Tuesday February 24, 2009 |
Remember that this and other columns are available
in PDF)
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There’s a looting frenzy going on in Abuja, and Nigerians should be hopping
mad about it.
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Last week, Next’s Musikilu Mojeed and Elor Nkereuwem gave an enlightening,
if disturbing, account of the obscene sums of cash carted home by the
looters who misbaptize themselves lawmakers. In reading their report, aptly
titled “An Assembly for Looting,” one realized the truth of what one always
suspected: that Nigeria is a veritable demo-crazy. |
....
paying themselves
salaries and allowances
that will make Bill
Gates envious. |
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What’s a demo-crazy? It is quite simply a space run by criminals who mask
themselves as devotees of democracy. Mojeed and Nkereuwem’s report informed
readers that Nigerian “politicians have turned themselves into instant millionaires just for being members of the National Assembly, paying
themselves salaries and allowances that will make Bill Gates envious.”
My initial response was that the reporters were trading in hyperbole. But
that’s hardly the case.
Here are some of the miffing facts in their report. Four times this year,
each of the 360 members of the House of Representatives will receive N35
million as “constituency allowance.” In conservative terms, that’s $300,000
per member per quarter. At the end of the year, then, each member of the
House would have collected a cool $1.2 million.
If this figure has made you dizzy – or put you in a tizzy – hold on a minute
until you hear this one. Each of the 109 senators collects N48 million per
quarter. At the end of the year, each senator’s haul will be in the
neighborhood
of $1.7 million. That’s not a bad sum for doing – little to nothing.
In case you’re wondering, these legislators gobble enough cash to give
pocket money to President Barack Obama. Obama’s salary is $400,000 per
annum. That’s less than what each Nigerian senator “eats” each quarter.
Mind: this gargantuan “constituency allowance” comes on top of salaries and
other sundry allowances by the Abuja “lootocrats.” As a former member of the
National Assembly told me, there’s no requirement that the legislators
explain how they spend their so-called “constituency” funds. “Throughout the
four years I spent in the House,” said this former representative, who asked
for anonymity, “I don’t know of one member who used the money to do anything
serious in his or her constituency. The cash was pocketed.”
The two reporters took care to give readers some perspective. “If you are a
civil servant, police officer or school teacher,” they wrote, “and you earn
N48,000 a month, you will have to work for more than 83 years just to earn
what your Senator is walking away.” And that’s just what the senator takes
to his bank every three months.
This duo of enterprising reporters made the looting vivid. Considering that
Nigeria’s minimum wage stands at N5, 500 a month, each senator’s quarterly
allowance “will pay for 2,909 workers earning the minimum wage.”
The reporters offered other tantalizing projections. If Nigerians were to
fire the entire membership of the National Assembly, the savings would be
more than enough to “fund the N88.5billion” Mr. Umaru Yar'Adua budgeted this
year for building power plants. Alternatively, we could “fund hospitals and
clinics” all over Nigeria, “fix the Benin-Ore Expressway, which has
collapsed, or make a significant down payment on the Lagos-Kano railway
line.”
Why wait? I personally can’t find much sense in retaining legislators who
guzzle such stupendous sums and render mediocre lawmaking. These legislators
abdicate even the basic responsibility of screening candidates for cabinet
positions. Where hard questions demand to be asked, our supine legislators
invite many a candidate to “bow and go.”
Nigeria’s know that their legislature is dominated by riff raff who got
smuggled into their seats by a ruling party that regards elections as
do-or-die warfare. A good number of them hardly understand the rudiments of
legislative business. Watch a televised legislative session and you
conjecture that many of these “bow and go” impostors won’t even make the
effort to show up.
In close to ten years of a “nascent” freak show we call democracy, the
National Assembly is yet to pass a law that even attempted to make a dent on
the issues of deepening poverty or stubborn culture of corruption. They are
not of the tribe of the poor, and most of them are fully embedded in the bog
of corruption.
Yet, these men and women have the cheek – the shameless gut – to plaster
themselves with inflated appellations like “Honorable” and “Distinguished
Senator.”
If this is the cost of the strange beast called democracy, then Nigerians
ought to refuse to pay it. Ideally, legislators should be paid sitting
allowances and hired on a part-time basis. It happens in several states in
the U.S. If we remove the allure of easy cash, we’re likely to see an improvement in the
quality of lawmakers. The leeches who are in it for the cash will take their
game elsewhere.
It’s time to say to these parasites: “Take a bow and go – home!”
