Kaduna State governor, Nasir Ahmed el-Rufa’i, has said he was elected to develop the State, not just to pay salaries of civil servants.
The governor disclosed this in a statement signed by Special Adviser on Media and Communication, Muyiwa Adekeye yesterday, in a reaction to the outrage of sacking over 4,000 workers in the State.
He said the State’s public finances have been severely stretched by the higher wage bills at a time when revenues from the Federation Account Allocations Committee, (FAAC), have not increased.
The governor said he was elected to develop the state, not just to pay the salaries of public servants. It was elected to promote equality of opportunity, to build and run schools and hospitals, upgrade infrastructure and make the state more secure and attractive to the private sector for jobs and investments.
The public service of the state with less than 100,000 employees (and their families) cannot be consuming more than 90% of government resources, with little left to positively impact the lives of the more than nine million that are not political appointees or civil servants. It is gross injustice for such a micro-minority to consume the majority of the resources of the State, the statement argued.
Therefore, the state government has no choice but to shed some weight and reduce the size of the public service. It is a painful but necessary step to take, for the sake of the majority of the people of this state, he added.
The public service is an important institution, and it should therefore maintain only an optimum size. Faced with a difficult situation, the Kaduna State government is persuaded that it cannot refuse to act or act in ways that only conduce to populist sentiment, without solving the fundamental problem”, he stated.
