagued by corruption issues. Such is its reputation for corruption that it was once identified as the second most corrupt institution in the country, in the 2007 Nigeria Corruption Index released by the Independent Advocacy Group, an anti-corruption group, and published in THE PUNCH of June 14, 2007. In a poll conducted in four major Nigerian cities, namely, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kano and Abuja, in 2005 using such yardsticks for measuring corruption as its frequency, severity, size, its social and financial cost, 87 per cent of the respondents believed the PHCN was the most corrupt institution in the country, while 99 per cent and 74 per cent believed it was the Nigerian Police and the Ministry of Education respectively. Though these are not the most recent statistics of the Nigeria Corruption Index, it is pertinent to this article because it is the most recent in which specific institutionsespecially the PHCNhave featured in the index, giving a clue to the ratio of institutional contributions to the negative image corruption continues to bring to our country, which the 2011 Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International identified as the 12th most corrupt on a list of 178 countries. Of course, there are many opinions as to why corruption is widespread in the Nigerian public sector. But perceptive people, not hasty to condemn the Nigerian civil servant, would generally agree that corruption would reduce among Nigerian public sector workers if they are no longer paid what amounts to corruption-inducing wages, such that the members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities once characterised during one of their strikes for improved working conditions as a take home pay that would not take them home. Undoubtedly, when an economic system makes more financial demands on workers legitimate quest for a meaningful life than their wages can support, room is inevitably created for the workers to engage in sharp practices to augment their income, giving rise to official corruption. For instance, if the average worker is paid wages which, in a given economic system, cannot guarantee him such basic necessities as decent food, clothing and shelter, let alone send his children to decent schools, then the temptation to prey on any public resource within reach, in order to fulfil such basic obligations to self and family, can become difficult to overcome. To say this is not to play "the devils advocate" for perpetrators of official corruption. Sometimes a corrupt person, if we look at the bigger picture, is actually a victim of circumstance, driven by the primeval need to survive. And I dare say that a society built on economic justice is the best safeguard against official corruption, and that economic justice should encompass paying fair wages to workers, commensurate with the cost of securing a decent living in the economy in which they operate. Needless to add that, from the foregoing, I think government and its agencies should be commended for any effort to improve the earning capacity of workers, as evidenced by the 50 per cent increase of the salary of PHCN employees and the upgrade of the national minimum wage from N7, 500 to N18,000, especially if such improvement is accompanied by effective measures to check inflation. That any labour leader could seek to exploit such a gesture, as it affects PHCN workers, to indulge his penchant for censoriousness is, to say the least, unfortunate. Oke, a public policy analyst and former employee of the defunct National Electric Power Authority, wrote in from Prince and Princess Estate, Abuja via ikeogu.oke@gmail.com+234-(0)803-453-1501
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