Tag: Legislature

With or without the legislators’ involvement, we must abolish our present predatory legislature. This was the closing declaration of last week’s beginning piece in this series. It will be our main topic in this week’s continuation of the series. But first, as promised at least twice in the course of last week’s discussion, we need to give a fuller explanation of the contention that our predatory legislature is the heart and soul, as well as the center of gravity of all the looting of our collective wealth and national assets, all the plunder, wastage and squandermania that characterize the running of governmental affairs in our country at the local, state and federal levels. Indeed, the tentacles of predation and exploitation of and from our legislature reach out so far and wide as to include the Judiciary (Bar and Bench), the Police, the Armed Forces and the other security services, as well as the religious estates of churches, mosques and synagogues. Is this not an exaggeration, this claim that wherever you find looting and corruption in the public affairs of this country, its ultimate foundation is the legalized and institutionalized looting in and by our predatory legislature? No, it is not an exaggeration, compatriots!

To establish the veracity of this claim, we have to bear three things in mind. The first is the often-forgotten fact that the humungous remuneration of our legislators did not exist before 1999, the year of the inauguration of the present 4th Republic that restored civilian democratic rule. This is to say that prior to 1999 and the restoration of “democracy” after the long interregnum of military dictatorships, what our legislators received as salaries and remunerations in the two previous republics of civilian rule were not exceptional; they were not out of tune with the pay packages of parliamentarians in the rest of Africa and the world – as they are now, beginning in 1999. Secondly, the outsize pay package was copied from traditions and practices of the Congress of the United States of America as part of the wholesale adoption of the American presidential system to replace the Westminster model that had been in force during periods of civilian democratic rule in our country. But note that what we copied from the Americans did not come with the strict regulation that governs how much American legislators can claim and how they are to spend and account for what they claim. In our case, and starting in 1999, what Nigerian legislators claim as salaries and allowances can only be regulated by the legislators themselves – which effectively means no regulation at all.

This leads us to the third and perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind as we approach the crucial subject of the centrality of our predatory legislature to the miasma of corruption, waste and squandermania in the current political order that we know as the 4th Republic. What is this thing? It is the sheer scope or size or nature of the pay packages of our lawgivers. The figures are disputed, but even the lowest figure given by some legislators themselves – around N15 million naira per month for each legislator – is the highest in the world. The highest figure, calculated by none other than Professor Itse Sagay – N29 million per month – is the highest in the history of modern parliaments. Even Olusegun Obasanjo, the man under whose presidency the bonanza began, has called it nothing short of “unarmed robbery”. And in July 2013, The Economist, one of the most influential economic newsmagazines in the world, ranked Nigeria as the country with the most unjust and lopsided pay structure in the world, based mainly on what our lawmakers pay themselves as salaries and allowances. Measured in terms of earnings per capita GDP, the British magazine calculated our lawgivers’ pay packages to be 116 times the per capita GDP of the average Nigerian. Indeed, it is instructive to recall here the comparative figures given by the newsmagazine for other countries in relation to Nigeria’s 116 per capita GDP: Kenya, 76; Ghana, 29; South Africa, 14.5; Brazil, 13; India, 7.5; Italy, 5; Bangladesh, 4.5 Finally, some civil society organizations have calculated that though our legislators and the staff of the National Assembly number less than 10,000, they receive annual salaries that are together  bigger than the budget of 21 out of the 36 states of the federation. To cap it all, our legislators’ pay packages are placed under a special category of expenditure known as “statutory transfer” which makes it mandatory for the federal government, after receiving any revenues, to immediately make transfers to the account of the National Assembly before other considerations.

Dear compatriots, if you are curious about where I got all these facts, figures and statistics from, please know that the question is unnecessary, almost to the point of being redundant. Why so? Well, because the scandal of Nigerian lawmakers’ salaries and allowances is a topic that has attracted considerable interest around the world. If you spend one hour on the subject on the Internet, one hour only, you will be amazed at how much material you will get. And indeed, I must state very clearly here that, with regard to the subject, I am by no means a lone voice crying in the wilderness. One group, #OpenNASS, is worthy of mention and praise for the persistence and diligence with which it has gone after this mega-scandal of our predatory legislature. The only quarrel I have with the organization and others like it is the fact that they see the problem as one of making our legislature more transparent and accountable when, to me, it is as clear as daylight that what is needed is far beyond asking for transparency and accountability; it is the abolition of the legislature itself in its present form. The strongest case for this is the centrality of this predatory legislative order to the scale of predation and exploitation in our barawo democracy.

Corruption on a mega scale, in both the public and private spheres of affairs in our country, did not start in Nigeria in 1999 with the inauguration of the 4th Republic. Corruption had become lord and master in the land in the years and decades of military dictatorship, reaching its zenith under the presidencies of Sani Abacha and Abdulsalami Abubakar. What happened in 1999 in the new and hitherto humungous pay packages of our legislators was the institutionalization of corruption on a mega scale as completely legal and unchallengeable in the law courts of the land. To see this clearly, compatriots, you must see the difference between income and wealth. Most men and women, the old and the young never, never get wealthy from incomes. And this has been true in the past as it is true in the present. And it is as true in capitalist economies as in non-capitalist or socialist economies. Indeed, you could say that income is as different from wealth as working hard to survive is to winning a lottery: most people will, in their lifetimes experience the former while only a fraction of the human race will ever experience the latter. With the exception of legislators of the Nigerian 4th Republic.

With the inauguration of the 1st National Assembly of the 4th Republic in 1999, the normative, age-old difference or distance between income and wealth was abolished. If you so prefer, compatriots, you could say that the difference was collapsed. If you are receiving N15 million or N29 million a month, your income will become wealth in less than a year. And since you’re elected for four years for every cycle of the legislature, you would have become a very wealthy woman or man even if you served for only one electoral cycle. Please, note that this is all perfectly legal, even if it is also abysmally unjust and exploitative in a very poor country whose economy is yet to be transformed into a middle-income economy – in spite of the immense oil wealth. As much as this is crucial to grasp and hold on to as a fundamental aspect of the centrality of our predatory legislature, what is even more important to grasp is the fact that the legalization of greed and sleaze on such a grandiose scale made possible an impunity, an immensity of looting and thievery in our country that is almost unique in the democracies of the world. As we all know, the criminal justice system in Nigeria, starting from around 1999, has been unmatched by any other country in the world in how politicians and public officeholders can walk free without successful prosecution and return of their stolen loot. In case the logic of my argument here is not clear enough, permit me to make it clearer: if you want to know why looting and thievery became so pervasive in the 4th Republic, you must pay attention to why the legalization and institutionalization of greed and sleaze in our predatory legislature fatally corrupted the criminal justice system in our country, starting from around 1999.

Is it any wonder that on top of their humungous salaries and allowances, we still read and hear of illegal and unconscionable acts of colossal thievery by our legislators like “budget padding”, contract scandals and bribes from lobbyists? Many legislators have been caught red-handed but have gone scot-free. Nigerians ask themselves, helplessly, why the most overpaid legislators in the world still feel driven to steal and loot on a such a massive scale. Why, why and why? Because with the abolition of the distance between income and wealth, the doors opened wide for unlimited and unregulatable looting and thievery. And the lawyers, the magistrates, the judges followed suit. As did the prelates of the churches, mosques and synagogues. Franchises, all of them, with a few exceptions. Almost all connected to the banks and the financial services industry. And all, all of them connected to the global capitalist pool whose centers are in Europe, North America and the resurgent Far East.

In all the foregoing, I have concentrated on the broad picture, on the formal features. But at the end of the day, the real significance is measurable in the concrete, searing terms of human  suffering and insecurity, the like of which members of my generational cohort had never seen anywhere in our country in the years and decades of our youth to our early to mid-life adulthood. Truly, I ought to devote an entire column to the cost in human terms of the centrality of our predatory legislature to the scale of poverty, want, joblessness and insecurity in the lives of the majority of Nigerians at the present time. That being impossible in the present discussion, permit me to say only this: our country has become one of the most challenging countries in the world to be born into, to live in and, mirabile dictu, to die.

But this is not to end with despair, with a jeremiad of complaints and protestations. When you are calling for the abolition of some terribly unjust and unregenerate state policies, actions and, indeed, a way of life, the last thing you want to do is lapse into a dolorous or defeatist discourse. As a matter of fact, the main impulse for this series came from my sense of the defeatism in addressing complaints and protests about our legislators’ pay packets to the legislators themselves in the hope that we can either convince them or, shame them, into doing what is right, what is in the interest and for the good of the majority of our peoples everywhere in the land. My contention in the discussion has been that this is strategically unwise and ill-advised. I had thought that I would get to this concluding issue this week. Clearly, that is not possible in the space left for this week’s column. For this reason, this will be our starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series. For now, permit me to end with the following hint of what I will be arguing next week. What is it? This is it: we can and should tactically call and work for reform from within the predatory legislature itself; however, strategically we should work outside the legislature through a comprehensive, non-violent movement for the abolition of the current legislative order. With or without our legislators’ involvement; and without a military coup, thank you very much.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu