Weep not mayors

The first time I heard that mayors don’t have a salary was many years back. I took this piece of information like some tale from the kind of stories I used to read from the Arabian nights, a book of very captivating stories that usually kept our minds alert as children in those days. And in the village these are the kind of tales told on very cold nights by grandma’s fire side.

The difference then and now is that I was already a grown up, well brought up in the art of establishing the truth, or rather sorting out the truth from falsehood. For this reason, I could not quite understand why mayors, of all state agents of progress and development at local levels, could go without salaries, and yet they control a reasonable proportion of community money.

These days it is called a budget. And that mayors control huge sums of money which runs in hundreds of millions and they just expend it in the collective interest of their communities, while their stomachs burble with hunger and thirst, is in my own opinion punitive. Yet, I have always stayed awake most of the time to imagine how saintly this class of people could be.

Yet again I have waited at street corners to see any one of them moving like someone in need. None of them left their offices at the end of their terms in office, looking wretched.

One truth that comes to my mind is that, they are actually not speaking the truth because, if you see the kind of campaigns during elections, beginning from nominations at the primaries, you will discover how desperate some aspirants appear, and how lowly they descend to be chosen. It is here that you realise that, salary or no salary these mayors need not weep. They have a way of surviving using their positions in their time in office.

It was Mayor Njong of Kumbo, who made me realize that mayors had a right to complain. In fact when he brought up the matter at one time, he was honest enough to regret that mayors going without any fixed salaries place them very close to the gates of hell, under the sin of putting their hands in state coffers to help themselves.

This was about nine months ago. He was lamenting that on several occasions, they have put up their case to the government through their supervisory ministry, but the file seems to have gotten lost somewhere in transit without reaching its destination at the presidency.

All of a sudden, however, whether they saw it coming or not the mayors’ supervising minister, Rene Emmanuel Sadi, wiped the tears from their eyes at least for the interim when he announced that he has located the file concerning their salaries and that it is heading for the presidency for final signature. So weep not mayors. The good days are coming.

I just want to imagine myself hiding behind some curtains in the mayor’s offices and watching them unnoticed fumbling with figures, from one budgetary head to the other to see what little thing they can scrape out of the budget to keep body and soul intact.

Or I could see some close relations of the mayor coming up with letter-heads for some dubious contracts organised by the mayors. Whatever argument they may advance in defence of themselves, this is the true picture how they manage to survive without salaries. But can you blame them?.

I want to believe that all this is over. Let’s move forward in the spirit of 2035.