The shame and the bane of our democracy is the level of corruption and compromise perpetrated in the National Assembly. A situation where a lawmaker earns about 8 times more than the president of the United States in an economy that is near comatose is simply sad and indeed shameful.

And the revenue commission refusing to disclose exactly how much the lawmaker earn or what is approved by law to enable interested parties to compute the lawmakers’ illegal collections is also a clear attempt to cover up the wrong and crime against the Nigerian nation and people. Ordinarily, the commission should be the one demanding remedy. But here, we are with a commission that is withholding information from the people that have come to its rescue.

It is aberrational in fact!  It is one of the many contradictions you find in our polity where people saddled with statutory responsibilities simply occupy them for personal or sectional gains. For withholding this vital information, the commission makes itself an accessory after the fact of this crime. What the lawmakers earn does not qualify as an official secret and the commission will be subpoenaed by the court through the TNM to disclose it, you can be sure.

On constituency projects, the fact remains that the lawmakers have no right to dabble into constituency projects. It is clearly an executive function simply conceived by the lawmakers to fatten their purses. Legislative functions as assigned by the constitution do not go beyond representation (legislation), appropriation and over-sighting the executive. With regards to the last constitutional assignment, it does not require an expert to come up with the fact that a compromised legislature, for losing its moral high-ground, cannot oversight the executive. Our legislative arm is clearly compromised with their meddling in executive functions, thereby making itself an extension of the executive and rendering the arm worse than a paper tiger with rubber teeth.

Their argument that their constituents expect them to bring home projects is irretrievably flawed because they can attract projects to their constituencies without being directly involved in their execution and diversion of funds meant for such projects as is the case today. In all decent and progressing democracies, the legislators lobby the executive for their constituencies during budgeting but do turn contractors in doing this, as in our case. Our legislators spend more time in the ministries and govern agencies pressing for contracts, more than they do in lawmaking. How many of them attend sittings?

It makes nonsense of the arm and that is also why TNM wants to rescue the legislature from itself.  If they believe TNM is wrong in this position they should agree to an audit of such projects and let Nigerians see how they have been shortchanged by the same people they elected to protect them from executive tyranny. The legislature has turned itself into an enemy of the people and an anathema. It has become so bad now that they have no friends amongst Nigerians.

It has been said the NLC hasn’t done much to check these excesses and absurdities. Well… in the first place it is the absence of opposition party that has made people to look in the direction of the NLC and even the students unions and so on for opposition. It is such a huge shame. NLC hasn’t done much but then, are they to blame? Is checking fraud a direct responsibility of the NLC?

It is not! Bad government and fraud can be combated not by labour alone but by all good people in the country, led by opposition party. That is what you call party democracy. But that is not what we have. Just one party – PDP! The rest have simply refused to play their opposition role.  You can see the mass movement to the PDP which reflects the lack of desire to have and play opposition.

Where does this leave the country? In one party state and the result is what you now see in NASS, where both opposition and the ruling party sit down and share and loot the national treasury – funds meant for projects and development and common good. The legislature must not be allowed to continue this way.

A senator cannot be allowed to walk home with nearly 2 billion naira every year, aside the huge contracts allocated to them by the ministries and agencies they oversight, which is another  aspect of the corrupt practices in the polity that have rendered our democracy a mockery and a sham because no legislature, no democracy.  

·       Law Mefor is the Country (Nigeria) Coordinator, Transform Nigeria Movement (TNM) and Director Center for Leadership and Social Research (CELSOR), Abuja. Tel.:234(0)803-787-2893; email: lawmefor@yahoo.com

And this is what Daniel Elombah told Vanguard:

Question: There is a huge public outcry against the alleged jumbo pay by Nigerian legislators and your group has been in the forefront of this. What makes you think that your petition to the EFCC would change the status quo?

Answer:
Our petition to the EFCC is meant to put pressure on the authorities to investigate the jumbo allowances.
Section 70, 84, 111 and provisions of the third schedule of the Constitution gave the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, the powers to prescribe salaries for political office holders so that everybody who comes under that purview has his or her salaries and entitlements provided for under the Act. Anything outside the Act is illegal and is not the law.
I.e., Salaries of political office-holders are prescribed by law and anything above what is prescribed is illegal.
Therefore we are asking the EFCC TO:
1. Confirm the actual and total payments made to each member of the National Assembly in salaries and allowances annually;
2. Confirm whether it is legal for any chamber to collapse its recurrent and capital votes into one and share among members; would such a practice not amount to fraud and a breach of financial regulations in the public sector?
4. Ensure that the Lawmakers refund what has been illegitimately collected;
5. Ascertain whether any extant laws have been violated, by whom and punish the culprits accordingly;
6. Confirm under what extant laws the members of the National Assembly are appropriating Constituency Projects and directly collecting funds and whether they actually execute such Constituency projects.
7. Confirm that an Audit Report on the Constituency Projects claimed to be executed by members of the National Assembly for which they collect huge sums of money exist; If not, why should such an audit not be done?
8. Prosecute anybody found wanting in your investigation and ensure that the money dubiously collected and/or misappropriated is safely returned to the government treasury for the beneficial use of all Nigerians.

Question:
Some have argued that the Nigerian politician is the highest paid in the world, don’t you think that the explanation of the Revenue mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission REMAFC, that the prevailing economic situation in Nigeria is responsible for the alleged jumbo pay, may be right?

Answer:
I would be very surprised to hear the RMAC justify having our lawmakers as the highest paid political office holders in the world.
I think this is a matter that should be challenged in the courts on 2 grounds:
1. The legislators are paying themselves monies in excess of what is approved by RMAFC, the body constitutionally authorized to fix the pay of political appointees.
2. Even if this high pay is approved by the RMAFC; it can be challenged on natural justice ground. A legislator cannot effectively represent any group of people if the pay of that legislator has no bearing with the earning capacity of the group he claims to represent.
How can you effectively represent me if I am earning 25, 000 monthly while you as my representative earns 5 million Naira monthly?

Question:
What do you make of the open condemnation by former President Olusegun Obasanjo on the legislators salary which he puts at about 250 million per annum?

Answer:
I thank former President, Olusegun Obasanjo for giving voice to the general feeling of Nigerians on the corruption and outright robbery going on in the National Assembly.
While it sounds very ill on the mouth of the Chief Obasanjo to accuse his fellow lootocrats of corruption, in this instance however, I implore Nigerians to look at the message and not the messenger.

Question:
Do you think the EFCC is the appropriate channel to present your grievances on the issue?

Answer:
Yes because if you carefully read our petition, we said it boldly that the allegations are complaints of commission of financial crimes of which the EFCC is statutorily empowered to investigate and prosecute under the provisions of the EFCC Act, 2006.
Moreover subject matter of the allegation we seek EFCC investigation into is borne out the dreaded menace of corruption having regards to the provisions of our 1999 Constitution, particularly Section 15(5) which states thus;
“The State shall abolish all corrupt practices and abuse of power.”
Moreover the Petition could be looked at upon the consideration of a previous decision of the Supreme Court in FAWEHINMI –V- AKILU (1987) 4 NWLR PART 67 @ 797 @ 832 which held:
“The peace of the society is the responsibility of all persons in the country and as far as protection against crime is concerned; every person in the society is each other’s keeper.”
So we are asking the EFCC Chair to use her good offices to cause the investigation

Question:
What do you think is responsible for the lucrative nature of political office, unlike in other countries where politics is seen as a call to accountable service?

Answer:
There is one lecture delivered by the former CBN Governor, Prof Charles Soludo here in London where he argued that the post-colonial oil boom, and the rentier, distributional politics that developed around it, have emasculated the potentials for Nigeria’s economic greatness.
So with the unprecedented oil boom a culture of entitlement around the oil rents emerged, and much of the politics is woven around the struggle for the ‘sharing’ of such rents.
So you see in Nigeria’s rentier state, people have seen that the quickest means to instant wealth is not through owning large farm estates or taking risks in manufacturing or other rigorous, risky investments, rather It pays more to invest in politics.
The emergence of oil as the dominant revenue source in Nigeria, together with the institutional arrangement for sharing the rents, has concentrated almost all wealth in the hands of the government.
And according to Soludo, this concentration of power and money in the hands of the government to the exclusion of all other productive sectors of the economy has created a large army of highly talented, skilled but unemployed ‘big men’.
Such ‘big men’ depend on outright handouts from governments/public officials to pay their bills and they have captures the instruments of power.
So why waste your time in other businesses if you can swim in the murky waters of Nigeria politics?