Abdul Ningi may not like it when he wakes up in the morning. He is called a senator but he does not attend the senate chambers. He is called a lawmaker but cannot make laws. He is a politician in exile. A public officer of sorts without an office. An irridentist with an eerie agenda, he is an island. To sedate the senate, his colleagues have robbed him of the name senator for three months.
What he cannot deny is that he is an Atiku acolyte, a sly bigot and a fly in the ointment of democracy. He was no backbencher in the Adamawa chieftain’s crash last year both at the polls and in the court. He was like his chief of staff and director of the campaign. He is no candidate for conscientious objector. He is a fellow traveler, and he is also a pied piper’s victim and marionette. As a bigot, he is borrowing from Atiku’s proclamation during the last presidential campaigns when he asked all northerners to vote north. Atiku did not disguise his plagued and wounded soul. He may be a prostitute, but he has his favorite customer: northern bigotry.
Senator Ningi is borrowing from the hollow book. Pity that he has been suspended for three months. He can take shelter in Adamawa’s bosom. He has made himself guilty of two often related sins: a bigot and hypocrite. A bigot of religion and region. A hypocrite because he claims that the budget was padded, and he did not raise a finger when the same budget went through the rigour of debates, additions and subtraction. Did he have eyes that did not see, ears that didn’t hear, or body that did not feel as the motions passed on the budget? He did not know mathematics then. He dusted up his book of pluses and divisions and multiplications after he discovered two things. That he could speak to BBC Hausa radio and the bitterness of the election loss reminded him of what might have been.
So, he says there was padding before he said he did not say so. He said the executive presented a budget of 25 trillion naira and the senate, his senate, ballooned it to 28 trillion, adding 3.7 trillion naira. In his effort to invoke north, he stumbled. His northern colleagues abandoned him. In his mathematics, he stumbled and fell. In English language, he also hit the rocks. It was a trinity of failures. What he did with success was, in the words of Senate President Godswill Akpabio, damage the hallowed chamber with a hollow peroration.
He sounded a drum to his northern fellows but no one danced. He had to vacate his chair in the northern senate forum. He became a lone ranger, a bitter droplet in the northern tea. He showed himself a bad example of how to be a bigot, just like Atiku. Ningi was campaign director under Atiku, so it was the malice of the defeat that was still prodding him into mangling figures. Senate leader Opeyemi Bamidele and Appropriation Committee Chairman Olamilekan Adeola threw direct jabs at him. Has anyone addressed Bamidele’s assertion that it is Senator Abdulaziz Yari’s malice of loss fighting back? He referred to those who did not want Akpabio to outlast a year as senate present.
But certain issues have to be clarified. It concerns constituency projects. It is controversial and some have argued against it. But whether we want it or not, those who support it say it testifies to lawmakers’ heartbeat in the grassroots, that they see and feel what the executives sometimes miss. That is, taking the intimate projects to the precincts of the people.
Two, this is nothing new. It is a fixture year after year. Why is Ningi stoking an old fire that warmed his old bones in the past as though the heat is new? In this budget, he has constituency vote amounting to hundreds of millions. He did not cancel it. That is why Senator Bamidele says it is not a northern or southern matter but a Nigerian matter. But his fellow senators knew it was coded appeal to an irridentist impulse. That is why it is dangerous. Senator Akpabio asked Ningi for evidence, but he adduced none after battering about like a ram.
On the 3.7 trillion naira charge, Senator Adeola spelt out the list of allotees, including the judiciary, national assembly, NDDC, NEDC, etc, that amounted to over 3.2 trillion as first-line charge without details.
The dangerous part of this narrative is that some have not understood the political issues but have looked at it as mere mathematical and corruption issue. If it were a corruption matter, Ningi would have raised it when it was under scrutiny. His fingers would have pointed at him. If it were a mathematical issue, we are not running a senate of farmers and hunters. There are engineers, professors, bankers, historians, etc in the chambers. So there is a lot of mischief in the matter.
Padding, for instance, is misunderstood even by so-called genuine commentators. If you pad, there has to be a base or skeleton. You cannot pad a toe with cotton wool, if there are no bones and blood veins to cover. If a project is padded, there must be a cost and the difference with the approved sum is the padding. What is that difference? If it is not clear what the real cost is, no one can say padding has occurred. You can say it is opaque. In that case, you who accuses should do the costing before charging the law maker with padding, or exaggeration. Senator Bamidele responded by saying that we cannot determine exaggeration until after the budget period expires. It is then auditing will kick in for the facts. After all, a budget is a statement of intention, not necessarily funds disbursed.
It is also a failure of monitoring in the past that has led to this vexed hour. Have we ever compared budget with execution cost so as to develop a roster, constituency by constituency, on who gobbled up project funds? Groups like SERAP roar so as to get press clippings to submit to their sponsors abroad and at home.
The whole hoopla is about facts and prejudice. One lawmaker’s fact is another’s prejudice, one man’s padding is another’s envy or bias. One man’s pride is another’s prejudice. While some call Ningi a whistle blower, others say it is an irridentist cry.. It is time we acted like the two lovers in Jane Austen novel in which the pride of the wooer and the prejudice of sweetheart melt into what Thomas Hardy calls a “happy doing.”
