Date Published: 06/01/10

Nigeria National Assembly for looting... by Muskiliu Mojeed/Elor Nkereuwem

Jobs are in short supply and cash is scarce, what with the economy heading for recession, Nigerians everywhere are trying to make every kobo count, and even big banks are begging for help.
But our politicians have turned themselves into instant millionaires just for being members of the National Assembly, paying themselves salaries and allowances that will make Bill Gates envious.
We can reveal today that your representatives in Abuja are getting ready to pay themselves nearly N18 billion, enough to solve the problem of portable water for all the people of Katsina State.And that is just their quarterly allowance, so that they can serve you better.
As soon as the quarterly allocation to the National Assembly is released each of the 360 members of the House of Representatives will get N35 million in cash money. Each of the 109 Senators will do even better, pocketing N48 million each, supposedly to maintain their offices back home.
If you are a civil servant, police officer or school teacher, and you earn N48,000 a month, you will have to work for more than 83 years just to earn what your Senator is walking away with later this month, for the privilege of serving you.
This is just in “constituency” allowances for only one quarter. Your favourite lawmaker will be paid this amount three more times this year, so that each Senator will get more than N192 million and each Representative will be paid, by you, about N140 million.
This does not even account for the regular salaries that each lawmaker takes home each month.Each of the 469 lawmakers have all 10 fingers in your pocket, which allows them to live lifestyles of outrageous excess, with the most expensive luxury cars packed on National Assembly grounds and filling up the parking lot at a favourite hangout for our millionaire leaders such as the Hilton Hotel in our capital city.
This brazen looting of our treasury has turned our National Assembly into an instant millionaires’ club. And it is in addition to the balloon salaries totaling another N15 billion officially sanctioned by an obscure body known as the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC.
The minimum wage, of course, remains at N5,500 a month. Well, a quick math says each Senator’s annual “constituency” allowance will pay for 2,909 workers earning the minimum wage. The “constituency allowance” is about five times the N15 billion approved by RMAFC for salaries and allowances of the 469 federal lawmakers.
If the citizens were to dismiss the entire membership of the National Assembly and find other uses for their money, our treasury will have nearly enough money to fund the N88.5billion that President Umaru Yar’Adua plans to spend this year on building power plants, so that children can do home work under electric lamps and not parafin.
Alternatively, we could send our lawmakers home and have more than enough this year to fund hospitals and clinics throughout the land. We would even be able to fix the Benin-Ore Expressway, which has collapsed, or make a significant downpayment on the Lagos-Kano railway line.
The payment also is not part of the allocations earmarked for committees of the House and Senate. The payment is labeled “office maintenance allocation” and it is usually directly remitted into lawmakers’ individual accounts purportedly for the running of their offices.
The money is disbursed after it is approved at a “closed-door session” once allocations are released to the National Assembly every quarter. After the closed-door session typically held to agree on the sharing formula, chairmen of the service committees in both chambers are mandated to put up requests for the payments.
The request is approved by the President of the Senate and Speaker of the House of Representatives and then passed to the director of finance of the National Assembly for payment. The payment has been made regularly since 2005 but it had remained a highly guarded secret, with bureaucrats in the National Assembly keeping sealed lips on the matter for fear that they might be victimised by the lawmakers.
Last year it became a matter of deep acrimony between the Senate and the House of Representative, when the House members angrily insisted on equal status with the Senate and therefore expected the allocation to be equitably distributed.
Stella Ugboma, chairperson of the women’s forum of the Nigerian Bar Association, finds all this cash sloshing around impossible to believe. “If this information is true,” she says, “I can only say that it is daylight robbery, no more no less.” She called on the EFCC, the anti-graft body, to investigate.
But the payment has not always been that high. When it was first introduced in 2005, senators got N8million each while their colleagues in the House got N6million. The figure however rose with each succeeding year. In 2006, it was N20million for Senators and N12million for members of the House.
The following year, it was increased to N35milion for Senators and N25million for representatives. In 2008, the figure shot up to N48million for senators and N35million for members of the House. It is not clear yet whether this figure has been retained for this year or has again been increased.
Investigations by NEXT indicate that the management of the National Assembly tried in the past few years to halt the questionable payments. Insiders said before his retirement in 2006, the immediate past Clerk of the National Assembly, Ahmed Salim, tried frantically to persuade the leadership of both chambers of the Assembly to stop the trend. After Mr. Salim left, his predecessor, Nasiru Arab, reportedly continued the battle.
After holding several fruitless meetings with the principal officers of the National Assembly on the matter, Mr. Arab, in frustration, wrote to the leadership of the National Assembly to put his position and that of his colleagues on record. “The clerk wrote twice to them (the principal officers) so that if there is any problem over the payment, there would be evidence that what they were doing is illegal,” an official, familiar with the matter, said on Tuesday.
When David Mark emerged President of the Senate in 2007, becoming the chairman of the National Assembly in the process, Mr. Arab took up the matter with him afresh. On assumption of office, Mr. Mark reportedly indicated to the management of the National Assembly that he would adhere strictly to due process and global best practices in all his dealings in office so that his numerous political enemies would not have anything to pin on him.
Mr. Arab therefore felt that a man with that kind of mindset would be the right person to halt the corruption and profligacy that are pervasive among lawmakers. But Mark did not keep his promise as the illegality has continued unabated.
But when Mr. Arab was contacted on Tuesday, he rose in stout defence of the lawmakers, saying the lawmakers needed the money to run their offices. “The lawmakers have full-fledged offices to run.
They also have staff that have to be paid salaries. Whatever they are paid is budgeted for and you have to look at the budgetary provision for the National Assembly,” he said on the telephone. Section 11 of the National Assembly Commission Act 2000 provides that the clerk of the National Assembly could “be removed from office by the commission acting on an address supported by a simple majority of each House of the National Assembly praying that he be so removed for inability to discharge his function infirmity of mind or body or any other cause or for misconduct”.
Earlier, the Director of Information of the National Assembly, Monima Daminabo, had laboured vigorously to convince NEXT that the huge quarterly allowance that the lawmakers are paying themselves is legal. “I can tell you that the money is not a dash. What has been given to them is to allow them carry out the functions for which they were elected. As you know, they do a lot of travelling, perform oversight functions and conduct investigations. They can’t be expected to use their personal money to do all this,” Mr. Daminabo said.
When reminded that separate allocations had been made to committees to pay for lawmakers’ trips, accommodation and other expenses while performing oversight functions, Daminabo simply smiled and said, “All I can say is that the quarterly payment has a special purpose. The essence is to deepen openness and accountability in governance.”
On why the National Assembly management had been paying the illegal allowance to the lawmakers even when it was clear that it was not approved by RMAFC, the spokesman said, “As management, we only advise lawmakers, we don’t control them.
Once the Senate President or the Speaker approves, who are you to disagree? To do otherwise will be to stall the activities of the chambers.” Section 70 of the 1999 Constitution stipulates that, “A member of the Senate or of the House of Representatives shall receive such salary and allowances as the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission may determine.” The quarterly allowance is not part of allowances approved by RMAFC.
Labour’s reaction is swift and broad. The Assistant Secretary General the Nigeria Labour Congress, in charge of information, Owei Lakemfa, in reacting, shot at the law makers saying “Do you know that the minimum wage in Nigeria is 5,500? This is corruption with an official backing.
It is legitimized corruption. It does not make sense that all that money is paid to individuals who claim that they are doing the nation a service. But if this is for the senators and the house of reps, then the executives are receiving far more; the presidency and others receive the security vote which no one accounts for. This is indecent and the political system needs to be reformed.”
Senators and members of the House were evasive when asked by NEXT to explain the rationale for the jumbo allowance they had discreetly allocated to themselves. Eseme Eyibo, Chairman of the House Committee on Media, who was the first to be contacted via telephone, claimed that he and his colleagues had only been receiving their “statutory entitlements”.
When he was asked to explain who approved the allowance and why it is that high, Mr. Eyibo raised his voice, saying, “What you need to do is to look at our quarterly allocation so you will be able to determine whether the allowance we get is illegal.” He refused to entertain further questions, claiming he had a meeting to attend.
The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Media, Ayogu Eze, said he would not react to the matter on the telephone after initially claiming that he did not understand what our reporter was talking about. On his part, Chairman of the Senate Services Committee, Effiong Bob, who is responsible for processing the Senate’s share of the largesse, rebuffed efforts to interview him on the matter.
He directed all enquiries to Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Commission, which later said through the chairman of its remuneration committee, Emeka Wogu that it was not aware that the lawmakers were paying themselves allowances different from what was approved for them by the commission.
The National Publicity Secretary of the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties, Osita Okechukwu, said what the lawmakers have done is part of the culture of impunity which he said had been the lot of the National Assembly. “We have always said it that our lawmakers have gross disregard for the law.
A lot of impunity happens there and it is no surprise that they have committed such an illegality,” Mr. Okechukwu said.