Civil servants across the country are cautioning Nigerians to refrain from voting for APC presidential candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd.), if they do not want a repeat of the gale of retrenchments that trailed his first sojourn as Head of State between 1984 and 1985.
Their fears are based on Buhari’s antecedents in relieving government workers of their jobs without compensation.
Civil servants are not allowed by law to speak openly on matters of politics but a random [pro_ad_display_adzone id=”10″]sampling of opinion among civil servants across 10 states showed that sad memories of the over 200,000 civil servants sacked without compensation by General Buhari in 1985 remain ever fresh in the civil service.
Although most of the people polled claimed they were not yet in the civil service at the time, they said the harrowing stories of frustration, hunger, suicides and suffering that the sacked civil servants faced after they were relieved of their jobs are still told in civil service circles, a situation that makes most of them wary of returning General Buhari to power via their votes.
“We do not want the sad situation of 1985 to visit us again,” one of them revealed. “The economy is in bad shape now and any President that has the tendency to sack civil servants will likely not get our votes. We are not in the best of working conditions and the little we are getting at the end of the month only manages to take care of our families and those of our relatives. But if we lose our jobs, you can imagine the millions of Nigerians that will suffer.”
Another one put her reasons thus: “Buhari’s retrenched over 200,000 civil servants in 1984. That equates to the sack of over 415,000 civil servants in present-day Nigeria. Buhari’s policy led to the loss of over two million private sector jobs as at 1984, which equates to over 4.2 million jobs today. History should be made a compulsory subject in secondary schools, so we do not make the same mistakes out of ignorance or laziness. This isn’t ‘Change’. This is slavery.”
