NationalAssemblyBudgetandtheEl-RufaiChallenge
Ihave followed with keen interest the running spat between Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr Yakubu Dogara. Like El-Rufai, I have always wondered why the budget, salaries, allowances and emoluments of members of the National Assembly are often shrouded in secrecy, despite the transparency mantra which every reasonable politician mouths during campaigns. I must however add that this secrecy is not an exclusive vice of the members of the National Assembly. It runs through the entire government system including the executive governors, local government chairmen and their officials, even judicial officers etc. We, the members of the masses do not know what they earn officially. Not even the provision of the Freedom of Information Act has been able to break the code of what our lawmakers take home as their pay.
Expectedly, this knowledge gap fuels rumours and sometimes exaggerations on what the actual figures are. As the younger generation will say, Gov El-Rufai was thus on point when he challenged the National Assembly leaders, represented by Dogara to unveil the secrecy surrounding their budget and salaries.
As a counterpoise, Dogara had challenged El-Rufai to publish both his salary and the security vote and what they (governors) do with Local Government funds.
It is noteworthy that the National Assembly leaders are often edgy and uneasy and sometimes unduly angry, whenever they are challenged to make known their pay packet. I don’t understand why it annoys them, even as they claim they derive their powers from the mandate we gave them.
Anything that seeks to expose the figures to public scrutiny is frowned upon seriously. That was why the House of Reps promptly suspended, for one year, Mr Jubrin Abdulmumuni who tried to blow the whistle on budget padding. The poor lad is still serving his suspension. If there is nothing to hide among the lawmakers, why do they get fussy any time the issue of their take home package comes up?
The Kaduna governor had in response, published, last Monday, not only his state budget, but also his monthly salary as approved by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMFAC).
Boxed in, Dogara was thus forced to follow suit by publishing, last Wednesday, the details of his six-month pay slip.
Although only the naïve will believe that the published figures are all there are to their salaries and benefits, it, at least, offers a silhouette of what officially these leaders are entitled to.
Is it also not remarkable that of the published six-month pay slip of Dogara, the net figures changed four times? Certainly, there is more to the benefits of these lawmakers than has been made public.
Rightly, El-Rufai in his memo, had noted that, “The call to #OpenNASS is not a personal one. It is one which the leadership of the National Assembly owes to all Nigerians. It is therefore disingenuous for the Speaker to use State Government budgets as the excuse for the opacity of the NASS budget.” He alleged further that “in 2016, the NASS budget for its 469 members was larger than the capital budget of Kaduna State, with close to 10 million inhabitants. It is also larger than the entire budget of several Nigerian states. Indeed, over the past ten years from 2008, the NASS as an institution has cost the country over a trillion naira without any detail on how this amount was allocated and spent”. Can Dogara fault this?
I listened to the feeble and uneasy defence of the Chairman of the House of Reps committee on media and public affairs, Abdulrazak Namdas, who pointed out that what El-Rufai published was the security budget of his state and not the governor’s security vote as demanded by Dogara.
He further added that the National Assembly budget covers the salaries and allowances of all the 469 lawmakers, the salaries and allowances of the about 3000 legislative aides, and the salaries and allowances of about 5000 staff in the National Assembly Bureaucracy. He claimed that the National Assembly budget is just about two per cent of the total National budget, wondering why the attention is focused on just the two percent without minding what happens to the other 98 per cent. He claimed further that the challenge from El-Rufai amounts to undermining of the Buhari administration and a distraction of the National Assembly. Really? If it is not abuse or misuse of words, I do not see how the call for transparency in an institution’s budget amounts to distraction and undermining of an administration.
Mr Namdas, two per cent of a nation’s budget is not a joke. Do the members of the National Assembly make up to two per cent of the nation’s population, as to appropriate about N115 billion?
Why did Namdas not talk about the many contracts the lawmakers run after, sometimes at the expense of their duties?
Or why did he not talk about how they blackmail ministers, to corner juicy projects in the budget before passing the budgets? Why did Dogara not talk about the N15 million each of them receives as running cost of their offices every month? Nobody talks about illegal oversight kickbacks they get from contractors. Nobody reckons with the many under-the-table deals that go on within the National Assembly. To advertise a stripped pay slip in pretentious pursuit of transparency is thus specious and misleading.
Were it not so, how can a mere salary of N346,577.87, (for the Speaker) for instance, sustain the nearly wild and epicurean life style of many of the lawmakers, as we see them?
Are we not aware that many of the so-called constituency projects of the lawmakers merely end up in their pockets, without anything being done for the poor, and sometimes ignorant constituents?
Are we not aware that some crooked lawmakers even adopt/ appropriate state government projects as their own constituency projects, during those jamboree inspections called oversight functions?
If the lawmakers are diligent in checking and monitoring the budget implementation, Nigeria would probably record about 50 to 60 per cent budget implementation and the country would be a million times better for it. But they compromise, run a chopand-chop budget, look the other way even when they know the wrong things have been done, believing that next year, those same projects will feature again in the budget. And the beat goes on.
In all, I think the El-Rufai challenge is apt and a call to a new orientation among public servants. It is the failure to run transparent system that feeds the greed and corruption among many public servants. And that, in a way, explains why they have wealth they hide and cannot declare, because they know they did not acquire such wealth legitimately. Let the El Rufai fire catch on, even among those in the executive arm of government.