social responsibility or self-enrichment?- Lawmaking

social responsibility or self-enrichment?-

Lawmaking

All the ideas emanating from the National Assembly regarding remuneration of lawmakers are far from the ethic of social responsibility, which requires people in leadership positions to accept an obligation to act for the benefit of society

Even a few days into the new administration, it is becoming clear that some lawmakers are already acting as if they have lost the political will for change.

Given the manner of choosing principal officers in the new National Assembly recently, it is not exaggeration for a public affairs observer or commentator to say that it is getting hard (or harder than in the days of Jonathan) to tell who and who in the legislature is working for APC’s manifesto of change or for PDP’s commitment to continuity or ‘business as usual.’ But today’s column is not about how and who got into the juicy positions in the Senate and the House of Representatives. After all, the ruling party has officially assured the public that it is ready to work with those elected into legislative offices, regardless of the initial controversy generated by the sidelining of 51 APC senators. Some people would say that the elite struggle for power in Nigeria is better left to the elites within the power circle to sort out. But citizens need to get intervene in the discourse of power politics before self-serving politicians drive and bury them in poverty.

The interest today is to focus on level of remuneration for lawmakers in the new Nigeria of diminishing revenue from the easy source of foreign exchange that had driven individuals and organisations for decades to expect to be pampered with huge salaries and outlandish allowances. In the days of high revenue from petroleum, even the authors of the current constitution chose to give the power to determine what states and public office holders get as allocations and salaries/allowances to a group. The Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation, and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) is constitutionally charged with recommending what every stratum of the polity gets from proceeds from the oil flowing from wombs of the Niger Delta. Although RMAFC prides itself on its website as independent, it remains to be seen how much of that independence or autonomy has been used to plead for moderation in matters pertaining to remuneration of political office holders and lawmakers. RMAFC is on record as complaining about several allowances lawmakers awarded themselves in the past, an indication that lawmakers have taken liberty to exploit their positions.

Whatever was the culture in the past, the new economic realities in the country now call for more critical thinking than was the case in the regimes of Olusegun Obasanjo, UmaruYar’Adua, and Goodluck Jonathan. The abundance that led to creation of 36 states, 774 local governments, over 400 House of Representative members, over 100 senators, and even recently to recommendations for moving the number of states from 36 to 55 appears to be drying up faster than the authors of the Nigeria of today could imagine.

All the ideas emanating from the National Assembly regarding remuneration of lawmakers are far from the ethic of social responsibility, which requires people in leadership positions to accept an obligation to act for the benefit of society. For example, the claim by the deputy speaker that the National Assembly is a separate arm of the federal government with its own peculiarities does not suggest any readiness on the part of this APC man from Osun State to respond appropriately to the call for prudence and sensitivity to society’s needs. To say that a budget of 150 billion naira is not much because it is less than three per cent of the total budget is tantamount to ignoring the new realities on the ground. Similarly, the defence of over half a million naira wardrobe allowance for lawmakers by the new Senate President and the spokesperson for the RMAFC during his recent visit to the Senate leader also misses the point.

While it may not be right to blame the 8th National Assembly for the largesse given to lawmakers directly or indirectly in the last sixteen years, it is proper to expect new legislators, particularly those who got elected on the platform of the party that promised Change to get critical and creative about how to end what citizens generally have considered as oversize budget to pamper lawmakers in particular. A country that has borrowed money to pay salaries even at the federal level is not in any position to justify giving its legislators salaries and allowances higher than what their counterparts earn in wealthier and more advanced countries or what senior public servants like judges, professors, permanent secretaries, generals, etc earn for serving the country on a full-time basis.

Given that the long list of demands that the anaemic treasury inherited by the new government must have forced President Buhari to take to the G7, no legislator should need special persuasion to realize the need to cut out the culture of waste inherited from the past. Nigeria is still one of the poorest countries in the world, despite its huge petroleum revenue in the past. Over 65% of Nigerians are believed to live on less than 300 naira a day. Child and maternal mortality in Nigeria is higher than that of many of its neighbours. Education and health care are two major social services that have been in decline for years. Most Nigerians have access to electricity not for more than two hours a day. Most Nigerians have no access to potable water while about 98% of Nigerians travel on substandard roads on a daily basis. Most Nigerians working in the public sector do not get their salaries as and when due while pensioners in many parts of the country get their pension benefits usually in arrears. Apart from the special insecurity of Boko Haram, most of the roads and streets in the country are unsafe for any form of night-time economic activities. All of these happen even after the government at all levels owe over $60 billion, most of which have apparently been used to finance recurrent expenditures. What other evidence should any serious-minded lawmaker need to get real?

There has been so much opaqueness about how much money is given to lawmakers as salary or allowance. While the basic salary of the average legislator looks normal, the list of allowances is scandalous: furniture, wardrobe, utilities, vehicle maintenance, leave, newspaper, constituency, recess, domestic staff, entertainment, personal assistance, etc. When added up, all these allowances and salaries put the Nigerian legislator as the highest paid lawmaker in the world. And this is despite the fact that lawmaking in Nigeria is a part-time activity, 120 to 180 days on the job in a year. Citizens serving the country in non-elective positions have to work 260 days in a year to earn a net income that averages between .001 to 10% of what lawmakers and other political office holders get in the name of allowances.

As laudable as the decision of the new governor of Kaduna State to take only half of his salary is and as ridiculous as the readiness of the Bayelsa Senator to pass his wardrobe allowance to widows in his state and workers in Osun State sounds, what is needed at this point is not good-hearted philanthropy from overpaid political office holders in the executive or the legislature. The country’s economic condition, most graphically illustrated by borrowing money to pay salaries and the long list of requests President Buhari had to carry to Bavaria for consideration by members of the G7 group, calls for bold intervention.

The onus to show a higher sense of responsibility in determination of what to pay federal, state, and local political office holders is not just on the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission. Lawmakers should seize the initiative to assure citizens that they are not in the National Assembly for the over generous emoluments inherited from sixteen years of profligacy in government. When citizens shifted majority of their votes from the PDP after sixteen years to the party that promised to change the way the country has been governed, they wanted to end a model of governance that appeared to privilege enrichment of the tiny political elite over the general welfare of citizens. Undoubtedly, the Resource Curse that is part of the rentier state nurtured in the last fifty years must have produced the regimes of indulgence that the 2015 election results had promised to change. If, as it has become clear, our Manna economy cannot sustain prodigal allowances of the tiny political elite, it stands to reason that the change to an economy based on productivity and taxation will not be able to sustain the extravagant allowances for lawmakers and members of the executive branch of government. It is time for citizens to get more vigilant.