The Governor of Nasarawa State, Alhaji Umaru Tanko Al-Makura, has called for the total overhaul of the pension scheme as practiced in the country, lamenting that it has usurped the funds available for job creation for the youths who are daily being churned out of institutions of learning without any hope of securing a decent job because civil servants who retired decades ago are still on government payrolls.
Al-Makura who made the call in Lafia in a parley with LEADERSHIP, said any government policy directed at providing the youths with paid jobs was an effort in futility unless the issue of pension was reviewed.
“The issue of unemployment will be here with us for a very long time and the future is really very bleak”.
The Congress of Progressive Change(CPC) governor who said he was not against people getting their entitlements which he demonstrated by being the first governor in the North to pay the N18,000 minimum wage also said he was an advocate of prompt payment of gratuity so that retirees can plan for life outside the civil service, noting that if the current practice is sustained, parents will end up eating into the future of their children.
In the same vein, Al-makura harped on what he termed, ‘systemic injustice’ in the way government is being run with only about 10 percent of the total population while the greater majority are left in the state of want and called on the federal government to work out modalities that would guarantee the attainment of collective prosperity.
Giving a graphic presentation of his financial ordeal in the state, he said of the about N2billion that accrues to the state monthly about 90 percent goes to the servicing of workers’ salaries with a total workforce of just about 50,000, leaving a little over N100million for running cost of government and execution of capital projects.
Governor Al-makura further stressed that “the administration we now have in the country is against the common man, our democracy now in the country is against the common man because if you look at empowerment and the money utilised in servicing wages, it is only to a small category where the common man has no place and lacks the very prospect of development”.
Al-makura, who said he had chosen to embark on physical and social infrastructural development because that was the only thing the common man stands to benefit from government pointed out that “that is why instead of talking about some gigantic, self-aggrandised project, I am looking at the most ordinary projects that would have extraordinary impact on the ordinary man”.
On what to expect from the government in the nearest future, Ta’al, as he is fondly called in the state, said: “we are going to embark on robust rehabilitation of schools and hospitals because of their direct bearing to the common man”.