I make no apology

Angry about contractors?

Attending a broader departmental meeting yesterday morning, someone anonymously posted a message in the Q&A section of the presentation with the following premise. That the agency had hired contractors at highly inflated salaries who worked less and had no responsibilities thereby leaving the agency hamstrung on recruiting actual staff.

Many were in agreement with the comment, but it was one viewpoint that could not be left to slide. I have been contracting since 1995, in fact, I was persuaded to go contracting my then CIO who felt that there would never be full utilisation of my wealth of knowledge, and I would easily be frustrated in a permanent role.

For the season, for a reason

In all the years of my being a contractor, I have felt no less equal to the task along with feeling an integral member of the teams I worked in. To address the comment, I wrote, “Contractors are actual staff, albeit temporary, they have been engaged by the agency to help fulfil the goals being discussed the in the conference and that it was quite unhelpful to create an us-and-them situation where we should be banding together.” Soon, I had more agreeing with me than those who did with the original posting.

Contractors get a bad rap, usually through no fault of their own apart from the few rouge ones. We are paid competitively negotiated market rates which might seem high, but we fundamentally cost less in administration, overheads, and management, whilst bringing in skill, expertise, and other perspectives.

We do not have the employment benefits of permanent staff along with burdening the employers with fiduciary requirements by law and other statutes. The arrangements are neat, allowing for clean breaks by mutual and individual arrangement. The establishment so easily terminates the contract as they can renew or recall after a break of working there.

No apologies, none at all

As per my own experience, I am there to contribute and regardless of the tendency to differentiate staff status, many industries need all kinds of staff and everything is down to need, skill, experience, demand, negotiation, and the ability to get involved with the people you work with.

Now, if anyone thinks contractors are paid too much, in a free enterprise world they can also decide to become contractors rather than chafe at the choices of others on the one hand and the market requirements that create the need for such personnel on the other hand. What I will not brook is the denigration of contractors, nor would I apologise for being a contractor. So there!

A rather surly place owner

Shit hot shit people

There are people quite talented in what they do and that is all they have to show. In business, they probably employ staff who are marshalled into a unit to perform with excellence on the force of the personality of one.

I walked into a restaurant this afternoon and saw one such boss, for she was not a leader, the banter between her and two of her staff was like an offcut of a Nollywood film, laden with abuse and invective, the staff progressively belittled that if it were a shrinking game, they would have been the size of ants in the space of a minute.

Suffering smiling staff

When I was noticed, I tried to put in an order and when it did not seem to be a big one, she became surly and truculent at the point of doing the same thing she did with her staff. That she then stopped addressing me directly even though she could face me, and she delivered her diatribe and belittlement through another of her staff.

All this because we were putting an order in for food even though we had bought foodstuff there the day before and had the pleasure of being served by friendlier staff. Rather than run the gauntlet of the nasty woman tomorrow, I went back this evening, thankfully long after she had left for the day and again found beautiful and helpful people to fulfil my order.

The staff saved that place of a nasty review, of the boss, no words, but the staff will perform better if they were treated better, with courtesy, respect, and dignity.

Editorial: Shedding no tears for INEC staff

Working with bad tools

If anything, one can only commend Professor Attahiru Jega the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission for presiding over the April elections the best he could despite the constraints he had.

He was bequeathed a rotten and corrupt organisation he never had the opportunity to overhaul considering the short time he had to prepare and conduct the elections.

However, the subtle but radical ideas he implemented made for elections that were quite free, generally fair and acceptably credible from the deployment of members of the National Youth Service Corps as ad-hoc staff, the voters’ registration exercise requiring fingerprint identification to eliminate multiple registrations and the use of eminent Nigerians as chief collation officers to spread the burden of responsibility and integrity.

Working the imperfect

The whole process was almost totally sabotaged by incumbent INEC staff that he inherited because they were denied the scope to operate and suborn the system; many times he had to redeploy or even sack staff to ensure that the process was not compromised.

Now, on the whole it was not perfect but it would be unfair to berate the chief in the circumstances he found himself in.

It is however interesting to read that INEC staff are unhappy with their boss for not giving them opportunities to perform their duties which they should have been allowed to do if they did have a track record of honest and impeachable service in the conduct of previous elections.

Given the chance, they messed up

When they did get an opportunity to do all the work in the states where the elections were postponed, it was a debacle celebrating a farce which made the work of the ad-hoc and amateur staff employed before seem both professional and sterling.

Besides the news story, all the comments numbering almost 70 did not find any scope for sympathy for the INEC staff, their actions have done Nigeria down, put us to shame and left many pessimistic of the possibility of credible elections until Professor Jega found ways to side-track and tame their malevolence.

If the INEC staff feel so aggrieved, they should resign, they deserve no sympathy whatsoever.

Acknowledgements

234Next.com ran the story about INEC staff being unhappy with Jega.