•Now, Nigerians know how their legislators have been bleeding the system through their jumbo pay
Senator Shehu Sani deserves all the accolades he has received over the disclosure of the jumbo salaries and allowances being paid our senators. The senator representing Kaduna Central District in the upper legislative chamber caused an uproar when he explained that each senator goes home with a consolidated salary of N750,000 monthly, but is equally paid N13.5 million as running cost.
Senator Sani’s disclosure has only confirmed the speculation that our lawmakers are stupendously paid. As a matter of fact, many Nigerians have always believed that they are the most pampered legsilators in the world. So, in a sense, Nigerians have always known this; but what they did not know was the exact amount involved.
In a country where the minimum wage remains a meager N18,500 monthly, and many youths are unemployed, it is mindboggling that the federal account could be debited with so much for each senator. Similarly, each member of the House of Representatives goes home with N12 million as running cost.
Although Senator Sani who blew the lid off the jumbo pay said the legislators are required to back the expenses with receipts at the end of every month, we have not been told how regularly auditors from the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation scrutinise the accounts to ascertain their conformity with the extant rules in the nation’s public service. For the umpteenth time, we have to point out that the so-called constituency projects conceded to the legislators by the executive is a subversion of democracy and the national system.
Design and execution of projects are the exclusive preserve of the executive arm of government. Not only do the legislators insist on, and get N200 million projects allocated to each of them, they nominate the contractors and supervise the projects. In some cases, despite release of funds, the projects are abandoned, apparently because the legislators have a hand in the execution. This is an aberration, and an indication that corruption has become the norm.
We are aghast that despite the parlous state of the economy occasioned partly by the sharp drop in the price of crude oil, the mainstay of the economy, the legislators have not deemed it fit to slash their insensitive and unsustainable pay.
The Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) must be empowered to take full charge of all allowances and emoluments to all public officers, including the politicians. It is criminal for anyone being funded from the Federation Account to do so outside the purview of the commission, and concomitantly, the general public.
These indefensible sundry demands on the federal purse are mere symptoms of the deep malaise afflicting the system. Unless there is a general restructuring of the polity in such a way that the federating units are empowered to generate and expend their resources, the malady will continue, with attention being only occasionally called to the branches.
Nigerians owe themselves a duty to insist that a thorough survey and review of the system is undertaken with a view to fundamentally reworking the Nigerian federal system and ensure that all arms of government and institutions conform to the demand of Rule of Law and probity.
The elite could think it’s in their interest to pillage the economy and leave the country as dysfunctional as it is, but they should remember that if revolutionary pressures are pushed beyond limits, they have more to lose. Besides, the civil society organisations have a duty to galvanise the people to resist these ungodly acts.
