“Who will guard the guardians?”
This question, perhaps as old as human community, has been looking for a definitive answer since the ancient Greek philosopher Plato placed a master-class, the philosopher-kings, or guardians, at the head of his utopian polity.
But even in this age of separation of powers, with an elaborate system of checks and balances entrenched in written constitutions, the question, if less insistent, still awaits a definitive answer.
Who, indeed, will guard the guardians?
The National Assembly sees itself once as a repository of the popular will and a custodian of the people’s interests, mandated to make laws for the advancement of both. This is no idle claim; it is backed by the Constitution
To discharge these functions, the National Assembly debates the appropriations prepared by the Executive, modifies them based on the prevailing sentiment, and passes them into law. In addition, it prepares its own budget, debates it (ha!), approves it and passes it into law, almost without any interference or modification from outside its ranks.
It is all so incestuous, this process by which the National Assembly determines how much the Exchequer will expend on its operations for a given year, based almost exclusively on what its members decide they want to appropriate from the public purse.
They see no conflict of interest in this arrangement. After all, the Executive can countermand it if it so desires. But when the Executive and the Legislative branches are controlled by the same political party as happened in Nigeria from 1999 until the APC came to power last May, and when impunity rather than probity was the directive principle if not the fundamental objective of state policy, there were no checks and no balances.
Each branch extracted whatever it wanted from the public purse in a game of mutual aggrandisement. There were signs all right that the purse was not inexhaustible, and that the practice was unsustainable. But crunch time lay far ahead. Why ruin the game by needless anticipation?
But crunch time is finally upon us. And to its great credit, the National Assembly says it is prepared, in broad terms, to “make sacrifices.” As proposed by a committee of the Senate, this will translate into a 30 percent cut in what has been the official operating budget of the Senate.
I speak deliberately of the official operating budget, because nobody outside its ranks knows what the actual operating budget of the National Assembly is today or has been since 1999.
In its finances, especially what accrues to members in one guise or disguise as compensation for one contrived activity after another, the National Assembly has been as secretive as an oyster, and just about as transparent as a black hole, in astrophysics the hulk of a collapsed star so dense that not even light can escape from its bowels.
Because of this secrecy, many a commentator has taken the liberty to portray the National Assembly as an institution concerned not with achieving sufficiency for the general public, but superfluity for its members. Some have even gone so far in their contumacy as to cast the distinguished and honourable members collectively as predators in parliamentary garb.
The commentators seem to think that this strategy would goad the lawmakers out of their silence and engender a healthy debate. If they say their earnings are not an outrage on public sensibilities, let them spell out their earnings clearly and unambiguously.
Out of a sound instinct for self-preservation, the lawmakers have refused to oblige. And so, there has been no end to the dark insinuations masquerading as “common knowledge,” which has it that our lawmakers routinely pocket hefty compensations for activities including, but by no means limited to the following:
Sitting, standing and maintaining every position in between; for meeting and not meeting; for clearing their throats to talk, talking, and not talking; for belching and refraining from belching; for staying in one place and going everywhere; for the upkeep of their harems and their cars and their pets; for their clothing, right up to their intimate apparel, and generally keeping up with the latest fashion trends; for their grooming – hair care, manicure, pedicure, massage, face and body massage, etc, and for sleeping on the job or staying awake.
It has even been claimed by their detractors, no doubt out of pure envy, that our lawmakers have parlayed the — to their critics – sedate and cushy job of making laws into the most hazardous enterprise in Nigeria, which should be bounteously rewarded in cash.
Such indeed is the calumny of these detractors. That, at any rate, is how we arrived at this pass where, instead of applauding the lawmakers for submitting to debate a proposal to cut their allowances by 30 per cent when they could have preempted discussion or raised the emoluments to keep pace with soaring inflation and the misfortunes of the Naira, the detractors have been quipping: 30 per cent of what?
An answer, by no means conclusive, has come from a report in one of the weekend newspapers, with the salacious title “Naira rain at NASS as Senators collect N23.4 million each.”
Over the same two months during which the Senate’s main achievement was the election of principal officers based on documents widely believed to be an inept forgery, members of the House of Representatives received N17 million each.
Even taking into account fixed costs, this is a hefty charge on the treasury for an Assembly that has gone on recess three times since its inauguration last May and has not passed a single bill.
In whatever case, it is now universally acknowledged that Nigerian lawmakers are far and away the highest-paid in the world, raking in by way of “wardrobe allowance” alone at least three times the national minimum monthly wage of N18,000 that many states cannot or will not pay.
The payments made out to members of the National Assembly, it is necessary to state, are not for actual reimbursable expenses but outright grants. To cite just one example: Each senator, it has been reported, stands to pocket or has already pocketed N3, 500,000 as local travel allowance and N2,500,000 for international travel.
It is not clear whether this payment is for the month of July alone or for the first quarter of the current session, but that is beside the point.
The point is that the whole thing is obscene, no matter how you dress it up. It cannot be left to the National Assembly to perform “oversight functions” on its own finances when it has thus far proved unequal of carrying out that task on issues not shot through and through with conflict of interest.
This ravenous guardian cannot be left unguarded.
NATION
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What does it take to move the Nigerian to fight for himself? Is it that we do not see the National assembly as endagering our survival? If we do, are we so morally weak to save the day because we simply mirror these guys, we see them as lucky and wait in hope for our own opportunity to plunder the state?or still, are we so dumb that we rather wait for Godot.?