Tunde Fagbenle
A referendum on the form and nature of the National Assembly is imperative and urgent if we are to be taken seriously as a country truly ready for CHANGE. And I am ready to join hands with other well-meaning patriots to campaign for such a plebiscite in order to force the constitutional change needed on this needlessly large assembly that constitutes a monstrous drain on the economy.
As it stands presently, there are two chambers in the “house of horrors”; the lower is the House of Representatives, the upper is the Senate. Between them we have 469 (360 Reps. and 109 Senators) or so, men and women of different shades and hues, some bright as day, some others dull as a moonless night. But they are elected to represent us from their various constituencies.
Drunk by our oil into believing we are as good as America, we have modelled our Constitution (and so the Legislature) after the US, forgetting the historical process and the hundreds of years it has taken America to get to its present stage, and forgetting, more importantly, that all of our oil money is literally “chicken feed” to any state in America, nay, even to some corporations! But we are Nigeria, why should we crawl if we can run?
It is no longer news that Nigerian lawmakers at both chambers are the highest paid legislators in the world, a situation the renowned law scholar, Professor Itse Sagay, once described as a cruel anomaly and a breach of trust. Even more angered by the anomaly was the then CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (now HRH, Emir of Kano), who decried the disproportionate amount of money gulped by the National Assembly vis-à-vis the federal budget, which in percentage terms have variously been put between 17 per cent and 25 per cent! That’s insane.
Professor Sagay put the average salary and allowances per annum of a senator at N240m and about N204m for the House of Reps. counterpart. Not bad for a day’s job if one considers that the last Senate spent a whole year bickering and squabbling, enjoying the humongous perks doing next to nothing about mounting bills that are their primary function to formulate and pass into law, only for them to do it all as “a day’s job” with the scandalous passing into law 46 bills in less than 10 minutes! Unbelievable? Well, it did happen on Wednesday, 2 June 2015 under Mr. David Mark as Senate President.
So, perhaps, that’s all there is to it, a day’s job. But we must not let that cruel aberration lead us into thinking we have no use for the National Assembly or a legislative body, far from it. They are an important, vastly important, leg of the governance tripod in a democracy. They are to make the law by which we are to be governed, and more importantly, they serve as the crucial check and oversight to what could easily become banditry of the executive.
But the question is, at our stage of democratic governance and economic development what form and structure must this vital arm of democracy take? What makes the most sense for us at this point? Must we end up hanging by the balls on the democracy tree (excuse the pun) while trying to ape America’s monkey? Yet, if we must know, even in America today only nine out of 50 states have a full-time state legislature.
So, why on earth, other than being unthinking, do all our 36 states have full-time state legislators gulping a big chunk of the state’s meagre revenue? What are they legislating all year-round?
And at the US Federal level (called Congress), America’s “Founding Fathers envisioned that being a member of Congress would be a part-time job. Pennsylvania’s state constitution even had a provision calling for members of the Legislature to ‘have some profession, calling, trade, or farm, whereby he may honestly subsist,’” according to thehill.com. And “for almost 200 years, being in Congress meant holding down another job.”
I believe the time has come when well-meaning Nigerians must come together to reinvent the country. And the place to start is reforming and reformulating the Legislature. For sure, it won’t happen if we leave it to the National Assembly. They are full-time and, for many, their livelihoods depend on it. We cannot expect them to vote themselves out of job and be the first to make that giant sacrifice needed if Nigeria were to survive. Necessarily, we Nigerians, as President Buhari has extolled, must ourselves make the move to save the country from this slope to ruin.
Doubtlessly, the other arms of government, the Executive and the Judiciary would equally and urgently need complete overhaul and drastic restructuring. For now, President Buhari appears prepared to take the bull by the horns and trim down the Executive overweight of the past.
But the president cannot do it all alone. A referendum is necessary to force the hand of the present National Assembly to changing the Constitution to make membership of the Legislature part-time, and with it the cascading of a whole lot of money-guzzling structures. The noise around reduction in salaries and allowances is meaningless and a red herring meant to assuage our badly offended sensibilities.
And that’s saying it the way it is!
President Buhari and our looted patrimony
There’s a Yoruba saying, yiyoekun, t’ojoko, meaning, the stealth of a leopard is not of cowardice. President Buhari just because he has chosen not to play to the gallery by pandering to Nigerians’ desire for a quick-fixer, a Rambo that would as soon as elected start shooting wildly at anything on sight, began to get called Baba Go-slow.
Two things. One, Nigerians old enough remember General Buhari’s first coming as a military head of state, and how immediately on grabbing power he and his partner-in-arms, General Tunde Idiagbon, started hounding all politicians and some businessmen into detention and sentencing many to jail terms of many life times. They expect an encore. But Buhari also remembers that and what befell him. Two, Nigerians hurt badly. Stories of looted monies in astronomical proportions stink to high heavens. They hear of billions of naira and sometimes even of dollars, and their minds boggle. Yet they are hungry and see the looters parading themselves as the wise ones, Lords for whom there is no tomorrow, their private jets mere toys of competition in “my jet is bigger than yours” game.
But some of us knew that the leopard’s stealth is not of cowardice but of cunning to ensnare the game. Now the president has blown the whistle, just when he got the assurance of America’s support in hunting down the looters and their loot.
According to President Buhari, it’s a whole 150 billion dollars of it. Doubting Thomas may say that figure is impossible. Well, wasn’t that how it was said that General Abacha couldn’t have looted $5b or more until the monies came tumbling down in tranches?
$150b? What could that do? For a start, coming to N34.5 trillion, it is more than the Federal budget in any one year almost ten times over! With such sums, we would by now have railway networks with modern gauge running the length and breadth of Nigeria; our intractable energy problem would be consigned to the past thus enabling the upsurge and survival of industries; our schools, colleges and hospitals would be equipped and raised to world standards. But some bast..ds wouldn’t let it be.
The good thing is that the sort of money we are talking about cannot be hidden under a bushel; it can’t be quickly withdrawn in cash and flown into thin air. The mere process of withdrawing just $50m of it at a go will cause a ripple if not uproar in the banks they are held.
“The fact that I now seek Obama’s assistance in locating and returning $150 billion in funds stolen in the past decade and held in foreign bank accounts on behalf of former, corrupt officials is testament to how badly Nigeria has been run,” says President Buhari. And he has enumerated the stages of his approach: “First, instil rules and good governance; second, install officials who are experienced and capable of managing state agencies and ministries; and third, seek to recover funds stolen under previous regimes so that this money can be invested in Nigeria for the benefit of all our citizens.”
For this, the President seeks our understanding and patience. I give him mine! And that’s saying it the way it is.
Ref: http://www.punchng.com/columnists/tunde-fagbenle-saying-it-the-way-it-is/time-for-referendum-on-nass/
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