Former Secretary General of Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, Sen. Femi Okurounmu, tells Leke Baiyewu that former President Olusegun Obasanjo was right on the allegation of corruption against the National Assembly in his letter to the legislature
Do you agree with Obasanjo on his letter to the National Assembly, in which he accused the legislature of corruption among others?
Yes. My honest opinion is that Obasanjo is right. Those who know me know that I rarely agree with Obasanjo; I rarely agree with him on anything involving Nigerian politics. But on the issue of scandalous expenditures of National Assembly members, he is right on target. I agree with him.
Why are you agreeing with him this time?
A lot of well-intentioned Nigerians have been complaining for years — even before the current National Assembly — about the ridiculous budget the legislators allocate for themselves. That is why they frustrate the annual budget that the president gives them. When the president gives them the budget for a year, they will add whatever they have budgeted for themselves to it. That is why they write budgets off. And it is easy to blackmail the president that unless he approves it (the addition), they won’t pass the (annual) budget. If we look at the salaries and allowances of the legislators, what they use to deceive most Nigerians is their salaries. Their salaries cannot be said to be too much, if we consider only the basic salaries.
The basic salary of a senator is about N2m per annum and I will not call that excessive. But when we look at all the ridiculous allowances that they get, it is laughable – just laugh at them. Their allowances are more than 10 times of their basic salaries. For instance, look at some of the allowances they get apart from their basic salaries; they get hardship allowance – I am sure every Nigerian will like to have the kind of hardship that the legislators are having; they also get constituency allowance, furniture allowance, newspaper allowance – the poor man buys the newspaper from his salary while a senator gets a special allowance for newspaper, wardrobe allowance – to be able to dress flamboyantly at the taxpayer’s expense, recess allowance – even when they are not working they get an allowance for that, accommodation allowance, utility allowance, domestic allowance, entertainment allowance, personal assistant allowance, vehicle maintenance allowance, and so on and so forth. When you add up the allowances, it will be about N30m, compared to about N2m (as) salary.
This is just a part of what they take home. On top of these salaries and ridiculous allowances, they budget for themselves big sums of money every quarter, which they say is for running their offices. The latest figure I have on that is that every senator gets N45m every quarter and a House of Representatives member gets about N35m every quarter. When you add all these figures, it costs about N290m to maintain a member of the National Assembly per annum.
Senator Dino Melaye has alleged that it was Obasanjo who exposed the National Assembly to corruption. Do you agree with him?
That is a different matter. As to who exposed them to corruption, that is not the issue. The issue is that their salaries and allowances and what they are taking home are inconsistent with the state of Nigerian economy. This is the point Obasanjo was trying to make, and that is the point Nigerian legislators themselves should see. Everybody is talking about the economy; oil prices are now about $30 per barrel; governors are complaining that they can no longer pay the minimum wage of N18,000 per month to a worker; and the legislators who say they are representing us want to take home about N290m every year. That is ridiculous. When you look at their total package, we are the most indulgent country in the world in terms of our lawmakers.
Do you agree with those who say Nigerians should look at the messenger and not the message alone?
I started by telling you that I rarely agree with Obasanjo. My philosophy is to look at the substance: if my enemy is saying the right thing, I will say he is saying the correct thing; if my friend is talking rubbish, I will let him know that he is talking rubbish. We should begin to look at politics from a very objective angle, not from a partisan angle. That was why I refused to hold any party card; I don’t belong to any political party. If your party is doing well, I will say it is doing well. If the party is not doing well, I will say it is not doing well. Everybody knows that I didn’t vote for (President Muhammadu) Buhari; I am not a Buhari supporter. But in terms of fighting corruption, I support him. I have always spoken against corruption in my writings and everything I have done. I believe that corruption is one of those things killing the country, and until we get a government that can fight corruption, this country will not find its bearing. Corruption started from a set of leaders and it has been growing worse and worse. We need to have a leader who will have the courage to stop it and say ‘enough is enough!’ When Buhari wants to stop corruption, the legislators are saying ‘no, we are going to continue business as usual.’ Then, the whole idea of change is frustrated. There can be no change without fighting corruption in the National Assembly.
You represented Ogun-Central Senatorial District at the Senate between 1999 and 2003. Was there no corruption in the National Assembly then?
In any institution in Nigeria since we had our independence, it will be naive to say any institution is free of corruption. No institution, not even the angelic institutions are free of corruption. It is a matter of the scale of it. While I was in the Senate, corruption was minimal to an extent that we the senators were part of the fight against corruption. That was why we removed the first Senate President, Chuba Okadigbo. Okadigbo was removed because of corruption. He only awarded contracts and all the contracts he awarded were just about N60m. We called it anticipatory award of contract and we set up a committee, which indicted him. He was indicted and it led to his impeachment ultimately. We fought our own people whom we found to be corrupt. A lot of people apart from the Senate President fell with that crisis. We monitored ourselves and ensured that people were not corrupt.
The constituency allowance was non-existent during my time, which they are now claiming. The amount they are giving themselves every quarter was non-existent during my time. This idea of having Sports Utility Vehicles and special cars was non-existent. When we were in the Senate, the first set of official cars we had was (Peugeot) 505. Later, before we left, they upgraded the car to Peugeot 406.
While some Nigerians agree with Obasanjo on what he said about the National Assembly, they are also criticising the ex-president as unfit to condemn the lawmakers due to how his administration governed the country. Is this appropriate?
If you want to talk about corruption in Nigeria, Obasanjo cannot be excluded, I agree. But the point he was making in his letter to the National Assembly is valid. A judge judges the case before him. The case before the court now is ‘is the National Assembly corrupt or not?’ Are their salaries and allowances corrupt or not? That is the case before the nation today. If we base that on who is the messenger, we will never get our bearing correct. In that case, everybody in the country is already compromised. Who is going to criticise the National Assembly if Obasanjo cannot? He is one of those who can criticise them because he knows what is going on there. If Buhari doesn’t start the fight against corruption from the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, which are the three arms of government and which are corrupt to the limit, he will get nowhere. All these three institutions are corrupt.
How true is the allegation that the executive induced the legislature under the Obasanjo-led administration to prevent impeachment of the ex-president and to lobby for a third term?
They were exposed to corruption on several occasions. When we were there between 1999 and 2003, we were exposed to corruption on several occasions. It is for each Senate to see how to react to each exposure or temptation. It is for us to see how they react to temptation. If they were exposed to corruption at that time, must they institutionalise it such that it has now become a permanent feature of the National Assembly? If there are no roads in a constituency or the roads are full of potholes and workers cannot eat, and their senator comes in the most flamboyant SUV to the constituency, is he or she representing them? If a senator comes and sprays money every weekend because he gets too much of it; if he goes to every church and mosque to donate money, is that the way Nigeria is going to move forward? Nigeria cannot move forward that way.
There are plenty of opportunities to criticise Obasanjo but if we are talking about corruption and who started it, there are many people whose names will be mentioned. For instance, I have never hesitated to say that corruption started getting to a ridiculous stage and horrendous dimension during (military dictator, Gen. Ibrahim) Babangida’s regime. That was when we began to institutionalise corruption and respect corrupt people and adulate them. From then, it has always been growing from bad to worse in the subsequent regimes; from Babangida to (late Gen. Sani) Abacha, it got worse; from Abacha to Gen. Abdulsalami (Abubakar), it got worse; Abdulsalami to Obasanjo, it got worse; Obasanjo to (late Umaru) Yar’Adua, it got worse; Yar’Adua to (Goodluck) Jonathan, it got worse. Corruption has been getting progressively worse in succeeding regimes. – Punch.
