Whenever the story of this republic is told, the Eighth Senate will surely occupy a big space – for what is generally believed to be its intransigence and utter insensitivity to its environment. But, is this true?
Our senators have been savaged by a highly combustible social media mob for flimsy reasons, including incredibly their pay, which many who have little or no knowledge of lawmaking and its hazards have described as unnecessarily huge. Thankfully, those who have assigned themselves the sensitive task of knowing exactly how much our distinguished senators take home monthly have not succeeded in laying their hands on this highly flammable information with which they could set the country on fire and imperil our future.
But for the hard times, our distinguished senators would have been pressing for all those privileges and allowances that they have graciously not awarded themselves. They include allowances for their wives, who some of them declared as part of their assets forms, their concubines, pets, gardeners, cooks, stewards, designers, who conceive those kingly dresses, the tailors who sew them, the washer men, who make the fanciful dresses always crisp and smart as befitting of a senator’s wardrobe, drivers, shoe shiners, barbers and – I almost forgot – their armies of thugs. Don’t they pay for these and more? Yet some people scorn them for being spendthrifts and undeserving of the little they take home.
It is this same group of fastidious people who have been purveying the rumour that the National Assembly has refused to join the Treasury Single Account (TSA), which is being hailed for retrieving trillions of naira that would have been shared by ravenous public officials feeding fat on the system.
Their proof is that if the TSA was embraced by the lawmakers, it would have been difficult for them to have spent without recourse to the budget N1.314b on glistening Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) at a time when many are out of jobs and hunger stalks the land. But let’s be fair: when has buying some choice items become seasonal, like planting maize?
In vain did Senate Services Chair Ibrahim Abdulla Gobir (Sokoto East), the distinguished senator who handled the deal, explain that it was a testimony to the exceptional prudence of the lawmakers that only 36 Land Cruiser VXR V8 SUVs were bought at N36.5m per unit and not 109 units for each member of the Upper Chamber.
He said: “Come to think of it, there is no minister that hasn’t got about three to four cars. One Land Cruiser, maybe a back-up and two Hilux cars. There is no director in the civil service that hasn’t got a car; there is no permanent secretary that hasn’t got a Land Cruiser. In fact, every House of Assembly member has either a Prado or a Land Cruiser and here is a senator you say he cannot have one Land Cruiser.”
Poor man. His explanation, despite its lucidity, was like water off a dock’s back. It was as if the distinguished senator had committed treason. The pundits and self-appointed commentators descended on him. Some, obviously the decent crowd, said he was blabbing like an overfed baby. Others, the usually pugnacious and envious few who will never mind their own business, called him names as if he was a Lagos pick pocket caught in the act. Ah. Just because N1.314b was spent on cars?
Don’t our senators deserve some respect? How do we expect them to go about their oversight duties – in rickety molue, Keke NAPEP and tuketuke, buses?Haba! Shouldn’t there be a limit to frugality and prudence ? How do we expect these people who have humbly agreed to serve their fatherland to do so like paupers, being senators of the “Giant of Africa”, “the largest democracy in Africa” and the continent’s biggest economy – a trophy that South Africa was clinging onto until former Finance Minister Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala devised the magical formula Rebasing with which we snatched it away.
At the peak of the intensity of the bitter criticisms against the purchase of the vehicles, some envious fellows, who obviously would do anything to set the people against the senators, obtained many of the lawmakers’ telephone numbers and mounted a desperate campaign to get their constituents bombard them with calls to drop the deal.
“Don’t take that car. People are suffering and you guys want to buy jeeps? You represent me in Ekiti and we are watching. Ile ni apoti n joko de idi o(the seat waits patiently at home for the buttocks,” one told Senator Biodun Olujimi (Ekiti South).
Apparently not one to shy away from a street fight, she replied: “Sit anywhere. If you voted it was not free. I paid every inch of the way. Get a job and earn a living, so you don’t keep issuing threats that you can’t enforce and you don’t keep invading the privacy of people. Only dirty people do that.”
Mrs Olujimi has told of how her phone rings every minute. If indeed she paid her way to the Senate, will her constituents be fair, if they keep monitoring how she is exercising the mandate they sold to her? What right do they have to do that? Did she give them a receipt?
Just a few days before they were accused of being insensitive to the ordinary Nigerian’s feeling, our senators rejected a motion to ban used tyres, sponsored by Senator Shehu Sani.
Senators rejected the motion because the measure would compound the hardship in the land. Not everybody can afford new tyres, they said. How else can a group be compassionate? Yet, senators are pilloried for being greedy, lacking human feeling and discipline as well as a sense of service.
The critics are not done. They have accused the distinguished senators of padding the budget with extraneous items, spiking some key projects, such as the Calabar-Lagos rail line, delaying its passage and, thereby, extending the fiscal and economic hardship that has gripped the land. Really?
If a senator suddenly remembers that the public toilet in his town is crumbling and the roof of the town hall is leaking, what crime has he committed if he puts these key items in the budget to show that he is enamoured of his people?
But it was never like this. Ministers used to lobby for their budgets to be passed and lawmakers obliged them with remarkable excitement. In fact, a former Senate President once told a permanent secretary who came to defend his ministry’s budget on behalf of the minister: “Your minister is not here? OK. Tell him last year we did not see his Coke. Even Mirinda we no drink. Tell him that when coming here he should add that of last year to this year’s. Then we will pass the budget.”
Needless to say, the fellow’s ingenuity did not last. He was fired some months after for some financial malfeasance.
By the way, where is former Senate President Adolphus Wabara; remember him?
Since the trial of Senate President Bukola Saraki for alleged false declaration of assets began, his colleagues have been following him to the Code of Conduct Tribunal. This, say the critics, portrays the lawmakers as busybodies and idle hands who are unworthy of their seats. Won’t we be carrying our oversight duties too far when we tell our senators where to go and whose company to keep? Where are the fundamental human rights, including that of movement, to which we all subscribe?
When the Senate Committee on Ethics summoned Justice Danladi Umar before whom Dr Saraki is standing trial over a petition in which His Lordship’s integrity was questioned, the lawmakers were dazed by a hail of attacks. Some people said the timing of the invitation was wrong: others said it was contemptuous and immoral. Being respecters of public opinions, the lawmakers withdrew the summons. Needless to say, the attacks are yet to cease.
The senators, not given to sentiment, ploughed on. They announced that they were reworking the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) and the Code of Conduct Tribunal Act. The attacks got more intense and hit a crescendo that forced the Senate to pull the brakes on the amendments. It was all to please those who felt, again, that the timing was wrong, coming during Saraki’s trial. The question is, when will the time be right? Whose exclusive privilege is it to determine the right time?
The other day at the Senate, Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu was in his office when a senior official of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) showed up to decorate him with the badge of a partner in the anti-corruption war. The simple ceremony sparked a bitter row between him and the agency, which minced no word in saying that the official did not get its blessing to honour Ekweremadu. The senator swiftly told the EFCC that he never lobbied for the honour that was dropped on his laps.
Surprisingly, that little matter was the impetus those revisionists needed to pounce on Ekweremadu. They lashed him as they would a wayward school pupil for what they called legislative profanity. They claimed – apparently without any proof whatsoever, let alone some ironcast evidence – that Ekweremadu and others forged the Senate Rules to gain undue advantage in the controversial election of officers. They did not stop at that; they called for his trial. Is that fair?
One would have thought that after conceding so much, our senators will be allowed to do their mentally demanding job in peace. Wrong. Now there is the “OCCUPYNATIONALASSEMBLY “ campaign and many are suggesting the seeming extremism of scrapping the Upper Chamber. I disagree.
Let our senators be, if for nothing but for those periodical displays we see on television. Is it easy to find an assemblage of such eminent citizens entertaining us ordinary folks?
NATION
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