Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, recently spoke to newsmen on the recent agreement signed by the Federal Government, Nigerian Governors Forum, Judiciary Staff Union of Nigeria (JUSUN), Parliamentary Staff Association of Nigeria (PASAN) and other stakeholders, for the implementation of autonomy for the judiciary/legislature in the 36 states of the federation, the suspension of the strike by the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP), among other issues. These are excerpts from the interview.
CAN you take us through the Memorandum of Understanding that you signed with JUSUN/PASAN that ended the strike of the unions over the issue of non-implementation of autonomy for judiciary and legislature at the state level in the country. Again, JUSUN wrote a letter to you, commending you for your intervention and the role you played in getting to a point where after 65 days the strike was called off. This is quite unusual. In previous negotiations with labour, they used to block the road to your house. What did you do right that you got the commendation?
There is nothing too strange. It’s a battle for economic survival and economic independence. The judiciary wanted autonomy as in the constitution. The legislature in the 36 states of the Federation also wanted the same. You see, when you go to the judiciary, the people you see and talk with are the staff there, starting from the Chief Registrar, then going down to the lower ranks. So, that is what you notice. It is a tug of war between members of the judiciary and the legislature for self survival. The president, if you remember, signed the amendment or alteration of the constitution in the 4th alteration that granted autonomy to these two arms of government in the states, not in the Federal level because the Federal system already created independence for them in the constitution. There is no lacuna about that. It is clear that the funds meant for them go straight to the National Judicial Council (NJC), according to Section 81 of the Constitution. So, they are on what some people call first line charge. If you go to Section 6(5) of the Constitution, it listed the courts and gave powers to the National Assembly in Sub-sections K and L for the state assembly to create other courts. So, what are listed in 6(5) of the Constitution, A-F are superior courts of records. The other ones created by the state like the Sharia Courts, Customary Courts, Magistrate Courts, are the creations of the state law. But that allocation coming from NJC into the courts, created by Section 6(5) A-F, does not cover them. It covers only those courts listed there. And if you go to Section 84 again, it also listed those to be paid from the funds that are gotten by the NJC from the Federal Allocation and Statutory transfer. So, it was that lacuna 121(3) sought to bridge and the president gave assent to that particular alteration. But, it has been difficult for the states to come to terms with it and grant that full autonomy. Some of them are already funding anyway. So, they are now saying, “why is there now need to compel us to do this?” But, again the people who own the money, the full judiciary and the full state assembly are saying, ‘you are short-changing us’. We want our independence. So, that is the situation. There is nothing that is very absurd. Of course, there must be resistance. The judges cannot come out to fight. The legislators also cannot come out to fight their governors directly. And the judiciary and parliamentary workers led the onslaught because they also suffer some losses in allowances, income and other welfare packages that are associated with their job. So, this is it. And when the ding dong lasted, the president signed Executive Order 10 by which erring states were to lose their rights to collect the total allocation of their states and if you are still erring, the Accountant General of the Federation must deduct at source from Abuja and transmit it into the accounts of the states. They made representation through the Governors Forum. They went to court and questioned so many other things in that Executive Order and even portions of the Constitution where they wanted full interpretation of what those portions meant. So, the president said there is no need being legalistic and asked the Chief of Staff to look into this matter. As he was looking into it, it snowballed into full blown strike. And the strike continued. I allowed them to continue the negotiation because by the mandate of my ministry. By our mandate industrial dispute resolution is one of our cardinal mandates.
When did you eventually intervene in the matter?
When the strike lasted more than three weeks, I had to invite all of them to come. I met with the Chief Judges, the Chairman of Judges Conference of Nigeria, the head of Chief Judges in states, heads of courts, because the Chief Judges have an association. We met with them, the Chairman, Deputy and Secretary and we also met with the Implementation Committee for Executive Order 10, that is the Attorney General represented by Solicitor General and their Secretary, Senator Ita Enang. We met also with the Governors Forum through separate meetings and we then did a combined meeting. It did not break the impasse and we continued because that is part of our trade. We were able to finally fashion out an agreement, which we translated into Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). From Memorandum of Understanding, we moved it into Memorandum of Action (MoA) and now started putting timelines. We put 45 days for the governors to put all the structures in place to implement that autonomy and for the legislative Houses of Assembly to open so that those laws can come in. About three laws are cardinal in the agreement we had. And that agreement says that they are to create State Account Allocation Committee (SAAC), which is equivalent to FAAC. But whatever we are doing, we want to give it a template of what is succeeding and for us, what is succeeding is the NJC template which is between our Executive and the National Assembly. So, they had to put up a SAAC, to be headed by a Commissioner and the allocation that come into the state from FAAC allocation to the state and the IGR of the state, is well known to the committee. The committee is to be headed by the Commissioner for Finance of the state. A second body is the State Budget Committee to be headed by the relevant commissioner, for them again at the beginning of the year get budget from the legislature, the judiciary and the executive. And in this budget committee, envelopes will be given out of what you can spend for the year, the projected receivable for the year and apportioned out like that into the envelope to the judiciary, envelope to the legislature and envelope to the executive….It depends on the mode you people want to do. In the federal here, we allow them to submit to the National Assembly. In the states, some states like to have everything as a vote and the governor will present. In the former times when we started our democracy early enough in the late 1990s and early 2000, it was gathered together and the president presents. But right now, we allow them. It’s their envelopes and their budgets. They defend it in the National Assembly. So, this is what we have now been replicated in the states. And we think it is going to work. In fact, it is working because the reports we are getting is that even some states still on the discussion table, have gone ahead to put up these three bodies and enact laws backing them up. Bayelsa had done so. Delta had done so. Plateau has started implementing immediately the agreement was signed the other day, Lagos, Rivers and some other states have been up and doing, giving full financial backing to these two bodies. What I also say, is let them now in consonance with the agreement we have reached (MoA), put that package into a budget of the year and put again the releases as due to them in the same manner as released to them from the Accountant General’s Office of the statutory transfer of first-line charge into the Consolidated Revenue Funds of the state. That is what we have done and a lot of negotiation went into it, up and down, but at the end of the day, we are happy that we are all now on the same page.
Still on JUSUN/PASAN strike, they called it a suspension of the strike pending the 45 days timeline for the implementation of the agreement. The NJC has set up a committee to monitor the implementation of the MoA, comprising all the issues that you talked about. How optimistic are you that at the end of the 45 days, the strike will be totally called off?
Since I came to the Ministry of Labour and the labour unions go on strike, there is never a paper that I signed where they stated that they have called off strike. They will tell you that they suspend. I don’t know where they learnt that one from. They said what it means is that when they suspend, they can go back if they are not satisfied with the implementation of whatever agreement reached. But, I think we won’t have need for this. I am in touch with the Chairman of Governors Forum and the three-man committee that they set up on the negotiation and that same three-man committee will also look at compliance by the states. The governors Kebbi, Plateau and their Chairman are heading this Committee. You see the agreement is even delineated to what capital expenditure should be and tried to go down to the nitty-gritty, so that the element of fear on both sides will be erased. The element of fear on behalf of the judiciary and legislative workers is that when they call off, the governors will not keep their own side of the bargain. Again, they will say, we need compartmentalization in the Assemblies because when the money also comes, we are not sure what the legislators will do with it. So, the agreement has gone into the legislature and in the legislature account, we will have three compartments. One, there will be account for the legislators. Two, there will be account for the staff development and welfare. And three, an account for the state House of Assembly Commission. So, there are now three accounts there. Nobody will cross the line and go and use the money already budgeted and appropriated for any of these sub-bodies into his own compartment. So, they are now less afraid. The governors themselves are afraid: Does it mean that the Chief Judges will be building the courts and offices for themselves without anybody saying something? Can Chief Judges award contracts, sign it and if there is breach of agreement, is it not the courts that the thing will come back again? We are now saying that capital expenditure in terms of construction of new court buildings and quarters for both legislators and judges are expenditures that will be supervised by the people who have the mandate. That is the state Ministry of Works and Housing because those buildings are public buildings. So, it is in the agreement. So, nobody wakes up and go and start awarding contracts for buildings and the rest of them, even though it is in your budget. There must be synergy because public buildings are responsibilities of Ministry of Works and Housing actually. And so, there must be that arrangement by which the supervision of the structures and everything are monitored from the state Ministry of Works. Vehicles, air conditioners and others are capital expenditures that the judiciary or legislators can handle themselves. And in the case of the judiciary, the Chief Registrar is the Accounting Officer, going by the Fund Management Law that will be enacted by the judiciary. And the Clerk of the House of Assembly is the Chief Accounting Officer and the Chairman of the management of funds in the State Houses of Assembly. So, this is how we have designed it. It is like a skeleton given to them for them to be putting some flesh as they go on. As you know, this is work in progress. Every day, we learn new lessons and so, I think I am very comfortable with it. I was a governor and I have told the governors that they don’t need to panic on the agreement. I was a legislator. So, I told the legislative people that there is nothing to panic about. We have given you what is obtainable in the National Assembly. So, that is where we are on the matter for now. But I am very optimistic that we will not have any brouhaha again, provided everybody keeps to his own lane.
I am happy you talked about human beings not keeping agreements. Do we have to wait until we get ourselves into a protracted strike before we can talk to ourselves as a nation? Secondly, we now have a backlog of cases in court because the courts were not sitting. Could we not have settled these issues without getting to this point? Was it worth it?
No, it is not worth it. You have said it all about human beings. I began by telling you that it is a sort of battle for economic survival and economic independence and in a battle, there must be a fight and some people will be wounded, if not killed. So, that is what has happened. On the part of my Ministry, when the judiciary workers wrote, what we did was to invite them to come and discuss. But at the same time we discovered that it is being managed at the level of the Chief Justice of Nigeria and at the level of the Chief of Staff to the President whom Mr. President gave an instruction to reconcile these people immediately. I don’t want to be legalistic about this. So, what I had to do was to monitor that negotiation. That negotiation is allowed in labour parlance because we are also allowed to appoint outside arbitrators to handle such a negotiation. We call it bi-partite plus. Or even if we are doing tripartite plus, we can invite a foreign body to join them. So, that is what is happening there. It is not like we said, no. They have been having a very fruitful discussion in the office of the Chief of Staff and as a matter of fact what we did in the Ministry was to build on one or two areas they had agreed because the governors were not even giving any contemplation to it before.
About a week ago, the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) suspended their strike for 30 days to allow the Federal Government implement the agreements in the Memorandum of Action (MoA) agreed towards the end of April. What are those key agreements and how far has Federal Government gone in the implementation?
Well, you know that we have desks at the social ministries of Education and Health where you have gotten a lot of these labour issues. We created what we call labour desks in Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health. We also have labour desks in Finance, Aviation, Petroleum and Agriculture. These ministries are prone to industrial disputes because of the kind of professional workers they have. On the polytechnic issue, I have it clear to the two Ministers of Education and the Permanent Secretary that we already have a template from our negotiation with ASUU and the issues being raised here by ASUP are about the same. So, we told the heads of the unions that this matter can be handled in-house in the Ministry of Education. And we asked our labour desk to guide them. That was exactly what we did. We didn’t bring them into our Ministry. But, we monitored them and they did what we told them to do. Now that they have done that, we have a copy of the agreement that they reached there and it is time for us also to monitor the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance to make sure that agreement is implemented and religiously adhered to, because like I said before, the issues raised there are not alien or outside the purview of what we had done with ASUU, NASU and SSANU. The issues include shortfall in salaries, earned allowances, non-benefit from the consequential adjustments of the National Minimum Wage and things like what IPPIS has done right or wrong when they go on their sabbatical, amongst others. So, it is the same thing.
You have announced that you are raising hazard allowance of doctors and other health workers by 350 per cent. That is good. What are you doing about the arrears owed doctors by a couple of states, some as much as 21 months? What can you do as Minister of Labour to enforce the payment?
There is not too much I can do into making the money to get into their pockets. But, I can assist by talking to the heads of those state governments to see that a workman is due for his wages. A certain state in the Southeast that has 21 months arrears, in terms of call duty allowances and some other medical allowances. We have spoken to them. From 21 months, they have reduced it now by nine months. They paid them nine months. They are not arguing that they are not owing. But, you see, the issue of management of workers is a very intricate issue and I don’t think the sub-nationals (states) are paying great attention to it. A workman is due for his wages like I said before and it pains me when I hear that people did not get money for work done. It is not right at all. It is against the Convention of ILO.
Lastly, the matter in Kaduna has been pushed to your table now. What is the update?
We have a committee in place, but it has not come alive and I am already taking the matter up. We are getting in touch with the governor. That committee should be resuscitated and supported, so that they can do social dialogue very quickly. It is on that table that the issue of those that they have “punished” or “victimized” against the subsisting agreement will come up. We don’t think it is proper. Workers by ILO status have a right to strike and not be punished or removed from job. But, you know the strike in Kaduna was a different kind of strike. There was some colouration of high-wire strike that even overstretched some limits, which I pointed out to the labour leaders. But if the government in Kaduna State wants to take their pound of flesh, they can invoke the principle of “no work, no pay”. If the government feels that the workers have committed economic sabotage, they can go to court. Nobody stops them from going to court.
By Agatha Emeadi,
The Sun