New South African Airways bailout package shows government is not committed to transformation

By Martin Van Staden

With low economic growth prospects, ever-increasing unemployment and destitution, government appears to be more concerned with the useless prestige and status that comes with our national airline, than the wellbeing of the South African people.

In mid-July, EWN reported finance minister Malusi Gigaba saying that “too much money has been invested in cash-strapped South African Airways (SAA) in the form of guarantees and bailouts” and that government was going to seriously try to waste no more resources on “inefficient state-owned entities”. In an about-face, Gigaba now says that Treasury is considering a R13 billion bailout for the national carrier.

Proposing such a bailout in the midst of a tax shortfall is evidence of government’s deep-seated contempt for the people of South Africa and a preoccupation with satisfying its short-term and short-sighted ambitions. Its intention to introduce more and more taxes to finance programmes like the National Health Insurance (NHI) is mindboggling, let alone the proposal made earlier this year that, in addition to television licences, it would consider requiring licenses for other devices to boost revenue for the national broadcaster. The Davis Tax Committee too is considering increasing wealth taxes.

These desperate attempts to get its hands on more revenue are unnecessary in the face of the most obvious solution – significant tax transformation – and dangerous, in that it is unlikely that businesses, especially small ones, can survive for much longer in such an environment. Companies like General Motors and AngloAmerican already have either left our shores or are in the process of reducing their investments.

ANC MP Pinky Kekana proposes that, to help our national carrier, government intervene and give to SAA air routes currently operated by other, profitable airlines. For her, this would be radical economic transformation. By what logic could forcing the productive and efficient private sector, which creates unquantifiable wealth for millions of people every minute of every day, to yield to the ineffective and bloated dinosaurs of the public sector radically transform anything? South Africans already find more affordable and higher-quality travelling products with foreign airlines. Even domestically, it is estimated that SAA contributes less than a quarter of commercial air travel.

If government wants more money, it should look to decreasing taxes and repealing regulations across the board to allow significant economic growth to occur. In turn, more South Africans will become taxpayers and contribute to the national purse. But, even if this should happen, the national purse should not be an ATM for state companies that have proven time and time again that they are unable to stand on their own two feet in the market. Both SAA and Eskom have been given repeated opportunities to become profitable, but each ‘second chance’ ends with yet another ‘turnaround’ strategy. These companies are lost causes which South African taxpayers are propping up with no benefit to themselves, and certainly none to the poor.

Radical economic transformation would be to get rid of wealth sucking, economy strangling state-owned enterprises that are firmly rooted in the social engineering logic of the apartheid regime to fulfil, as the first apartheid labour minister Ben Schoeman explained, “State control on a large scale” that replaces personal responsibility with a “system of State responsibility.”

There will be no radical economic transformation while government and state-owned enterprises get first dibs on the hard-earned produce of the people. The people have a natural right to keep what they earn, and government is under an obligation to spend what it takes from the people wisely. What we are seeing now, however, is a commitment by government to itself, and not to the people.


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ASUU, the Government and Tertiary Education in Nigeria: The Way Forward

By Ashton Dagana

Since 1999, successive governments have at least two things in common; ASUU and strikes. ASUU strikes. The ASUU strikes always follow the same pattern; initial noise about a possible ASUU strike, a warning strike, government ignores ASUU all along, the public isn’t particularly interested, ASUU goes on long strike, everyone gets interested, government and ASUU meet over and again, agreements are signed, ASUU goes back to school, tick tock tick tock, repeat cycle.

As usual with most things Nigerian; no one really cares about a sustainable solution that ensures there is no repeat of a bad situation, attention is often paid to what Nigerians would call ‘patch-patch’ solutions. Each government deals with ASUU in a way that ensures ASUU returns to the classrooms, knowing fully well that the underlying problem of why ASUU goes on strike remains perpetually unresolved. Like debts and corruption cases, they pass on the ASUU burden to future governments. It is why over 18 years into our new democratic experience; our universities continue to face exactly the same challenges they faced in 1999. Poorly funded, absenteeism of lecturers, normalization of the handouts menace, strikes, dilapidated infrastructure and the inability to compete globally. This simply means that we are not going to fix our universities and the recurrent ASUU challenge with the same Band-Aid approach we used in the past. We need a far more sustainable solution. The challenges of our universities and indeed other tertiary institutions are not that these challenges exist; it is that these challenges more or less remain the same over decades. What we must now do is solve them and work out ways of meeting new challenges and not continue to sink under the weight of the same challenges decades on.

We should not be in this position where all the lecturers in virtually all the public universities can go on strike at the same time. None of the countries where the children of the rich and powerful go to school abroad have this model. Our leaders, including even some of the privileged lecturers have their children in schools everywhere but public schools where they are exposed to some of the menace already mentioned above. Like with most of the challenges Nigeria has had to deal with over the course of almost its entire Independent existence, the problem is centralization and control by the Federal Government. The current structure does not work and we already know that. What we probably aren’t so sure of is how to move forward.

The universities should be run by Trusts. Government should simply give grants. Trustees should include private sector big wigs and people that can help raise money and endowments for the University. They will also check fraud by the VCs, which is very rampant. At the moment, at least six former or current Vice Chancellors are under investigation by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC. There are verifiable rumblings for the arrest of some others. Some of them have even been charged. This piece is not about the obvious so I will not be elaborating on that but I should add that University administration has since been taken by the general Nigerian malaise; corruption. The Trust sets the terms and conditions for employment. That way, each lecturer is an employee of the trust, not directly of the Federal Government. For instance, if UNILAG lecturers choose to strike against their Trust, the strike will only affect UNILAG. This is the same problem we have with Health and why doctors constantly go on strikes. These problems have become permanent simply because we choose the same Band-Aid solutions that are not sustainable and far reaching over much more sustainable and effective ones.

The FGN appoints people as Ministers of Labour or portfolios of the type and automatically assumes that they were born as skilled negotiators. No negotiation skills. No training. Two things then happen. First, each strike is an opportunity for the Labour Minister or the cronies to make money. In the past, huge sums were ferried at night to Labour leaders to persuade them to call off strikes. The Minister, of course, got a huge cut and it was in his interest to collude with the unions to hold out for more money, while publicly “appealing to them to go back to work.” Secondly, the glory for him was that he had successfully ended the strike. He would therefore sign anything, knowing fully well that government could not afford it. In his mind, ‘the next Minister can worry about that.’ This, just so he can say, “when I was Minister, I ended the strike.” This is all that matters to them in a country where the interests of personalities continually trump the collective interest. Today, they agree with ASUU. Tomorrow, Non-Academic Staff of Universities will claim that you can’t give ASUU alone and so they go on strike too. The Minister will sign another agreement with them. ASUU will get angry again and the cycle continues. The exact same thing we do with Doctors of NMA and Health Workers under JOHESU. It’s a sad expensive joke, really.

While one is sympathetic to the claim that agreements should be honoured, the quantum of ASUU’s claim is put at about N1.2 Trillion. In 2009 when this was agreed, this was about 25% of the Budget. Someone was illogical enough to sign this on behalf of government. To move forward, there may be a need to overhaul the system altogether. This reset of the system could even cost an entire academic year but if it fixes this particular problem permanently, it would be a very useful sacrifice to make for the sake of the future. Since 1999, ASUU has embarked on some 12-strike actions that lasted about over years cumulatively.

ASUU through the individual universities establish university staff schools without consultation with government. There is apparently an agreement with the government on funding the staff primary schools and secondary schools. Government had in the past agreed to fund the primary schools 100% and part-fund the secondary schools. Then the universities open the schools up to outsiders and charge handsome fees. They pocket those fees and don’t remit a kobo to the FGN. The schools want government to pay the teachers that they – the schools – recruited. They want government to maintain the schools while they pocket the fees they charge. This, according to available reports is part of their reasons for striking. I wonder, did a government official sign these agreements without making it clear these schools were to serve the children of the staff of the schools or make it clear government funding would not cover for discretion taken by the schools outside of the agreement?

ASUU has organised resistance to IPPIS, the government biometric payroll system that has already helped to weed out thousands of ghost workers in several ministries, this so that they can continue to create ghost workers. There is an estimate from a reliable source at IPPIS that some 30% of the people ASUU is striking for are ghost workers. Part of government’s negotiations should therefore be to do biometric capture so that they know who they are paying. The situation is the same with hospitals. They refuse to go on IPPIS, recruit illegally and create ghosts. That way, the salaries government sends are spread to half pay for all and government is then accused of owing salaries when it has paid everybody it gave approval to be recruited in full. Government gets to be used and treated like an entity whose failings mean nothing, when in reality the people are the government.

Government needs to cut a deal with ASUU but must think sustainability when going to the table. A recent news report has the current Education minister Adamu Adamu saying the ASUU strike will be over in a matter of days. This simply means that we are about to wash and rinse the same dirt from the previous playbook. This means that in the very near future, another government, if not this one even, will have to call ASUU back to the table again, when they embark on yet another strike. The government must go all out to overhaul this system once and for all by divesting and relinquishing control and ending this centralization that favours everyone else but the very people the universities were set up for, the students.

Ashton Dagana, a Quantity Surveyor writes from Port Harcourt. (

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World Youth Day: The Concept of Youth Investment, Peace and Security

By Ugbabe Adagboyi Damian

Every year since 1999, the United Nations has continued to celebrate the youths all over the world. Eighteen years after, the youths have continued to gain increasing recognition as agents of change in the society – since they have very important roles to play in deterring and resolving conflicts, and are key constituents in ensuring the success of both peacekeeping and peace building efforts. Hence, their inclusion in the peace and security agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development committed to fostering peaceful and inclusive societies and affirmed “Sustainable development cannot be realised without peace and security”. Goal 16 aims to ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels. The World Programme of Action for Youth, which provides a policy framework and practical guidelines to improve the situation of young people, also encourages “promoting the active involvement of youth in maintaining peace and security”.

For the purpose of achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda, it is considerable to adopt a conventional definition of youth; assess the concept of youth investment and how it can ensure the success of both peacekeeping and peace building; as well as suggest ways the incentives tailored towards youth investment can make meaningful impact on them.

According to Wikipedia, The terms youth, teenager, kid, and young person are interchanged, often meaning the same thing, but they are occasionally differentiated. Youth can be referred to as the time of life when one is young. This involves childhood, and the time of life which is neither childhood nor adulthood, but rather somewhere in between fourteen and twenty-one years of age.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989 defines a child as any human person who has not reached the age of eighteen years.

To bring home the definition, we shall adopt the definition of the African Youth Charter; that a youth is any human person who falls in the age bracket of fifteen and thirty-five. However, the task that lies before us should make us think in line with Robert Kennedy that, “the world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease”.

The concept of youth empowerment and youth investment are interchanged, often implying the same thing. On the contrary, youth empowerment is a form of political heart-buy of youths for continuity. Most African politicians and their governments have bastardized the concept and have used it to manoeuvre their immediate social environment. Many of them believe that empowerment mean to purchase and distribute either of, motorcycles, tricycles (popularly called “Keke” in Nigeria), wheelbarrows, hairdryers, Knapsack sprayers, and stipends in form of social transfer benefits, etc. In as much as this is a plus to the society, there are little or no evidence that the beneficiaries expressed any form of predominance of courage over timidity; developed a superior state of mind or have any quality imagination that can spur innovation to permanently lift them out of poverty. It is evident that many of the beneficiaries have no appetite for adventure as they are limited to what they know and do, and are hardly proud of their skills since they remain restless and agitated. They also develop high sense of entitlement and feel marginalized; believing that what they have received can only keep them surviving each moment and not living in each moment.

The concept of youth investment sees beyond tenure. It is a concept that seeks to improve young people’s outcomes through better funding opportunities, programmes and initiatives that build the capability and resilience of young people so they have the skills and confidence to engage positively in, and contribute to, their societies. These outcomes support increased educational achievement, greater employability, improved health and less state intervention. The economic and social landscape of the world is rapidly changing with the developments in technology affecting the way we think, live and work, the young people forming about 70% of the African population need to acquire the digital, entrepreneurial and enterprise skills to be participate and contribute to the social and economic growth of their societies.

 This concept has three key strategies: leadership development, volunteering and mentoring. These can be achieved little or no stress but with the political will power to grow the economy and sustain peace and security.

The following key components of the strategies includes; maximising scarce resources through collaborating with corporate, non-governmental, and other government organization, improving data collection and analysis to enable funding based on knowledge of what works and for which group of young people, a clear mission statement and continuous appraisal of outcomes, and targeting investment to where it will have the most impact.

Therefore, if we intentionally adopt these strategies, guided by its component; and ensuring accountability, integrity, and inclusiveness we can build and shape a peaceful and secured Africa.


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Ugbabe Adagboyi Damian

Twitter @ugbabeD

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