“[My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” John F. Kennedy, January 20, 1961.
The above oft-quoted statement by John F Kennedy at his inauguration as the 35th President of the United States has become a standard summary of the relationship between the patriotic citizen and a caring nation-state. It speaks to the responsibilities of citizens in exchange for their expected protection from the state. In one word: Patriotism. Whereas such basic civic awareness is a part and parcel of the normal upbringing of the young, such is however a given for adults, particularly politicians holding public offices. Unfortunately, from the lamentation of the new Chief Whip of the Senate, Senator Orji Kalu, it is obvious that many citizens, including our distinguished Senators are yet to understand, much less, assume the civic responsibilities of patriotic citizenship.
Just a few days ago, Senator Kalu confessed his ignorance about the nature of his constitutional assignment at the National Assembly in the revered capacity of “senator” often aggrandised as “distinguished” when he haughtily told the nation that most of his colleagues are lamenting that “they did not know it was going to be like this… When they were outside, they were also saying that all the money was carried (sic) by the National Assembly which is not true. The money they have given them is not going to be enough. I have seen them crying already…. I call on you people to change your minds because there is no jumbo pay; honestly, I have not seen one…. When I was governor, the state was buying my food; the state paid (sic) everything, but as a senator, nobody does that.”
Listening to him, one gets the regrettable impression that the only reason these people contested for the Senate or ventured into politics at all, is to have unbridled access to the nation’s treasury but now that they are discovering that the wasteful looting spree might be constrained by the unavailability of cash and other budgetary strictures under the austere Buhari administration, they have suddenly gone depressed up to the point where some of them, according to Kalu, are crying. Even though Orji Kalu did not specify the exact figure that they are now carting home, it is still obvious that it is not the national minimum wage of N30, 000 monthly.
After Senator Shehu Sanni’s disclosure of what each senator hauls home monthly, it is no longer necessary for anyone to want to hide what it costs the nation to maintain their aristocratic emoluments for a near-part-time job as Kalu attempted to do by shedding well-rehearsed crocodile tears over senators’ “poor pay”. At the very minimum, using Shehu Sanni’s calculus, each senator takes home a minimum of N13,500,000:00 monthly (£27,000; $37,500) in addition to their official salaries of about N750, 000 ($2,000) which cumulatively works out to be one of the highest in the whole world!
No one expects our senators to be taking home peanuts, they should be very comfortable in their job but, given the relative wretchedness of the Nigerian economy, such a vandalistic plundering in the guise of constituency allowances constitute a great drain on the nation’s scarce resources, and an insurmountable impediment against sustainable economic development. The universal common-sensical rule is that prevailing incomes should always be based on productivity, affordability and the relative utility and risks associated with a particular service. There is nothing that our senators do presently, be it legislative, administrative, policy formulation or otherwise that economically justifies the stupendous pay that they are carting home. It is irrational, greedy and ultimately unsustainable.
Whether we like it or not, Nigeria is a country impoverished largely by the infamous reckless mismanagement of the wealth that fortuitously came into her coffers during the oil boom era. It is therefore irresponsible for Nigeria or any other poor country for that matter to want to pay its public office holders bountifully like their counterparts in the rich and developed nations. It is instructive to note that the so-called rich countries actually pay their politicians a lot less than what Nigeria is paying if one takes their GDP figures into account. For example, the United States whose GDP is a thousand times more than that of Nigeria, on the average, pays its Congressmen about $174,000 per annum or $14,000 monthly.
Unlike Nigerian lawmakers, their U.S. counterparts do not collect the kleptocratic “constituency allowances” that has been corruptively normalised here. When you add their constituency allowances to their basic salary of about $2000, you will get about $30,000 monthly which adds up to about $16000 more than what the average U.S. Congressman earns. Whereas the U.S. is indisputably the largest economy in the world today, Nigeria, on the contrary, is now one of the poorest. Given these embarrassingly contrasting realities, do we still need to ask: where Nigeria’s earnings are going into?
Orji Kalu’s revelation of the unusual profligacy and wastes in the name of official perquisites at the state level only confirms the already well-known fact that what we call democracy is actually a serious drain on the nation’s resources, an interminable sinkhole. The wasteful way we run our “democracy” is just too expensive to survive. If as governor, Imo state funded Kalu’s aristocratic lifestyle, uncommon glitterati and his global junketing addiction in addition to the unspeakable “security votes”, why are we still asking: “Why is Nigeria fast going down the drain economically if we replicate such odious hedonism across the 36 states of the federation?”
U.S. Vice-President, Mike Pence, the 50th governor of Indiana from 2013 to 2017 and a member of the United States House of Representatives from 2001 to 2013 as at this week officially “doesn’t appear to own a home, and he hasn’t saved much besides $65,000 in index funds, at most, and his bank account holds less than $15,000.” The only hope that he will eventually become a millionaire in his life is if and when all his pensions are calculated from his various past positions as state governor and congressman! Let us not forget that in his capacity as vice-president, he also constitutionally functions as the President of the U.S. Senate.
On the contrary, our Senate President and other principal officers of the National Assembly lawfully count their income in the millions of dollars. If the Vice President of America, a former state governor and congressman has just $65,000 in invested savings, then, that society must have a different meaning to public service. Whereas Senator Orji Kalu sees parliamentary services through the mercantilist’s “cash and carry” lenses, a goldmine to be fully exploited, Mike Pence and his colleagues in the rich and developed democracies see politics as essentially a call to service. Mike Pence has patriotically asked himself: what can I do for America? On the contrary, Orji Kalu and his fellow senators are asking: “what can Nigeria do for them?”
It usually requires a substantial pay-cut for professors in top American universities to take up a public appointments but the satisfaction is always that they are thus privileged to serve their country. On the contrary, what the Nigerian professor takes home as salary is less than what a local government councilor in the remotest parts of the country hauls home as official entitlements. Is there any better evidence of the fact that what we presently call “democracy” is actually a sophisticated variant of “State Capture” wherein unpatriotic individuals stealthily take hold of state institutions with a view to indecently corner the resources of the nation all in the name of “governing”?
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