Those of you who are either Federal Public Servant or State Civil Servant, you have two or more children, resident in town and also paying house rent, I DUFF MY HAT FOR UNA. It is not easy for a salary earner coping in this country even if you transverse office from your village, not talking about one residing in town.
You may agree with me that the recurrent expenditures for those resident in town is over 70% of their consumables, while the salary used in servicing this expenses is very meagre. Almost every actions and deeds are capital intensive. Someone may be tempted to ask, must a civil servant reside in town if one know that he/she wouldn’t be able to cope? The simple answer is YES for those working around the town where they live.
If you are offered job to work as a civil servant in Nigeria for example, your appointment letter will read thus “the appointee must be one residing within the area where the workplace is located”. This is enshrined in the appointment letter so you wouldn’t have an excuse over your area of resident. So the staff have no option than to relocated from one’s base to the working place.
The basic problem of a Nigerian civil servant is the inability to have a clear defined protection of his/her financial needs, especially where there is continuous inflation like what we are witnessing in this country today. The difference between a businessman and a civil servant is that in the case of rising in the prices of goods and services, the one into buying and selling will always adjust prices of his or her goods while the government worker’s salary is fixed without shifting ground.
A businessman don’t bother about inflation, in fact, they make more money when prices of good soars but that can’t be said of a former. Wherever you see a civil servant, especially those living in town, please do well to greet the person specially because it is not easy coping in the country like ours that its policies and programs is very insensitive to what their staff is going through and the funniest thing is that it is the civil servant who is working out the money used in servicing this country.
If you are a civil servant, May God bless our hustle!
Mazi Nwokwu Chukwuemeka reporting, Obinwannem News reporter September 26, 2021
