The brood of corruption
It can be so easy to be blind-sided with the claims and
counter-claims of Nigerian politicians and lose sight of the serious piece of
information that underlays the mudslinging.
The former President Olusegun Obasanjo had in a recent interview
accused the National Assembly of corruption and offered examples and figures to
justify his claim.
However, members of the minority parties did not take this lying
down, they accused the ex-president of grandstanding, spreading falsehoods
without substantiation and rounded that up with saying he was their
grandfather in corruption [1].
Slush funds to each for favours
The conflated interviews and statements of the President Obasanjo
and various minority members of the National Assembly give an interesting
insight into the workings of our legislature and probably our democracy too.
The president opined that the legislators allotted bogus
allowances to themselves and inflated budgets with the view to profiting from
the allocations because they chose their preferred contractors and consultants
in the execution of the projects.
The legislators accepted that accusation then confirmed that
President Obasanjo in the quest for a third term in government bribed
legislators with NGN 50 million (c $330,000) each, then challenged the press to
seek audited sources of income of the ex-president through his tenure.
Cost of corrupt enterprise
They were all agreed that politicians are corrupt but tried to subscribe
to pedantry by asking the ex-president to identify specific legislators who are
corrupt, but that is beside the point.
The core issue is that the Senate costs 3% of the national budget,
no mention is made of the additional cost of the Representatives, but even if
that cost an additional 2%, it beggars belief that such a non-productive sector
of country can drain 5% of the budget.
One senator offered that the recurrent expenditure in our
democracy always exceeds the capital expenditure, the latter being what really
benefits the people.
Each legislator according to the ex-president now costs more than
NGN 250 million (c. $1,7 million), I would suppose that means annually.
Telling it as it is
He laments the lack of transparency which cannot be asserted if
the National Assembly would not pass the Freedom of Information Bill that has
languished in the legislative doldrums for years.
At least, we cannot say that the ex-president does not know what
he is talking about when it comes to the cost of the legislative arm of
government and he believes they are costing too much for the Federal Government
to maintain.
Whilst he compared the cost of the legislature in 1999/2000 to
today the article in the Vanguard failed to provide that comparison correctly
because the current cost of NGN 250 million per head is the same as the $1.7
million quoted in the article at today’s exchange rate.
Exorbitant is unacceptable
But the most important piece of information in these exchanges is
really in the statement made by the Minority Whip, Senator Olorunimbe Mamora
and he said, “My sincere view is that the cost of running government is
exorbitant in Nigeria.”
Taking the word exorbitant,
the Merriam-Webster
Dictionary [2] defines this
as not coming within the scope
of the law or exceeding the customary or
appropriate limits in intensity, quality, amount, or size.
The WordWedOnline [3] volunteers: Greatly exceeding bounds of reason
or moderation and Answers.com [4] suggests: Exceeding all bounds, as of custom
or fairness with excessive,
aberrant, flagrant and extreme as synonyms.
This corroborates
views [5] I have expressed
variously about the outrageously lucrative perks of Nigerian political office,
irrevocably damaging the democratic landscape with people going to unmentionable
extents [6] to grab office
and remain indefinitely incumbent.
Change has to come
It is means on the basis of cost alone, our democracy is unsustainable
but one does wonder how change can be made to bring the costs down to
reasonable, fair, just and equitable.
In the end, we can only thank the ex-president and the legislators
for volunteering information we have never been able to obtain by any other
means, we wish they continually taunt each other with abuse, accusation, blame
and chicanery, the results might just be their undoing and the hopefully the
making of our democracy.
Long live Nigeria and death to the leeches that have bled her to a
chronic anaemic state.
Sources
