FIJ
Isaac Bristol, a resident of Rivers State better known on X as PIDOMNIGERIA, will have a torrid time security his freedom from the police, judging by not only the ease of meeting his bail conditions but the possibility of finding the right fits.
Bristol has been detained by the Nigeria Police Force on allegations of treason, terrorism financing, breach of Official Secrets Act (OSA), espionage, among other serious offences, following his arrest on August 5.
His arrest was made on the basis that he runs PIDOM, a leak journalism page on microblogging platform X. FIJ has reported the inhumane treatment meted to Bristol and the reprehensible manner of his arrest.
But beyond that, the administrative bail conditions set for him has also captured attention. In the bail document seen by FIJ, the police demanded tthe production of two sureties.
One of these sureties must be a Level 16 civil servant with a landed property worth N500 million in Abuja — an almost impossible demand, considering how well civil servants are paid in Nigeria.
To see if these bail conditions are realistic, FIJ looked the earnings of Level 16 civil servants in Nigeria compared to the value of the required property.
Civil Servants at Level 16 earn between N2.5 million and N3.3 million per-anum, according to the Consolidated Public Service Salary Structure, published in 2019. It is also noteworthy that civil servants can only work for a maximum of 35 years or until they turn 60, according to the Public Service Rule.
By implication, even if a civil began their career at level 16, started at the highest salary and saved every single naira for 35 years, they would only accumulate about N115.5 million. This is conspicuously less than 50% of the amount required.
This scenario is unrealistic. With an annual income of N3.3 million, a Level 16 civil servant would need to save for at least 150 years to afford N500 million.
In a fairly realistic situations, the following assumptions could hold: that the civil servant in question starts their career with a Bachelors degree at Level 8 of the civil service, that the civil servant gets promoted promptly, according to the years in service listed by the Public Service Rule Gazette.
It is noteworthy that, according to the public service rule, between levels 7 and 14, a civil servants needs to have spent at least 3 years in their position before promotion considerations.
Between levels 15 and 17, they need to have spent at least four years in the same position before getting promotion considerations.
With these assumptions in place, here is a table of how much a civil servant would have saved in their career if they did not spend their monthly earnings on any other thing:
In the end, the civil servant would have only managed to save about N76 million; this is just fairly above 10% of the amount required to purchase the landed property in the bail conditions.
Most importantly, these numbers assume no money is spent on basic living costs — another impossible scenario.
