Tag: earnings

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, back in 2010, as CBN governor was the first to alert the nation of the danger the consumptive pattern of a National Assembly that cornered 25% of the national budget posed to the well-being of Nigerians and the growth of the economy. The National Assembly denied Sanusi’s claim but for over seven years refused to make public the breakdown of its budget despite public demand for transparency.

We have however now been told that our senators, widely rumoured as the highest paid lawmakers in the world, only earn a modest N750,000, monthly and another N13.5m to be receipted for. Individual senators, we also now know, presides over how N200m constituency projects are executed annually.  Credit for these facts goes to Senator Shehu Sani, a very credible source whose claim that President Buhari was fighting corruption among his close allies with deodorant while using insecticides to wage the same crusade among his political foes was validated when the president, after initial vacillation was forced to sack Babachir Lawal, his secretary to government who was to be later recommended for prosecution over alleged corruption and abuse of office.

But long before Shehu Sani finally laid to rest the controversy surrounding what our lawmakers pay themselves, suspended House of Representative Appropriation Committee chairman, Abdulmumin Jibrin had revealed  the 2016 budget was inflated by as much as N4b to fund constituency projects of members. However, his allegation that principal officers of the lower house including the Speaker, benefitted from such illegal diversion, did not throw much light on what the lawmakers pay themselves. Jibril himself suffered from credibility deficit as his allegations came after his suspension over his committee’s alleged unilateral removal or diversion of budgeted funds for Lagos-Calabar coastal railway.

That what the lawmakers pay themselves was shrouded in secrecy was not the only source of worry to Nigerians. Consensuses among all those who have dealings with the upper and lower houses seem to confirm the two as houses of deals. Minister Raji Fashola disclosed how allocations in the 2017 budget to important federal projects including the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway which is critical to the development of the economy was slashed to accommodate lawmakers’ constituency borehole projects. President Buhari had also taken his frustration with the lawmakers to the court of public opinion by calling attention to how, in spite of his advice, the lawmakers frittered away public funds on state of the art expensive toys even after collecting personal car loans often retired through earned allowances. And finally, worried by the level of larceny going on the National Assembly, ex-President Obasanjo who was instrumental to the removal of about three senate presidents in quick succession over corruption charges described our legislators as ‘armed robbers’. Of course Obasanjo, now out of office should, from the benefit of hindsight, know better. He is not expected to have kind words for those who during his administration, deployed the instrumentality of government policy thrust to defraud the nation,  derail his energy sector reforms as well as the rural electrification contracts which they awarded to their own companies.

But no matter how much we rail against thieving members of the National Assembly, they are mere symptoms of our crisis of nationhood. The fundamental question we have failed to address is why members of the governing elite have waged endless war against Nigeria since 1962. Since studies have shown people are indifferent and in fact work for the collapse of a system in which they have no stake, the most plausible explanation is lack of faith in Nigeria as a corporate entity by Nigerian critical stakeholders. Ahmadu Bello’s “the mistake of 1914 has come to play” following disagreement over Enahoros 1953 motion for “independence in 1956” more than captured this. And before him, Obafemi Awolowo had also admitted Nigeria was a geographical expression while Balewa was to later describe Nigeria as a British intention. In other words, Nigeria was nothing but an idea, first nurtured by the colonial masters and later by representative of nationalities that own the space described as Nigeria. But our ill-informed and ill-educated military thought the structural blocks designed to build the Nigerian nation were the problems and decreed them out of existence. Unfortunately, 60 years after the death of an idea, the military as represented by retired Generals Obasanjo and Buhari and their fronts – the major beneficiaries of the current anarchy, have continued to confuse symptoms with the fundamental cause of our crisis of nationhood.

Their fraudulent claim we can literarily climb the palm tree from the top by imposing a nation on nationalities without first resolving the fundamental issue of how the nationalities want to live together, probably explains why, every emerging new set of the parasitic ruling elite, loyal to none but themselves, is often worse than the one preceding it.  For instance, as if they were not called upon to serve the nation, the 1999 set insisted on recouping funds they expended on fighting elections. The David Mark/Ekweremadu that followed supervised free looting of the nation with Mark going to court to defend his immoral confiscation of the senate presidential mansion for an amount EFCC alleged was far below market price of the structure.

The Saraki/Ekweremadu set holds no pretence to any form of morality. Those who by their own accounts literarily sold off the victory of their party cannot be said to be driven by any lofty ideals or loyalty to the state. That they have resolutely stood against government’s pro-Nigeria policies in the last three years  more than demonstrate they are in office to serve none but themselves. The Senate’s spokesperson, Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi has even tried to justify the scandalous N13.5m senators’ monthly running costs by claiming “almost all holders of elective or appointive office have running costs allocated to their offices”  without citing where else in the world whether in a democracy or dictatorship  such practice is sustained.

Thieving members of the executive, lawmakers or ‘armed robbers’, as Obasanjo calls them, or supreme courts judges that trade in justice as well as the compromised members of the fourth estate of the realm, are not the sources of our nation’s nightmare.  They are all symptoms of a state as an orphan.

The truth is that we are today back to 1962 when those who had no faith in Nigeria seized the country. A clear evidence of this is the recent APC response to clamour for the restructuring of the country. The recommendation by its committee on restructuring headed by Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State that ‘indigene-ship’ be replaced with residency or citizenship in a federal constitution is a reinforcement of an old policy that has been successfully used for the pacification and assimilation of all the Hausa-conquered territories in the north. It is also a policy whose covert implementation in the unconquered Middle Belt territories has resulted in social dislocations among a people that are being prevented from taking their own destinies in their own hands.  APC’s ploy is nothing but another name for the military and its PDP political arm’s failed ‘mainstreaming’ gamble.

Finally, modelling Nigeria, inhabited by unconquered nationalities that cherish and celebrate their different cultures and values after America, a nation conquered through force of arms by adventurers and criminals from Europe, amounts to intellectual fraud. If there is a lesson to be learnt at all, it has to be from our European colonial masters who, based on their own long history of internal strife and two devastating world wars, had advised us on path to peaceful co-existence, a path we traded for mainstreaming in 1962.