WITH the Nigerian economy currently brought to its knees by a toxic combination of rampant corruption, gross mismanagement and rapidly plummeting revenues from crude oil sales, there is no better time than now to take a second look at the outrageous salaries and allowances of the country’s political office holders. It is just as well that the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission has set in motion a process for a review of the remunerations of this class of Nigerians. Through lawful process, civil society groups and other stakeholders should be prepared to resolve the anomaly once and for all as the beneficiaries of the outrageous largesse will defiantly constitute a stumbling block to democratic changes.
Since the return to democratic rule more than 16 years ago, Nigeria’s political office holders have taken full advantage of frailties in the system to massively enrich themselves. Not only do they come appallingly short in the provision of the required leadership and governance, they have also acquired the notoriety for being among the highest remunerated of their kind in the world. Two years ago, the London-based The Economistmagazine blew the lid off the secrecy in which the emoluments of Nigerian federal lawmakers are shrouded, saying that each of them earned $189,000 (an equivalent of N30 million then) annual basic salary. This placed Nigerian lawmakers second only to their Australian counterparts and ahead of their opposite numbers in the United States of America, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and Germany, among others.
To start with, each of the newly inaugurated senators will reportedly receive N506,600 per annum as wardrobe allowance. That is just the tip of the (benefits) iceberg that comes with being a senator. Other sumptuous benefits, with at least 19 of them identified by this newspaper on Tuesday, await our 109 senators and 360 representatives. This is not only provocative; it is mindless folly. Yet, our over-indulged politicians across party lines prefer to defend this financial recklessness by being economical with the truth. One notorious defender of this national shame is David Mark, the immediate past president of the Senate, who has always insisted that what National Assembly members earn is open. But the grim truth, as we said, is that “the budget of the National Assembly is never broken into components and efforts to get it to break down the budget have not yielded the required result even after the invocation of the Freedom of Information Act.”
Although RMAFC, the body constitutionally empowered to fix the salaries and allowances of public office holders, has always described the amount prescribed as reasonable, what actually goes to each political office holder has remained a guarded secret. Yet, unofficial information available to the public indicates that by tapping into a mountain of juicy perks, they earn far much more than the commission’s recommendations. In this regard, the allowances that Nigerian legislators approve for themselves actually put them in a class far ahead of their colleagues in other parts of the world. For instance, it was once acknowledged that a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, received a quarterly allowance of N100 million, amounting to a whopping sum of N400 million a year, while the Deputy Speaker and House Leader were entitled to N80 million and N60 million respectively per quarter.
Also weighing in on the same issue, Itse Sagay, a professor of law, claimed that the Senate President took home an outrageous sum of N88 million a month. This, to many, may sound unbelievable in a country where the minimum wage is a paltry N18,000 per month. A former Central Bank Governor and now Emir of Kano, Lamido Sanusi, once famously stated that the upkeep of the National Assembly members gulped 25 per cent of the country’s recurrent expenditure. While this did not go down well with the lawmakers, it did not stop a former minister, Oby Ezekwesili, from saying that the country spent N1.1 trillion on the National Assembly members between 2005 and 2013. Nobody has, however, challenged all these claims, except a few lawmakers who lack scruples.
In a country where the poverty rate tops 70 per cent and two-thirds of the 36 states have not been paying salaries, it smacks of utter insensitivity for a group of people to continue to appropriate for themselves such obscene financial benefits. Although the case of the lawmakers is the one always making the headlines, they are by no means the only ones guilty of this betrayal of public trust. Across the board, from the Presidency to the 774 local governments, there has been legitimised looting of the treasury by public office holders. For instance, the practice of keeping security votes, a veritable slush fund, is one of such cases. This fund ranges from hundreds of millions of naira to billions, depending on the buoyancy of the state involved and the conscience of the person in charge. It is an amount for which the beneficiary is not expected to render account; and, in most cases, ends up as money dispensed on patronage and used to hire thugs for the purpose of rigging elections, among other uses. This abuse of public finance must stop.
But this cannot be done by the RMAFC alone. It can no longer be business as usual as the economy is facing an ocean of challenges. This is where President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress, the party that controls the majority in the National Assembly, come in. They should use their influence to ensure that things are done rightly. Also, the Nigerian public must shed their toga of aloofness; the time calls for the involvement of all if there is a genuine desire for change. The civil society groups and the labour movement have to lead the way to force a change. In fixing new renumerations, the RMAFC committee looking into the issue, which is expected to complete its assignment in September, should take into consideration the median annual household income, the national poverty level, the state of the Nigerian economy and the numerous problems crying for attention.
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