By Efio-Ita Nyok
All hell was let loose yesterday simply because I disagreed with the position of former ward councillors, vice chairmen, and LG appointees protesting for the payment of the so-called “severance allowance.” I still stand by my yesterday’s argument.
The people telling me to “respect the law” or “what is good for the goose…” especially Ken Asim-Ittah, Otu Otu Ita, and Akabom Okon etc are missing the only point that matters.
Ward councillors, LG VC’s, and appointees (and governors, lawmakers, appointees) sit inside a remuneration system they design, expand and defend for themselves. They peg their own salaries to senior civil-service ranks, add a monthly legislative vote that can dwarf that salary, collect furniture allowances, and then demand severance after three short years. Meanwhile a graduate in the Cross River civil service still takes home ₦75–90k after deductions. One group writes the rules about public money; the other lives under those rules. That is not an accident of “applicable salary structure.” It is class power.
Calling severance “just like pension and gratuity” is dishonest. A career civil servant earns exit benefits over decades of continuous, often precarious service. A councillor extracts a package after a brief elective stint whose quality of representation, legislation and oversight is almost never audited. The two are not comparable exit packages; one is the residue left for the working class, the other is accumulation by the political fraction that controls the state.
Vic Chris, your pointing out that governors also collect pensions or that the same people once collected severance as senators only proves the continuity of privilege. It does not legitimise it. Mutual generosity among the political elite is not a moral argument; it is evidence of how the fraction looks after its own.
“Change the law before you shout” as suggested by Magdalene Eyoma is the most revealing line of all. Who writes and amends the remuneration laws? The same class that benefits from them. Demanding silence until they reform themselves is simply a procedural defence of the status quo. I’m afraid this line even suggests a narrative of Stockholm Syndrome so I will keep shouting. The law is not a sacred contract when it is written by the beneficiaries to protect their own material interest. It is one more instrument of class power, and it remains open to public rejection.
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps explain why so many people like Vic, Otu, Magdalene etc rush to defend these packages. Hegemony is not simply force; it is the ruling class’s ability to make its own interests appear as the common sense of the entire society. When critics are told “it is in the law,” “it is an entitlement,” or “change the law before you shout,” they are being invited to accept the political class’s self-designed rules as neutral and inevitable. That acceptance is the everyday work of hegemony: the dominant fraction secures consent for its privileges so that open coercion becomes unnecessary. The law itself becomes one more instrument through which the political elite naturalises its material advantages.
I am not confusing entitlement with privilege. I am refusing to treat the self-awarded enrichment of the political class as morally unassailable simply because they put it in writing.
Efio-Ita Nyok, Ph.D., aicmc
Thursday 22nd October 2026
Old Town
