‘Wrong Timing,’ Joe Abah Faults Proposed Pay Rise For Politicians

A former Director-General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, Joe Abah, has faulted the proposed review of salaries for political office holders and argued that the move was ill-timed and poorly conceived.

Abah spoke as a guest on Channels Television’s breakfast programme Sunrise Daily.

“It is often not enough that something is the right thing to do. Something could be the right thing to do, but if you do it in the wrong sequence, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way, you end up doing more harm than good. My thinking is that the timing is not right, the optics are not right,” he said on Monday.

“The government has not demonstrated that it takes fiscal prudence seriously. We have the largest cabinet in Nigeria’s history. Every day, new agencies and commissions are created. I have always argued that for every new agency we create, we should close at least ten.

“You cannot in good conscience announce an increase in the pay of political office holders when we already have about 50 ministers, countless assistants, special advisers, and technical aides. Nobody even knows the full numbers. It does not create the impression that this is the right thing to do at this time,” he said.

The ex-BPE boss pointed to what he described as “great distortion” in the public sector pay system, where officials at the same level sometimes earned different amounts.

He said such issues required “urgent correction” before salary increases could be considered, especially given the approved ₦70,000 minimum wage.

The Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) had recently disclosed that plans were underway to review the salaries of political office holders.

The commission had described their current earnings as “inadequate, unrealistic, and outdated,” noting that they had remained unchanged since 2008.

Meanwhile, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) called on the RMAFC to halt the planned review and described it as insensitive and unjust.

NLC President, Joe Ajaero, warned that the move would worsen inequality and deepen poverty.

“RMAFC should put on hold this exercise before it triggers a tsunami,” Ajaero said in a statement on Sunday.

He argued that the plan “will only succeed in deepening the growing inequality between civil servants and political office holders and further impoverish the generality of Nigerians, majority of whom are already multi-dimensionally poor.”