Once again, we are reminded of the need to put in place, good residency laws. This time around, the reminder comes from a foreign land. Paul Le Guen is a French national and a world-renowned football coach. He parades very tall credentials in this respect.
Among other things, Guen was the coach that took the Cameroon national team to the 2010 World Cup. He had earlier played for France at the national level; and he has coached several French First and Second Division teams. In its quest for a foreign coach for Nigeria’s national team, the Nigerian Football Federation, NFF, approached Guen and both parties struck a deal, or so they thought. A contract had perhaps been signed and sealed; but at the point of delivery, Guen informed NFF that he was not moving to Nigeria. Rather, he was going to be an absentee coach – coaching our team in Nigeria from faraway France. NFF made it clear that Nigeria was not looking for a coach that would work by proxy but one that would reside in Nigeria with the players he was coaching.
That was where Guen declined the offer. At the home front, NFF’s deft move was applauded by everyone – even those who themselves are guilty as charged. The people that readily come to mind here are our local government functionaries. We have argued, perhaps with monotonous regularity, that the nature of the local government as the nearest tier to the grassroots makes it imperative for local government functionaries to live with the people they serve. In the more advanced democracies, residency requirement laws are religiously enforced at the local government level.
In Nigeria today, most local government officials reside in the cities, outside their local government areas, apparently because the good things of life: electricity, pipe borne water, supermarkets and shopping centres, etc., are found in our cities. It has become fashionable, and indeed a status symbol, for instance, to work in Lafia, Nasarawa State, and reside in faraway Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja. For most local government officials in Edo State, Benin City has become a bedroom community.
Those in Delta State who cannot afford the luxury of going to Benin City invariably migrate to such other cities as Warri and Ughelli at the end of each day. In the Western World, the most significant recent development in the field of local government employee relations is the proliferation of residency requirement rules. Many public administrators and local elected officials are convinced that requiring their employees to reside in their local government areas is both good management and sound public policy. The arguments in favour of residency requirements will continue to flourish for a number of reasons: One, the residency requirement ensures that employees take pride in their work.
This presupposes that employees who live where they work have a greater interest in the quality of the services they render. If important government officials live within the communities where they work, they will ensure that public utilities – light, water supply, sanitation equipment, etc., function more efficiently. Two, there is no better way to promote understanding of local customs and habits on the part of the employees, thereby assuring that the employees relate better to, and identify with, those they serve and vice versa.
This in turn promotes confidence in the local government by showing the citizens that those who work in the local government also find it a suitable place to live in. Three, the residency requirement protects the public coffer in the sense that those who reside in the immediate area must necessarily spend their salaries there and consequently keep the tax money circulating within the local government area. This makes sound economic sense because it keeps people in the area meaningfully busy and employed.
Four, the residency requirement enhances emergency manpower pool by ensuring that off-duty employees will be readily available for call-in and able to respond quickly when contacted. This aspect is particularly pertinent to police, fire, healthcare and other key personnel. Right now, when the doctors and nurses have migrated to Benin City after 4 o’clock, in the event of any health complication, we simply have to contend with the services of the traditional medicine practitioners. Five, our present system, which is akin to an army of occupation, encourages absenteeism and tardiness.
If you have any business to transact in the local government council office, you are better advised not to go on Mondays and Fridays because these have become off-duty days and on the remaining days, you are best advised not to go before 11.00 a.m. because that is about when they begin to trickle in from the city and as soon as the clock begins to move in the direction of 2 p.m., the whole offices become desolate. And in this age of fuel scarcity, the slightest threat in that direction, particularly during the non-allocation peak periods, the officials stay away from work. In fact, in most cases, the workers are able to develop convenient work schedules that enable two workers share the work with each of them taking his turn every other week.
One major factor hindering the residency law in Nigeria is that those who should make and enforce the law are the same people who have a major stake in breaking it. It is perhaps another case of asking the thief to help find your stolen item. All the same, there must be laws that compel people, to spend their money where they earn it instead of going to further congest the already over-congested cities. This is, therefore, a clarion call for state and local government legislators to wake up to their responsibilities of making laws for the advancement of the localities. For us, every bit counts in this crusade. Perhaps it is time to begin to appeal to the sensitivities of the local government functionaries that they cannot continue to render half service while expecting full pay at the end of the month. No organisation ever grows that way.
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