Question…As the immediate past Commissioner for Finance, Abia State, what challenges did you encounter on assumption of office?

Well, on assumption of office on June 2nd, 2015, we had about four special advisers. I started as a Special Adviser Economic Affairs on secondment from First Bank and this means that I functioned as a staff of First Bank and they still paid my salaries for the four years.

I never got any salary from Abia State Government and my name was never on the payroll of Abia State Government.

There were a lot of challenges, first, we found out that the State was still processing payment of salaries manually, there was no centralized pay roll/data management scheme in place. There was no biometric capturing of civil servants, there was no idea of TSA, and there was no existing relationship between the State and any donor agency like World Bank etc.

Our overhead obligations were heavy and cutting down was the way to go, all these and more were too heavy for the young administration.

One of the things we deliberated on was whether to pay salaries with the old processes we met and that means manual payment through the MDA’s. The process is such that cheques are issued based on the submission of the payroll officers which are most times fraudulent and manipulated by the collaborations of the payroll officers. We devised a means which was highly resisted by the civil servants by developing a checklist which captures your name, Ministry, Agency and departments, date you joined service, current level, last promotion date, gross and net amount earned. We made sure that the director of administration, finance and Permanent Secretary jointly sign that the person is a bonafide staff of the Ministry. With this, we started gathering the data of civil servants though we discovered they were not cooperating, this semi automation process was highly resisted.

This is because the manual process they were using helped a lot of them in defrauding the State.

We identified about few bureaus that had about 20 to 30 staffs, most of them gave reason that they do not know what excel format means, however we engaged the bureaus under the SSG and taught them how to prepare the excel format and went ahead to announce that we have started paying salaries for June 2015.

Our MDA wage bill was One billion, five hundred million naira (#1.5b) as at june 2015 when we came on board with automation we saved about Six hundred million naira (N600m for the State, today the MDA salary have gone down to about 800m without prejudice to those that retired and those newly employed.

It’s instructive to note that some departments were paying cash to their staff in brown envelopes
We had to deal with the issue of fraudulent employment of workers without waiver, a small committee was set to review those employed without waiver over 800 illegal workers were discovered.

When the salary committee was invited by EFCC office in Port Harcourt, payroll officers inserted the 61 names into the State payroll and two months later, they were discovered and removed which cost the State about Fifteen Million naira (#15m)

Where things are done well, the pay roll officers should have been sanctioned and made to bear the punishment of how we lost Fifteen Million naira (#15m) to non-existing civil servants, so these are the issues we met and the processes that led to where we are today.

That is my legacy that we were able to get the database of the civil servants, have them under one centralized payroll system, Did biometric capturing of entire civil servants, the subsequent administration can only improve on what we have done as it affects salary processing but currently the ministry of finance is still running on my template.

On pension, we introduced automation of pension payment instead of cash payment that was abused, it is on record that when we came in, pensioners were being unfairly treated as they were made to travel from their local Governments and villages to the Sub-treasuries and even end up going home empty handed because pensions couldn’t get to them, even for as low as Five Thousand Naira and Two Thousand Naira (#5000, #2000) were being paid under the mango tree, they were at the mercy of those Sub-treasurers, civil servants lobby to be made sub-treasurers than Permanent Secretaries because they were pocketing about #7m monthly, building hostels and hotels in Umuahia and Aba.
To curb the pension fraud we introduced the automation of pensioners by gathering their data because we are dealing with old people to confirm if they are still around or not, if they are not, we remove them and input the freshly retired. We also had the issue of TSA. getting all our payments under one kettle, we succeeded in doing that but I cannot tell you it’s 100% but we did at least 70% of the implementation and this also saved the State a whole lot.

We also have programmes currently going on in the State and it was courtesy of the window we opened and the narrative we changed in our relationship between Abia State, World Bank and other multilateral agencies.

Then the issue of over-bloated wage bill, we discovered that Abia till today pays the highest in the whole South-East, our Permanent Secretaries earn highest in the entire South east which is cascaded down to the least staff in the state.

In line with the Governor's directive of cutting down 50% of his emolument, we were able to cut down Seven hundred and Fifty thousand naira #75,000 from One Hundred and Fifty Thousand naira #150,000 which naturally should have been overhead in the Permanent Secretaries salary but they embedded it in the entire salary.

This cost cutting affected every other overhead expense as a committee made up of the then SSG, AG and myself we took a critical look at our overhead and decided to reduce the entire overhead including that of my office by reducing the cost of going to Abuja for FAAC from One million, six hundred thousand naira #1.6m to Five hundred thousand with the belief that we must practice what we preach but surprisingly the amount has been jacked up to 1.6m since I left office.

It is surprising to note that barely two days after the new exco was formed, the salary committee that worked very hard was disbanded as was announced on air.

But it is interesting to note that after one week, this same committee headed by Mrs Charity Ukonu the lady that was detained at Afara prison and her team is still and currently processing payment of Abia civil servants, but why the current commissioner for finance decided to keep it a secret is still a surprise to me.

Question.. During your time as Commissioner, salaries were coming late, sometimes into the first and second week of the following month but now, salaries come latest the 28th of the month. What was the problem?

Salaries were the major issues of the previous administration and even the current one. The picture they succeeded in painting was that Obinna Oriaku was not keen on paying salaries as it were.

As it affects salaries and pensions, I must state that the issue of salary payment is very fundamental and that is where I lost it with the civil servants and people who refuse to reason with it. If what we used in paying one civil servant in Abia is what is used in Enugu to pay for two months which does not add up. If you like bring Ngozi Okonjo Iweala to be the Commissioner for Finance, the issues are there and they will continue to be there until the fundamentals are addressed which was the area I focused on.

You cannot eat your cake and have it. You cannot have an over the bloated workforce, employ everybody in your village because your brother is the Governor. You are earning far than what you should earn. I did an analysis of our total receipt in 45 months and outside the intervention of the Paris Refund, the State got about one hundred and fifty six billion naira (#156 billion) and about One Hundred Billion (#100 billion) was used for salaries, emoluments and pensions, the other Fifty Six Billion Naira (#56 billion) was used for overhead and capital projects, the implication is that Abia State exist just to pay salaries this has to change if the State is to move forward.

On why salaries are being paid early, during FAAC meeting in April 2019, the Commissioners Forum made a passionate appeal to the current Minister of Finance that we want the FAAC brought closer, before then our FAAC meeting date starts 24th -26th and if it falls on a weekend, that means the allocation is gotten either 30th because you will have to give a 2-3 days notice after FAAC meeting to get your allocation. That is why the average expectancy for FAAC allocation is between 27th -28th and after that, you can begin to talk about salaries.

After the demand by the Commissioners Forum, the FAAC meeting was brought back to the 19th of every month. The implication is that by the 22nd -23rd of every month, allocations have arrived and salaries are being paid.

That salaries are being paid today has no input from anybody except for the fundamental change in FAAC date from the federal government and the repayment of the Temporary Overdraft (TOD) under my watch as the commissioner for finance.

Most importantly, we were running on a temporary overdraft, this means that we usually go to the banks, ask for little augmentation to pay salaries and that system has been on for over three years.

That was why salaries were paid the first week of a new month because you must wait for them to do their end of the month for the CBN and other regulatory authorities to see that that account is in credit.

Abians should note that it had no human or technical intervention, it is only this thing that I have explained now done under my watch that is making salaries come early, go to the DMO and CBN sites and confirm when the FAAC holds.

Question.. Can you highlight those Reforms you brought on board as the Commissioner for Finance?

1) We discovered that we cannot be going round the problems of Abia State as they are fundamental from the military era. We resolved to attack them which we did. One of the reforms we did is the Judiciary reform. I know that the white paper was about being implemented when I left. The JUSUN salary issue, people ran to the judiciary, when you go there, we have more than 30 staff in one small magistrate court and even the customary courts and they do not seat more than once in a quarter and you are paying a humongous wage bill. An analysis of the judiciary will tell you that the entire judiciary constitutes over 40% of the entire wage bill so we felt that we need to attack it.
2)
Civil Service Reform: I expect that the civil service reform should be concluded. That civil service reform is very critical to the survival of the state because today in Abia State, the budget is not being followed.
A situation where every year people are being promoted, the civil servants are excited about it but they forget that they are also going to wait for the repercussion, imagine every one leaves together at level 16, it will have an effect on the pension and it becomes difficult to pay, I'm sure their pension is hitting Five Hundred Million naira (500m) monthly and It beats me how these payments will be made regular with poor monthly allocation and I wonder which government will pass out such value with the meager allocation we are getting. So these are the reasons I made enemies because I said we must address these issues if we are going to tell ourselves the truth.

3) We also have the IGR reform which is still ongoing, we automated the processes, the autonomy was about being implemented but there are still some issues that need to be addressed, the workers in the board of internal revenue, those employed as a board cannot be sacked or moved, these are the issues that needs to be sorted out because the reforms demands that you run the board like a private-sector based organization where professionalism and performance is given prominence than where you come from or how long you have been in the organization, these are the reforms that are still ongoing, We need to find a mutual resolution of those workers employed by the board and fully implement the restructuring as being done by other States that have grown their IGR as fresh and highly motivated staff is what is needed.

4) Again we did that of parastatals, we set out committees that visited them, discussed with them and also get to know their problems and now the implementation is what I expect the government to follow up.
Also the Educational Institutions: schools, I remember that Professor Mkpa headed the one for the technical college, so the report should be out by now.

5) Local Government Reform, we engaged in that reform because we discovered that some people earn salaries in the local government at the state level and also earn as political appointees, with the automation we did, and linking with their BVN we were able to identify them and made it clear that their salaries can come from only one source while others can be called allowances, but these are the reforms that we did and substantial savings were also made at the local and state government levels because we realigned our salaries in line with what it should be.

This act also incurred enmity among friends and relations who feels that because you are there it is your turn to protect their own people and perpetuate the fraud and immorality that is going on in the system so that it how it affects the reforms we did.

The most important one which today I'm excited about is the disarticulation, this is one of the most exciting reforms I supervised, It’s unfortunate that almost 20 years after the implementation of the Universal Basic Education law in 2004 Abia State is the only State that still had the Junior secondary school management under the State, This accounts for why we have challenges with teachers salary.
Today we have successfully moved the management and supervision of JS1 to JS3 to ASUBEB which is under the local government and free the state to focus on the senior secondary school, today the State is better positioned to clear the arrears of secondary school teachers as the wage bill has drastically gone down this is one of our legacies and I am excited that after 20yrs we have solved that problem.

We made available #6b as state Government contributions towards clearing the arrears of outstanding UBEC counterpart funding obligations, today over 10b has gone into remodeling of our primary schools and with our recent success in implementation of disarticulation. our Junior Secondary schools (JS1-3) will now benefit from the UBEC intervention in schools.

6) Economic Reform and Provision of counterpart funding of Projects: On assumption of office there was no viable donor agencies projects on going in the State .This was basically due to the mismanagement of such funds by past officials of government we understood that we cannot solve our problems alone we focused on provision of funds to attract the federal government component.

These include provision of over Six Billion naira (N6b) as state government contribution. Today we have almost cleared arrears of our UBEC funds that were lying fallow at UBEC Abuja. We provided over One Billion (N1b) as counterpart fund for NEWMAP that attracted over Thirty Two Billion Naira (# 32B) to Abia State for the takeoff of the Port Harcourt road, Uratta Road, Ngwa road, Drainage and flood control management.

We also provided over Six Hundred Million (N600m) for the Ramp. Today we are among the few States in the south South and South East states involved in Ramp 2 worth of Sixty Million USD ($60m dollars), We also intervened in the world bank ARIN program worth over Twenty Million USD ($20m). FADAMA 2. We were among the few States that keyed into the Sftas program etc.

African development Bank. AFDB. Our engagement with Adfb was reinvigorated even before assumption of office in 2015 through Mr. Emeka Ononiwu. This intervention has literally been concluded as ADFB have already concluded the procurement process for the engineering design of some projects. This intervention which is on drainage, road and Sanitation is worth Three Hundred Million Dollars ($300m). As the Commissioner for Finance I successfully defended the loan request before the House Committee of both the National Assembly and the Senate.

Note: This is outside their interest in the Enyimba Economic City Project
Procurement Reform. Under my watch we redefined government business by making sure that our procurement process is very transparent, this as expected did not go down well with few disgruntled people, however I am convinced that it is the only way to go and no regrets about it and this this saved the state a lot of money.

what is this one saying?