National Assembly leaders strive to leave the impression they are holding the executive branch accountable and in so doing have to get into confrontation with the executive branch sometimes. They have made a song and a dance out of their disagreement with the Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, on budget matters.
They beat their chest that they would not be the executive branch’s rubber stamp. They talk about the Senate’s rejection of Ibrahim Magu as Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commmission (EFCC) and similar issues.
Yet on close examination of those disputes, it is impossible not to see that only the individual interests of NASS members were at play. Broad policy disagreements are absent.
No principles are involved. There is no ideological confrontation of any kind. The two major parties are distinguished only by their names. In their activities in the National Assembly, they are agreed on all matters of policy, and especially so in their personal earnings which are the real issues that matter to them. Both sides were unanimous in keeping their salaries, allowances and other emoluments secret for 17 years. It was the best kept secret conspiracy involving such a large group in history. Neither of the two parties saw anything wrong in keeping their compensation secret from Nigerians, which is why it never came up as an issue for 17 years.
It took years of intensive campaigns by #OpenNASS and other organizations which had to remind the National Assembly of the hypocrisy of claiming to be a democratic institution while at the same time keeping its budget sequestered like the Mafia or a cult, like a secret society. To get the National Assembly to render its budget visible to Nigerians after 17 was like cracking the so-called Da Vinci Code. Even when the overall budget was revealed, individual pay was still shrouded in an enigma wrapped in mystery.
House Speaker, Dr. Yakubu Dogara, in a little belligerent exchange with the Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, published what he described as his pay slips for six months, which further dented the credibility of the House of Representatives and its leaders as people incurably economical with the truth.
Till today, Nigerians are still not wiser about how much members of the National Assembly take home as their compensation per month. Nigerians have to rely on earlier uncontested figures published in the Economist which revealed that senators take home N29 million per month and House members about N27 million; but no one in the National Assembly goes home with less than N25 million a month. And this does not include the so-called expenses which in Dogara’s case is another N25 million per month, as related by former House Appropriations Committee Chairman, Dr. Abdulmumin Jibrin.
The comparison often made on the conflict between the two (executive and legislative) branches in Nigeria and those of the United States is so out of place it is false analogy. When Republicans refuse to approve the budget and starved the Obama government of funds enough to shut down the US government, it was often based on the party’s well-known principle of being thrifty with public revenue. They would say they were saving the tax payer’s money from an extravagant, tax-and-spend, “drunken sailor,” spendthrift Democrats. Last Tuesday the Trump Administration’s Healthcare Bill collapsed in the Senate when three Republicans pulled out their support. Of course, Democrats returned the 2009 Republican zero support. Why did the three Republican senators oppose the Republican president’s bill? Because they have calculated and probably got enough warning from their constituencies that voting for the bill would hurt many constituents, who may pay back next year during the so-called mid-term election. How does the bill hurt some constituents? Because the Republicans have, in their usual obsession with saving money, pulled $800 billion from Medicaid which is a programme to subsidize the health care of the very poor, the aged and the handicapped.
In addition to its over-sized salaries, allowances and perquisites, the National Assembly pads the national budget yearly and this year was no exception. Last year was so out of control, it was sensational. Yet the executive has been so intimidated to the extent that even when the cases of fraud, waste and abuse by the National Assembly are so glaring and evidence abundant to ground prosecution, the executive has been so scared, it chickened out.
This is one reason the so-called war on corruption is getting nowhere because a vital engine of corruption seems to possess constitutional inoculation. Indeed, the National Assembly has been absolutely unconcerned with the fight against corruption and whenever it could, it undermines the fight. When the President and the vice-president declared their assets publicly, the whole world expected members of the National Assembly to follow suit. Except the Senator from Kaduna Central, Shehu Sani, not a single member of either chamber declared his or her assets publicly. As a matter of fact, NASS leaders are the harshest critics of the fight against corruption for the obvious reason that majority of the members of the National Assembly ought to be defendants in graft courts. Indeed, a commentator once noted that the Senate is the largest collection of the most ethically challenged legislators in the world.
National Assembly members, therefore, pocket billions from which they are able to spend millions employing astroturfs like the Movement for the Advancement of National Transformation, and Coalition in Defence of Nigerian Democracy and Coalition, the National Youth Council and others like them who can put a few hundred placard-carrying touts in Abuja streets to “rap” for Nation al Assembly members and their leaders. In one such recent exercise, the National Assembly lobbyists stated: “We have observed with great shock the relentless campaign of calumny orchestrated by the executive arm of government to silence the legislature with the inordinate aim of riding roughshod over Nigerians without being checked.
This severe campaign follows impudent acts of autocracy and tyranny against the senate in particular and the national assembly in general by the executive with the sole aim of undermining the senate and emasculating the National Assembly for very obvious reasons… These unfortunate developments have put us as a nation at the greatest risk of descending speedily into the unenviable state of anomie, anarchy, chaos and doom where impunity reigns supreme,” said the astroturfers. Patriotism, Samuel Johnson is quoted to have stated, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Correction: Last week, I erroneously named President Robert Mugabe as President of Zambia instead of Zimbabwe. The error is regretted.