Tunji Adegboyega
Granted that no single book can address all the dimensions to an issue, Nigeria Democracy without Development – How to fix it, written by Dr. Omano Edigheji, was a good attempt at drawing attention to the question of gender parity in the country’s political sector. The author has done his bit by focusing on a good area of focus, especially in our kind of clime where male dominance is palpably visible in almost all facets of our lives, particularly in the political sector. It is now left for the rest of the society to see the possibility of covering the areas not addressed in the book, for the general good.
Although I have not read the book, the snippets I have seen is enough to address my own area of concern, with the inspirational statistics provided by the author. This is the area of pensions for governors and their deputies. Edigheji’s disclosure that we have had about 180 governors and a slightly higher number of deputy governors from May 1999 to May 2019, should naturally stir the hornet’s nest, given the level of bad governance in the country, even within the period. This is much more so when we realise the humongous foreign exchange that the country made for a better part of the period. The excuse of dwindling revenue would only suffice for some time, even though that should not be over-flogged. Decades ago since the country has been living off oil revenue, we have always known this was not sustainable. Indeed, successive administrations sing this into our ears only to do little or nothing in the area of diversification of the economy throughout their time in office.
A second reason I believe the issue of inadequate revenue is over-flogged is that whether from the body language of our political elite generally, or from most of their misplaced programmes and projects, we do not see any evidence of this dwindling revenue. “Necessity”, they say, “is the mother of invention”. A time of dwindling resources is a time you expect creativity on the part of leadership. But what has been the trend for the better part of our lives, right from the military era, is the insatiable propensity to take the short cut in times of economic adversity (a thing that is largely a product of bad governance and corruption in the first place) and that is seek foreign loans. In Nigeria, many of us have grown to know that many times, such monies hardly get to the country not to talk of get used for the projects the loans were taking for. Perhaps the government itself is sensing that at the rate they are going, external borrowers would be getting apprehensive of the possibility of repaying the loans and therefore be reluctant to give us loans at a point, governments are now looking in the direction of unclaimed dividends and pension funds for money that most Nigerians can swear in their ancestors names would largely be mismanaged, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, the country’s leaders seem to underestimate the level of distrust the people have for them. And, why not?
In many states, the mouthwatering allowances approved for former governors when the economy was doing fairly well are still being implemented, with the exception of Zamfara, and to some extent, Kwara, despite the fact that they keep telling us that times are hard. Indeed, Zamfara State government was the first to scrap the pension payment when a former governor, Abdul’aziz Yari, requested for payment of the arrears of his N10million monthly upkeep allowance. That was in November 2019. The state house of assembly repealed the law which also made provision for the speaker of the assembly and his deputy. Lagos has kickstarted the process to repeal the law permitting this; the state legislature should accelerate the process to end it.
The argument as to whether governors and their deputies should get pension when, at best, they can only spend eight years in office, is only one leg of the story. These are people that virtually all their expenses are borne by the state while in office, meaning they can afford to save all that accrue to them in the eight years if they so wish. The excuse that these allowances were approved because some governors become poor after leaving office also does not hold water. Do people become governors so as to banish poverty from their lives or to serve? Is this the first time we are having people elected as governors that people now have to die so the former governors may live? If in spite of the security vote that they get alongside other perks, some ex-governors still complain of poverty, then, they have a serious problem. At any rate, poverty is relative. We know some of them were not rich before becoming governors; that is those who entered government house in bathroom slippers today only to emerge in golden shoes the day after. We also know some of them who were very rich before becoming state chief executives. None of the two categories should be poor after leaving office if only they can be satisfied cutting their coat according to their pocket. The problem is that many of them cannot imagine parting with the allures of office even after stepping down. They want the honeymoon to last forever. No honeymoon lasts that long. Perhaps the most important reason the former governors can return to poverty after leaving office is because they have seen politics as vocation. They cannot go into quiet retirement after serving as governors. They want to be perpetually relevant in the affairs of their states. Why should the average Nigerian pay for such ambition which only in the long run impoverish him the more?
The other leg is; even if the former governors must get pension, how fat or lean should it be? Many of them would argue that their state houses of assembly approved the pensions. This in no way makes it less corrupt. We Know that the only agency allowed by law to fix such emoluments is the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC). Moreover, Nigerians are not kids not to know the horse-trading that went into approving some of these things, and the executive threats that made some of the state legislatures to bow when horse-trading fails.
At least 26 states have pension provisions for the former governors and their deputies. An online newspaper, Businessamlive.com, in its December 22, 2019 edition put the matter in perspective: “States paying former governors and their deputies jumbo pensions, including houses, vehicles, fully-paid vacation, medical insurance and other juicy perks, top the list of states with the highest domestic and external debts in the country.” It alluded to statistics from the Debt Management Office to buttress its point: “According to the information on the website of the Debt Management Office, the 26 states that have the pension laws for their ex-governors owe a total of N3,920,194,580,284.72 (about N4tn), comprising N2,906,789,725,341.46 domestic debts and $3,311,780,571.71 (N1,013,404,854,943.26) foreign debts as of June 30, 2019.”
According to The Punch, ”the states with such pension laws leading the chart of domestic debtors include Lagos, Rivers, Delta, Akwa Ibom, Imo, Osun, Bayelsa, Kano and Kogi, in the order of their liability. Others are Oyo, Bauchi, Nasarawa, Borno, Edo, Gombe, Abia, Katsina and Zamfara states, which has repealed its own law as earlier mentioned. The rest are Kwara, Enugu, Ebonyi, Niger, Jigawa, Sokoto, Anambra and Yobe states.”
What this tells us is that many of these states are living on borrowed robes. Imagine the implications of replicating jumbo pensions to 360 people, complete with new houses, vehicles, etc., some of which are renewable every three years or so, on the finances of many of the state governments? Is this our idea of ensuring that former governors do not become poor after serving?
I congratulate Dr.Edigheji for producing such a thought-provoking piece and also thank him for opening my understanding to an issue that has been dear to me but which I have not been able to put figures to. Putting figures to some of these things brings out the situation at its grimnest. Indeed, the title of the book, Nigeria Democracy without Development – How to fix it is equally apt with regard to the ex-governors’ pension. With more than 360 governors and their deputies in 20 years, Nigeria ought to have been a better place if it had been well managed. That is if majority of the governors have governed in a way to justify the pains the people go through not only to sustain them in office but even after.
But it remains baffling that many of the governors are still holding on to these greedy provisions in spite of the crippling poverty in the land, spurred by mass hunger as witnessed in the #EndSARS protests. It is in the interest of those still holding on to it to voluntarily drop it before people begin to tell what the poor man has coughed up in the bid to pay these benefits in terms of naira and kobo. The sheer number of beneficiaries is scary enough. It is particularly annoying and inhuman that people who were well taken care of in at most eight years of serving feel no compunction about civil servants who put in over three decades in the public service getting peanuts for their efforts, a thing which is either partly paid for the lucky ones, while many others languish on pension queues without still being able to get the pension that represents nothing but crumbs from the governors’ tables.
If the governors still operating these obscene and vexatious provisions are not moved by court judgments either asking the attorney-general of the federation to challenge them in court, or declaring them illegal outright, especially for those of them collecting the outrageous pensions and also salaries and perks as senators or ministers; if they are not moved by their conscience, one would have thought that #EndSARS would have put the fear of God in them to wave bye to the outrageous pay and perks. That this too has not succeeded in moving them to pity the ordinary people and banish their insatiable quest for primitive accumulation can only make us liken them to the proverbial fly that follows dead bodies to the grave.
A word is enough for the wise.
