Without doubt the penultimate Wednesday’s face-off between Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria, and a joint select committee of the Senate over the governor’s claim that our legislators have been living it off at the expense of their hapless contituencies was a public relations disaster for the legislators. When they summoned him to defend his claim, they obviously did so with full confidence that they will make him eat crow as they’d succeeded in doing in many a previous encounter with senior officials of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs).

“Based on wrong computing,” Senator Iyore Omisore who presided over the public hearing, said, “you have embarrassed not only the NASS (National Assembly) but also Nigerians. We have given you figures and you are still relying on figures that are not before us. I thank you for coming.” All the other senators at the inquisition spoke in similar vein.

This time, however, they, as I said last week on this page, got more than they bargained for; “By my upbringing,” the governor had insisted, “if I’m wrong, I don’t need to be told to come and say I’m wrong and I would apologize. By my nature, if I am not convinced I’m wrong, I do not apologize and this where the point is.

“I gave a number and I said where this number came from. I did not abuse anyone. I did not attack anyone. I did not say anybody stole money. I was not given a chance to say the context in which I gave the number. Nobody has heard my side of the story on why that number came in; why the 25 per cent came up...

“There’s need to reduce the overheads, to reduce the expenditure, especially in government spending... I did not go there (Igbinideon University where he gave the offending lecture) to talk about the National Assembly. The reference to NASS was just one sentence in a one and a half hour lecture.”

It turned out the senators were wrong and the CBN governor right.

In their misconceived anger against the governor the senators apparently missed the central issue of their encounter. This was that whatever the correct percentage of the overheads they consumed – 25.41% according to the governor or between 1 to3.5% by the senators’ reckoning - it was simply obscene, to put it mildly, that 469 Nigerians (109 senators and 360 members of the lower chamber) should cost the country a whopping 136 billion Naira as overheads – an average of 289 million per legislator - just to do their jobs, especially when they have, to begin with, proved themselves so poor at those jobs all these years.

This figure is even more obscene in a country where the vast majority of its over 155 million citizens live on less than 150 Naira a day and whose GDP is a miserable US $248 billion compared to America’s 14.996 trillion, especially when America’s legislators earn considerably less than ours.

Obviously the legislators see nothing wrong with this obscenity. Otherwise they would not have quibbled over percentages.

However, not only have they quibbled over percentages. Worse, they have tried to justify their cost to the tax payer by accusing the Executive arm of government of worse profligacy and corruption. That is, when they are not out-rightly denying that there is indeed so much profligacy and corruption in the legislature.

Three months ago, Senator Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi, chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance and himself a former banker, attempted to do just that. “The payslip of any other senator after deductions,” he said in an interview in the Daily Sun of September 2, “is a little over N 900,000.00. That is in line with what the RMAFC (the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission, the body constitutionally responsible for fixing the salaries and allowances of certain public offices in the three arms of government) agrees.”

In saying so Makarfi tried to make a distinction between personal emoluments and the running costs of the National Assembly. “If these funds (i.e. the billions the legislators are said to cost the country in overheads alone) are personal emoluments,” he said, “now all the amount of money spent on the President including buying aircraft, even fuelling, including whatever, compute them and say that that is his personal emolument.”  

With due respect to the distinguished senator, this is somewhat disingenuous. Even as emoluments alone, the senator should know that “a little over N900,000.00” a month for a legislative work in a country where government says it cannot afford a minimum monthly wage of N18,000 for workers is simply too much.

Makarfi should also know that Nigerians are no fools; he should know that they are aware that, beginning from late 2003, the legislators have defied the RMAFC and gone ahead to fix higher and higher allowances for themselves each year which today has inflated their take home pay to well over 25 times his figure. After all the legislators are not islands unto themselves. They have friends and relations with whom they discuss goings-on in the National Assembly. And not all of them are happy or comfortable with those goings-on.

There are also staffs in the National Assembly who prepare the vouchers for these payments and often inadvertently or otherwise reveal the figures to friends and relations. Again the banks which receive these payments have staffs that are bound to discuss these figures with friends and relations with or without naming names.

 In any case people can see and feel the enormous differences that the membership of the Assembly has made to the hitherto modest, if not lowly, lifestyle of many a legislator before his membership.

Makarfi is, of course, not the only federal legislator to live in self denial. Speaking to the media at his residence two days after their encounter with Sanusi, the ranking senator, Professor Jibrin Aminu, said he does not earn the tens of millions that have since gripped and angered the popular imagination. “Of course it is false,” he said. “If I earn that much, my house would have looked very different from what you see here. N4 million a month is non-sense. You see I said it before the senate. I will repeat myself here. There is a war against the legislature by some interested people, principally the executive... And they have cornered a lot of sympathisers from the media, political commentators and others to fight us.”

With due respect to the senator, this, again, is being somewhat disingenuous. Surely, the brilliant medical doctor and administrator that he is, he knows the furniture in his house is not necessarily a reflection of his income. Surely, he must’ve heard of Mr. Warren Buffet, once the richest man in the world, who lived out of a caravan.

Both Senators Makarfi and Aminu are, of course, right that it has been unfair to focus on the legislators alone in discussing the cost of our democracy. They are probably also right to insinuate that the Executive arm is probably more profligate and corrupt.

Over eight years ago, Malam Adamu Ciroma, then President Olusegun Obasanjo’s minister of finance, presented a paper at the Peoples Democratic Institute on the cost of government since the return of democracy. Between 1999 and June 2002, he said in the lecture he delivered on August 19, 2002, the country earned about 4.3 trillion Naira.  The Federal Government, he said, spent 92% of its share of this revenue on recurrent expenditure.

“As at 30^th June 2002,” he said, “92% of all Federal Government revenues are devoted to recurrent expenditure. Only 8% is therefore available for capital spending.” Obviously the Executive arm, as the largest of the three arms of government by far, must have been responsible for the largest share of this recurrent spending.

Yet conventional Economics says for any meaningful development to take place in a country the ratio of capital expenditure to recurrent should be at least 70 to 30%. At best capital expenditure in the country since 1999 has never been more than 30%. This year’s budget of 4.6 trillion, for example, has only a capital vote of 30%, according to the Accountant –General of the Federation, Alhaji Ibrahim Dankwabo. According to Dr. Bright Okogu, the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, only about half of this has been implemented even now that the year has almost ended.

The mind can only boggle at this level of profligacy. Worse, the level of corruption is probably even more incredulous. Only recently Mr. Femi Falana, as President of the National Conscience Party, petitioned the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to investigate what he described as the “Grand corruption in the operation of the Federation Account.”

Over the last several years, he alleged, there has been (1), an illegal diversion of 1.8 trillion Naira from NNPC account, (2), an illegal withdrawal of US$ 8.575 billion from the Federation Account and (3), the withholding of trillions of Naira earned from sales of natural gas, signature bonuses and sales of government assets, etc, from the Account.  

As far as I know, Falana has never been given to making wild allegations.

However, whereas Senators Makarfi and Aminu are probably right that on this issue of profligacy and corruption, the legislators are no worse than the other arms, the executive in particular, they can only have themselves to blame for receiving more flak than the other arms.

As legislators they have the sole responsibility to appropriate monies and make sure that they are spent in the best interest of the public. Instead they have left no one in doubt all these many years that they are more interested in themselves than in the welfare of their compatriots.

Only recently, for example, the lower chamber voted without a quorum to impose its members on their various political parties as automatic executive council members in spite of all the public hue and cry that this is undemocratic. Similarly they dubiously voted 6.1 billion Naira to the National Communication Commission for SIM card registration against all opposition based on the fact that this is the responsibility, not of the NCC as the regulator of the communication industry in the country, but of the private communication companies themselves.

The very latest of their unbecoming conduct was the shocking revelation by Next on Sunday, penultimate Sunday, that the Senate President, the Speaker and their respective deputies have received President Goodluck  Jonathan’s nod to buy their official residences; something as unthinkable as the president himself being allowed to buy Aso Villa, or, much further afield, President Barrack Obama being allowed to buy the White House.

In this allegation of patently criminal collusion between the legislature and the executive to sell off government property to the legislative leadership - almost certainly at a give-away price - the president, as the ultimate custodian of public property, may seem the worse culprit, but it is an offer no legislator conscientious of his sacred duty to protect the public from the enormous powers of the executive arm would have contemplated accepting – never mind making a request for it as the newspaper alleged.

The fundamental issue in the face-off between the legislators and the CBN governor is that the cost of the country’s governance is simply unsustainable. For this, the legislature which is solely responsible for appropriations, shares the greater blame even if, as is probably the case, the executive is more profligate and corrupt.

Obviously the anger with which the legislators responded to the CBN governor’s concern about the unsustainable level of government overheads is proof positive that the current crop of our law makers have neither the will nor the capacity to deal with the problem.

It’s not too much to hope that the citizens of this country they have so ill-served will throw the whole lot out in next year’s general elections. 

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