What our National Assembly members take home is ungodly and inhuman.
They should slash, instead of trying to justify it
Even if our senators and House of Representatives members went to the National Assembly naked, they would not require N506,600 each per annum as wardrobe allowance in a country where minimum wage is N18,000. Of course we cannot stop those of them with the means to wear the best of apparels money can buy. But those who cannot should wear whatever the country can afford given its dire economic predicament. After all, the law makers were elected for the primary purpose of making laws and not for fashion parade. The rest of us do not have to go naked for our law makers to look good. Even at the all-time low N18,000 minimum wage, many states are months in arrears. Our lawmakers are not talking about this.
That over 16 years after the N5million each furniture allowance for our legislators raised ruckus in the country we are still grappling with allowances for them, has proved that we are nowhere near getting the legislators to shed weight. About two months ago, a legislator from one of the state houses of assembly was asked on a live television show, what his take-home pay was. Apparently caught off-guard by the question from an angry caller, the lawmaker murmured some mumbo-jumbo. When he finally found his voice, he said “em em … about (I think) N1m per month”. The angry caller was not impressed by the ‘about’ and he resorted, “so, you don’t even know how much you earn monthly?” The legislator made frantic effort to justify his inexactitude. The caller then asked why the legislator was trying to justify that lawmakers’ pay was not outrageous. He replied that the caller did not know what the issues were. He said there are a lot of people that the legislators ‘settle’ and that if they did not ‘settle’ them, the legislator would not return to the house. Now, the question is: must he return to the house? Was he born there?
One may say this legislator is naïve for revealing that much, but what he said is the truth. Most legislators want to return to the house. Yet, I have not seen any of them that has convinced anyone as to why they should receive the bogus pay they get. Even when Dimeji Bankole, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives visited The Nation when he was speaker and he was asked the same question on their pay, he laboured in vain to convince the editors that he was addressing on the issue. He brought his pay slip to the newspaper house and even waxed dramatic by handing it out to us for perusal. But we saw beyond the miserable figure in black ink and quickly pointed out to him that what we were talking about was beyond what was contained in the say-nothing pay slip; so, he should not call dog monkey for us.
Some legislators say they must be well paid so as to insulate them from corruption, especially from the ministries, departments and parastatals they are carrying oversight on. For me, they are talking like this because this is Nigeria. In other places, both the giver and the taker of bribes, if caught, would go to jail.
Besides, legislators’ primary responsibility is to make laws for good governance. But our own lawmakers have placed oversight and constituency projects over and above this primary responsibility because of the quick money they make from them. Even the newly inaugurated legislators are already scrambling for what they call juicy committees in the National Assembly instead of struggling to ensure making laws for good governance. It is because of the greed for oversight and constituency projects that our senators in the 7th National Assembly passed 46 bills in 10 minutes on June 3, barely 48 hours to the end of their tenure!
If good pay is an antidote to corruption, then our lawmakers should have little or nothing to do with the cankerworm, as some of the most pampered in the world. Despite being well paid, some of them even in the just-ended Seventh National Assembly still got involved in scandals. If we stretch the same logic of poor pay to the police and other sectors, then it means we should understand why police men and others too are corrupt?
The point is, the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) should ensure that whatever the legislators get is what our economy can sustain. What obtains is outrageous. For example, as at June 2007, under a new salary package, each Senator was entitled to N53.7 million and a House of Representatives member, N47.9 million per annum. By 2013, the Nigerian lawmaker had become the world’s highest paid at N3million per month (basic salary minus outrageous allowances). Given the new figures released for some of these emoluments, the senators are to get N4,052,800, N6,079,200 and N8,105,600m for housing, furniture and vehicles, respectively. House of Representatives members will however get N3,970,425, N5,955,637.50 and N7,940,850.50 each for the same purposes. These are mere percentages of their basic salaries and it also excluded the real money spinners for the lawmakers as contained in the fabulous constituency allowances, as well others that are hardly in the public domain.
I am not aware there was any lawmaker that was drafted into the race. Many of them fought bitter struggles to get their tickets; many spent a fortune to get elected apparently because they expected to recoup their ‘investment’ later. But lawmaking is serious business and is meant for people who want to serve and not those who want to be served. Any of them who is not comfortable with what the country can afford should return home.
It is fraudulent and self-serving for lawmakers to compare themselves with career civil servants as some of them are trying to do . If there is any issue with civil servants, it is not about their pay; rather, it is about corruption, particularly the ‘ghost workers’ syndrome’ and over-inflation of contracts. Many civil servants who served meritoriously for decades get nothing near what many of these political appointees get for working (?) in just four years. Our present lawmakers conveniently forget that this same job was done creditably by people on part-time basis in the First Republic. Moreover, legislators in some other countries, including Britain and the United States of America, travel by rail; many live in rented apartments, etc. So, what is the big deal in being a lawmaker? Why are our own lawmakers making a fetish of lawmaking?
Our present legislators must begin to make the point that change has finally come rather than keep justifying the absurdity. Part of the ways to herald this change is by shedding some of these indefensible drains on the public till that they collect as pay, either directly or indirectly. We all must have learnt from the last general elections that Nigerians are no longer fools. Indeed, that was amply demonstrated by the protest over the wardrobe allowance last week, even though that was over-bloated. If we all agree that “charity begins at home”; then the ruling party’s lawmakers must live by this dictum. That is the only way they can make nonsense of the saying that there are no firstborns among pigs because all of them (from the oldest to the youngest), play in the mud.
The legislators must be reminded of the British experience, specifically the public outrage that trailed the revelations by The Telegraph Group which in 2009 leaked the expense claims made by members of the United Kingdom Parliament over several years. Just as our own lawmakers are trying to shield the actual amount they take home annually, so did the British MPs too before the great revelations which caused a lot of public outrage. The MPs lost out and the matter got to the front burner of national discourse. The revelations led to a loss of confidence in politics and politicians. This was eventually followed by a large number of resignations, sackings, de-selections and retirement announcements, together with public apologies and the repayment of expenses by the over- pampered MPs. Indeed, some of them were prosecuted and convicted.
In summary, it was sundry matters like allowances and excess payments by the British MPs that led to political reforms even beyond these issues and ultimately to the derogatory reference to the British parliament elected in 2005 as the ‘Rotten Parliament’. Our National Assembly members must let reform come from within because coming from without could be catastrophic. They should not give Nigerians the opportunity of storming the place as the French people stormed the Bastille. They should spare a thought for the over 75 per cent of the citizens condemned to destitution and living on less than $2 per day. They should remember the over 40 million youths which official statistics reckon to be jobless.
