French protests can’t happen here
By Owei Lakemfa
FRANCE has been aflame for seven weeks as the President Nicolas Sarkozy government took on the people of France which elected it. The primary reason why the French are up in arms, the proposal to increase retirement age from 60 to 62 years, will shock the average Nigerian. That is putting it mildly; to many of them, the reason will appear insane.
Yet the French people are so passionate about it that they have periodically grounded their country with demonstrations reminiscent of the historic 1968 student protests; over one million people turned out for the protests last week Tuesday.
The reason why the Nigerian would jump for joy if pension age were increased even by 15 years, while the French would fight even a two-year increase is not due to cultural or racial differences, rather it is socio-economic and a reflection of societal management.
To the French, pension is a great expectation when the worker having given his youth to service, eagerly looks forward to the rewards that pension brings: a more leisurely and enjoyable life as a senior citizen. In contrast, Nigerians are subjected to deprivation, hardship and a high level of dehumanization and retirement automatically translates to a further devaluation of life and misery.
In Nigeria, jobs are quite scarce, there is no social security, unemployment benefits are unheard of; the country’s huge resources are privatised by the political elites and their co- travellers in uniform. Even for those that become pensioners, their pension stipend are usually unpaid, sometimes for years. For the few who get some pension payment, the obstacles are so much that some opt to forego their money while a few who are determined to collect their money simply die on the pension queue.
For ex-servicemen, things became so bad that many began living under bridges and became professional beggars just to be able to keep alive in Abuja, while awaiting their pension payment. It is said that ‘old Soja never die’ but in Nigeria, they die on pension queues.
So inside Africa’s giant where many are clinging to the basics of life, there is no life outside employment; to be retired is like receiving a death sentence except that in this case, the prosecutors and judges are less visible. In practice, many retirees actually die shortly afterwards as state policy is to abandon the aged, the retired and the helpless.
The result of this sub-human system is that almost all Nigerians try to stay at work for as long as possible even if they have to commit such crimes as forging birth documents and altering their official personal records in the office! It is therefore not uncommon to find a Nigerian employee with two different ages: the natural one, which is the actual date he was born, and the artificial, which is the age he as an adult declared for himself.
Apart from this whiff of criminality which some otherwise honest Nigerians are pushed into, the less honest ones, seeing no life outside service, tend to ‘feather their nest for the rainy day’ which is an euphemism for corrupt enrichment.
They face a situation where if they are retired they go without their gratuity or pension for years. For instance, the 129,000 federal employees retired in 2007 by then President Olusegun Obasanjo under his Civil Service‘reform’ measures, had their entitlements unpaid for years. Yet for many of them, they are their families bread winner and their situation is compounded by the fact that their graduate children remain unemployed for years.
Given this state of uncertainty, Nigerians are forced to make demands on government to continuously increase retirement age and sometimes they go on strike to achieve this. So today, professors who used to retire at 60 years and spend the rest of their lives writing books, being on the lecture circuit at their own pace and relaxing, have won the stiff battle to increase their retirement age to 70 years, while other categories of university staff have won the fight to retire at 65.
Judges who for decades have been bent over the bench, want their retirement age pushed to 75 years!
In France, Sarkozy is fighting the political battle of his life. His government’s argument is that France has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world and that the French are living much longer leading the national pension system into an annual $15 billion deficit. It also complains that the ratio of active workers paying into the pension system to pensioners drawing from it, is shrinking. It projects that the pension deficit would hit at least $130 billion by 2050 as the population grows older.
But the populace see in Sarkozy’s plan an evil attempt to erode the country’s social benefits which include long holidays, subsidised health system and good collective agreements that make it difficult for employers to lay off workers.
Many of those at the barricade feel that they are not just fighting for themselves but also to preserve the gains of their forebears while the youths and students believe that they are in the struggle to protect their future.
The struggle between both sides led to violent clashes, disruption of land and air travel and fuel shortages. All the one dozen refineries in the French mainland were affected while the paramilitary forces played a cat and mouse game with the protesters; once they lift the blockade on the some of the depots, the strikers re-impose them.
Sarkozy felt that once the parliament passed the bill, the wind will be taken out of the strikes; the bill has been passed, but the protesters are not about to give up; they appointed new dates of protests. Sarkozy who has tried to live the image of a tough and hard guy is in this case, a deficit to his government.
He also has a bad image internationally for playing the racial and religious card against Muslims and expelling the Roma people who are Europeans with the right to live anywhere in the European Union. Sarkozy is bad news to social services.
