Brickbats and recriminations, the very stuff of politics, flew freely recently when Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State and the Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, engaged each other over the troubling issue of lack of transparency in governance. The National Assembly management retreat in Kaduna in April provided the stage for the fray.
The governor, who fired the first salvo, had told the lawmakers that the secrecy surrounding their earnings was a major blight on their image, which they should confront squarely. “No transparency in your budget; nobody knows your budget or how much you get paid,” el-Rufai said candidly. It touched the raw nerves of Dogara, who also demanded that the governor should explain how he and his other colleagues spent their security votes and local government funds under the guise of State/Local Government Joint Account.
What followed was a payslip drama by the duo, which, instead of addressing the contentious issues, made a mockery of them. The monthly payslip of the Speaker, for instance, showed his gross pay as N402,530.37k, comprising: N206,425.83k for basic salary; N175,461.96k (constituency allowance) and N20,642.58k for recess allowance. But his take-home pay is N346,577.87k. This implies that ordinary members of the House receive far less. If this is all there is in the remuneration of the lawmakers, why has the parliament failed since 1999 to yield to the public clamour to make public what they earn? They are sustained by taxpayers’ money.
Nigerians are not fooled. They know that federal lawmakers do not live on the salaries and allowances prescribed by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission for political office holders. Legislators illegally appropriate more money to themselves by inflating their running costs, padding the budget with the so-called constituency projects, which they execute through proxy contractors, and collecting health and other allowances upfront. In their lingo, they “collapse” all the allowances.
No legislative session in the House fleeced the public treasury more than that which Dimeji Bankole presided over between 2007 and 2011. It took a bank loan to satisfy the financial greed of the lawmakers, which later put the leadership in trouble. The then Clerk of the House, Mohammed Sani-Omolori, warned them of the illegality of the transaction as the House budget of N60 billion in 2010 did not provide for such excesses.
In his sketch of the conspiracy, the clerk said “a 37-man committee, made up of one member per state and the FCT, to review the welfare package, specifically to enhance their running costs and any other welfare,” was set up and “the House resolved that the new running cost must be paid at all cost.” Therefore, from N27m each lawmaker received per quarter, it ballooned to N42m. That of the Speaker is more than double what an ordinary lawmaker collects. There are 360 members in the House. Imagine the extra burden this recklessness and irresponsibility imposed on the national treasury.
However, what the lawmakers collect as running cost differs from one legislative session to another. But the conspiracy to hike their welfare packages is a common decimal in the federal parliament irrespective of which epoch. Interestingly, Dogara, who wants the public to believe that all he earns is the paltry sum on his payslip, was one of the beneficiaries of the increased “running cost and welfare” the erstwhile House Clerk complained about.
Conversely, governors have acted more irresponsibly in pillaging of the public till. To find out how reckless most of them are in managing the treasuries of their states, turn to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to know the number of ex-governors facing corruption trials and the amount allegedly looted. Some of them are in the Senate purportedly making laws for the country. El-Rufai might not be collecting any “security vote” as he claimed in his response to Dogara’s challenge. But his colleagues do.
Such a charge on public funds has no legal or constitutional basis. Worse still, it is not accounted for. It is patently a corruption conduit that ought to have been dismantled before now. As Rabiu Kwankwaso, a former governor of Kano State, described it, “Security vote anywhere is stealing.” There is no better way to put it. Incredibly, the racket has been going on since 1999 without an effective national campaign against it.
How much has been siphoned from public coffers through security vote could be gleaned from the disclosure of a southern governor that his predecessor collected N6.5 billion per annum, but that he pegged his own at N2.5 bn, when he assumed office in 2011. By that action, a whopping N4bn was freed for other areas in dire need of funds. Kwankwaso’s case and the spiralling insecurity in virtually all the states exemplified in banditry, assassinations, kidnapping, Fulani herdsmen killings and loss of lives by police and military personnel, should compel urgent public action against this looting binge in disguise.
It behoves all Nigerians to be vanguards of the struggle to deepen the values of democracy, among them transparency and accountability. A governance template in a civil rule that allowed a governor to collect N6.5 billion security vote without rendering account to either God or man (which means that N26 billion might have been siphoned in four years), is worse than a military set-up.
