https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HHsMQ8Ik-Y
Tired of waiting. Tired of excuses. Tired of not knowing exactly what he needs to do next. He’s been teaching high school financial accounting in Nigeria’s southwestern Osun state for the last decade. He enjoys his job and gets on with his colleagues.

“I’m not angry,’’ he says. “But what we are experiencing now…if one is not careful it can lead to hypertension. It’s seriously affecting me now.”

Olatunji is tired and exasperated because he hasn’t been paid his monthly salary since December.

PAY ME NOW
Nigeria has a culture of not paying workers and it’s not about to change anytime soon

AP PHOTOS/SUNDAY ALAMBA
“No pay, no work.”
FROM OUR OBSESSION
Nigeria Now
Yemisi Adegoke
By Yemisi Adegoke
Published April 20, 2016Last updated June 6, 2019This article is more than 2 years old.
Lagos, Nigeria

Taiwo Olatunji is tired.

Tired of waiting. Tired of excuses. Tired of not knowing exactly what he needs to do next. He’s been teaching high school financial accounting in Nigeria’s southwestern Osun state for the last decade. He enjoys his job and gets on with his colleagues.

“I’m not angry,’’ he says. “But what we are experiencing now…if one is not careful it can lead to hypertension. It’s seriously affecting me now.”

Olatunji is tired and exasperated because he hasn’t been paid his monthly salary since December.

Last year, as many as 23 of Nigeria’s 36 states left their civil servants unpaid for months on end.
Last year, it was reported up to 23 states of Nigeria’s 36 states left their civil servants unpaid for months on end. Olatunji, 57, was one of them. After being owed his salary for eight months, he received half payments for the rest of 2015. Even after the federal government agreed to help out the indebted states with a 338 billion Naira ($170 million) pay-out to resolve the matter, Olatunji has yet to receive a single pay cheque this year.

“They [the Osun state government] have asked us to submit our documents [for verification],” he says. “I have submitted them four times but they keep asking us to come back. It’s just another way to keep delaying us. If the funds aren’t there, they should just tell us, for how long will it go on?”
Although there are no concrete statistics on the issue of salary delay in Nigeria it is not uncommon for employees in the public sector to be owed their salaries by the government.Thousands of school teachers, nurses and other civil servants are forced to turn to other private means of earning a living to survive doing everything from taxi driving to petty trading. This ends up leaving many state-run schools and hospitals without qualified professionals in attendance which in turn makes parents and patients turn to private institutions they can barely afford.

Explanations range from the non-existent to the hollow. Last year, thousands of government workers in Imo state went without their salaries for up to eight months, the exact reason was unclear and didn’t seem to matter much because it didn’t stop state governor Rochas Okorocha from, allegedly, spending 600 million naira on Christmas decorations for the state.

Over in the oil-rich southeastern Bayelsa state, which former president Goodluck Jonathan governed from 2005 to 2007, the government hasn’t paid local civil servants for 10 months. The locals find this particularly galling given its relatively small population and large oil wealth which probably should mean paying workers shouldn’t really be a problem.

That's why majority are not diligent at work, I can't imagine working for 50days without pay. They surely know how to make money without salary