Since inception, they have operated like a cult and in the sixteen years of the PDP, not even the loudest opposition member had the guts to openly disclose what he or she earns.
A glutton is one who eats voraciously and obsessively, and that precisely is what our National Assembly members have been doing since 1999, consuming everything in sight even while not putting in commensurate service to the nation that feeds their greed. But at last, it looks like a Daniel has come to judgment. If our luck as Nigerians hold pretty this time around, may be, just maybe, our legislators’ impunity-driven excesses and illegalities may soon come to an abrupt end – thanks to Olusegun Obasanjo and the unflattering slump in oil prices. Obasanjo, a two-term former Nigerian President whose legendary no-nonsense stance vis a vis the usually gluttonous National Assembly was ignominiously rubbished by his hand-picked duo of supine and clueless successors. No hard-headed observer of Nigerian affairs could have forgotten, in a hurry, how President Obasanjo put the National Assembly on a leach and on the path of rectitude even as Speaker Ghali Naaba was literally fire-eating, threatening him with impeachment. Obasanjo brooded no nonsense but the National Assembly went gaga the minute the same Obasanjo handpicked two weak successors and inflicted them on the nation.
As it would happen, both of them were more concerned with holding on to the reins of office, at whatever cost to the nation, and for this reason they had to romance the National Assembly. Their overriding selfishness was all the National Assembly needed to literally run amok, tearing into the national treasury as they pleased, and using, to quote Obasanjo in his recent letter to the legislative arm, “different disingenuous ways and devices to overturn the recommendations of the Revenue Mobilization, allocation and Fiscal Commission whose responsibility it is to fix emoluments for the three arms of government.” The result is that, today, what our legislators take home monthly, or quarterly, bears no correlation to the commission’s recommendations or to common sense in a cash-strapped economy like ours.
They not only earn so disproportionately to everybody else, they ingeniously ensure that only a very small fraction of that humongous haul is taxable. What have we not written about their opaque ways? What else remains to be said of their collective insensitivity; their beyond shame predilections? I have personally written myself sore on this carefree arm of government.
Thrice, I have called on Nigerians: students, market women and the country’s hoi polloi, to demonstrate their total disavowal of this insensitivity by storming what I called the ‘Bastille’, in reference to a similar incident in French history. In the article: Are Nigerians Condemned To This Profligate National Assembly? – The Nation, 17 January, 2016 – I wrote inter alia: “why are these politicians so conscienceless they would always agree on loots, irrespective of differences in their party affiliation or is the National Assembly a cultic coven where they swear to things besides the well being of Nigerians?
They are known to sometimes tear at one another exchanging blows; but such scuffles never happen when it comes to money matters. In that instance, they are always ‘ad idem’, belonging momentarily, only to one party: the MONEY PARTY of Nigeria.
That solidarity in financial matters is why Senator Dino Melaye and the House spokesman, Abdul-Razak Namdas, have been pooh-poohing Obasanjo’s timely warning. Whatever their reaction, Nigerians know only too well that each National Assembly session has traditionally been progressively more corrupt than the last, and that this present one is simply the worst in their greedy acquisitiveness. That is why many Nigerians regard the crisis in the oil sector as divine so that our gluttons can moderate their greed or get chased out by unemployed, hungry and angry Nigerians. Leo Ogor, for instance, is so enamoured with constitution amendment that he would like the executive to initiate another, easily forgetting that they are yet to successfully clear the allegation of massive corruption in the last one which came to nothing. If they can be so dismissive of the advice of a two-term president of this country what chance stands any other Nigerian trying to call them to work with an executive branch that is trying its dam best to instill sanity into the country’s finances?
Back then to Obasanjo’s letter which a serious National Assembly should have received with appreciation as Senate President Saraki’s reaction initially indicated. The former president began on a very sombre note: “I have reflected and expressed, outspokenly at times, my views on the practice in the National Assembly which detracts from distinguishness and honourability because it is shrouded in opaqueness and absolute lack of transparency and could not be regarded as normal, good and decent practice in a democracy that is supposed to be exemplary. I am, of course, referring to the issue of budgets and finances of the National Assembly”. To a more discerning people, words like these, coming from an Obasanjo should, ordinarily, have been taken with all seriousness. But that will not be our National Assembly members who have since been pouring scorn on the one single Nigerian who can tell them the absolute truth given that if President Buhari did, he would be misunderstood. Going further, the man you cannot gag went straight to the kernel of his message: “The purpose of election into the Legislative Assembly, particularly at the national level, is to give service to the nation and not for the personal service and interest of members at the expense of the nation which seemed to have been the mentality, psychology, mindset and practice within the National Assembly since the beginning of this present democratic dispensation”. Then he asked: “Where is patriotism? Where is commitment? Where is service?”
Thank you General. Nigerians are one with you in asking these questions. We can only hope we are not in a dialogue with the deaf. But he was not done as he went on to give them a lecture on the very essence of good governance: ”The beginning of good governance which is the responsibility of all arms and all the tiers of government is openness and transparency. It does not matter what else we try to do, as long as one arm of government shrouds its financial administration and management in opaqueness and practices rife with corruption, only very little, if anything at all, can be achieved in putting Nigeria on the path of sustainable and enduring democratic system, development and progress. Governance without transparency will be a mockery of democracy”.
That has been the cause of Nigerians’ greatest angst against the National Assembly. Since inception, they have operated like a cult and in the sixteen years of the PDP, not even the loudest opposition member had the guts to openly disclose what he or she earns. Indeed, not a few Nigerians actually believe that they are sworn to an oath. To dispute this, they must, today, let Nigerians know what they earn, to the very last penny. Otherwise we would brand them cultists and cheats.
Enough is enough. In no other country of the world does this happen.
NATION
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