The dispute about how much parliamentarians particularly in the Senate are paid as constituency allowances gave some of us observers cause for worry. The amount of billions of Naira each MP gets, if true, demonstrates either insensitivity or outright irresponsibility. If true in a country where the monthly minimum wage is a mere N35,000, it amounts to dangling a red flag before a raging bull. Is it surprising that a few days after the revelation have witnessed a spate of strikes in our higher institutions apparently because the staff there feels if there was this kind of money in the country they should also share in the booty.
The parliamentarians earlier on at the beginning of the session bought themselves each expensive four wheelers some of them armoured at humongous cost to the Nigerian exchequer. There is also the accusation that the 2004 budget has been padded by up to N3.4 trillion. This is at a time when it seems the country is apparently bankrupt merely surviving by printing paper money that has brought the Naira so down that those who had saved money all their lives are finding out that their savings have been reduced to outright nothingness.
Is the way the government is spending money the way we are going to get out of our economic mess? This is at a time when the inflation is well over 25% and when the Naira is virtually worth nothing internationally. There must be a rational reason for our parliament to be behaving as if it wants to bring the roof down on our heads. Perhaps this raises the issue of our expensive presidential system of almost absolute separation of powers, giving each branch the power and licence to run parallel budgets irrespective of our dire economic straits. We have now discovered that this American system we are currently copying is totally inappropriate for our economy. This is why the parliamentary system is most appropriate because if we had a parliamentary system, we would hold the prime minister responsible for the spendthrift propensity of our parliament but in our current system we cannot hold the president responsible because he is not in control of the Senate and House of Representatives.
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If we were to allow our people to decide our form of government, I have a feeling they will abolish the Senate and reduce the size of the House of Representatives by half and membership would be on part-time basis while the size of the executive would be radically reduced. Government is about people; they cannot be wallowing in poverty while their governing elite are stuffing themselves with Naira. What are the people getting from a bloated government in which salaries of officials are totally unrelated to the economic reality of the country?
If Nigeria were the UAE or Kuwait or Singapore and our country was working, no one would worry about what leaders are making as long as everyone could see that the national income was growing. But we are not the aforementioned countries. We just have to cut our cloth according to our size.
Those of us who are old enough can still remember when the Naira was king in West Africa and among global currencies. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Naira exchanged at almost two dollars to one Naira; we bought cars for anything from N2000 to N10,000 and this ranges from Japanese cars to German Mercedes with French Peugeot selling from N3000 to N5000. Those were the days and no young person believes us when we say “there was a country “as Chinua Achebe said and how true!
When I was at the University of Ibadan between 1963 and 1966, the ambition of most bright students was to excel and be like our lecturers and professors. In those days, professors earned the same as cabinet ministers – a little higher than permanent secretaries. The amount was just about £3000 a year, that is £250 a month and it was enough to have a decent life and to educate your child in Cambridge or Oxford universities as some of our professors did. University teachers avoided politics like a plague. May be that was a mistake but that is the truth. Nobody wanted to be rich. People just wanted to have enough to have a roof over their heads, a car to take them around and to educate their children. The currency was stable and even when we changed the Nigerian pounds to Naira it remained still stable.
Our problems started with the stupendous increase in our national revenue following the Israeli-Arab war of 1973 and the Arab oil embargo which spiked the price of crude oil and Nigerian oil revenues. The military intervention in Nigerian politics from 1966 to 1999 with the thieving Shagari interregnum, released the corruption genies from the bottle and we have not been able to put them back until now when we seem to have lost total control of our economy. Economy ticket by air to London used to cost N300 now it costs about three million naira. All this happened in our lifetimes! Our story is like that of a fool who would soon part with his riches.
This reminds me of a personal experience. When I was in Germany between 1991 and 1995, the foreign allowance paid to our ambassador was a fifth of what the Ambassador of Singapore and Zimbabwe were paid. I thought that was odd but understandable. The reason for such a disparity in Singapore and Nigerian treatment of their envoys was that Singapore was comfortable with that high remuneration and could afford it. But for Zimbabwe, it was outright foolishness. I doubt if it can even maintain an embassy in Germany today not to talk of paying their ambassador. I hope this is not our fate if we refuse to moderate our demands on our scarce national resources. The philosophy in Singapore is and was that their officials were paid so high that only greed would make any of them dip their hands in the national coffers and this is one of the reasons for their success. Despite the humongous salaries and allowances our members of parliament give to themselves, this has not stopped their cupidity for filthy lucre in their raid of MDAs while supposedly carrying out their oversight functions .
