By
Tunde Abatan
It was the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who described Nigeria as a reactive country made up of reactive citizens.
For him, Nigeria has the natural penchant for crying when the head has been cut off instead of asking why and how the head was cut off and taking steps to stop such an evil.
But as a people, who deal with symptoms, we keep on moving in cycles and never bother to go to fundamentals to solve our multifarious problems but only enjoying noise-making after the horse has bolted from the stable.
Ordinarily, the National Assembly (NASS) that yours truly got to know in the Second Republic and to some extent the aborted Third Republic, never spoke or debated about finances beyond mere approvals of annual budgets presented by the President as a ritual.
And the annual ritual does not go beyond scrutinizing the contents of the Appropriation Bill for fairness to all constituents and judicious allocation of resources to good ends for the benefit of the people they represent.
Today,we cry foul of the ‘peculiar mess’ going on in our hallowed chamberS when Senator Abdul Ningi from Bauchi State cried foul over budgetary matters, accusing his colleagues of padding the 2024 Appropriation Bill with N3.2 trillion, making a princely N28 trillion as proposed and subsequently apProved by the troubled House.
From all indications, the ‘mess’ of our latest budget padding wouldn’t have seen the light of the day had Ningi not been suspended last week by the committee of the whole house for what Senator Olamilekan Solomon Adeola and his Appropriation Committee members described as subjecting the house to ridicule and public opprobrium with his accusation of the leadership of the National Assembly made up of an All Progressives Congress, APC, majority.
To the enraged senators, Ningi not only broke the rules of internal engagement but also falsely accused the Senate of falsifying the budget to meet members’ personal needs.
However, had Ningi been able to give a breakdown of the sectoral allocations from where the padded N3 trillion emanated, maybe Adeola’s defence would have been properly punctured.
But with his three months’ suspension from the Senate robbing him in the process of leading the Northern Senate Caucus, Ningi was only provided the ammunition to bare it all.
By mentioning that some senators actually passed the budget to cater for their constituency projects, with some getting as much as N500 million and others N300 million, for projects most of which were never executed in most cases, the nation now has the privilege of knowing the selfish motives of senators, which in a way cuts across party divide.
What Ningi’s suspension has revealed is that perhaps for the allegation of unfairness in the distribution and sharing of the ‘national cake’ as represented in the of constituency projects, the citizens wouldn’t have known that Appropriation Bills have since the beginning of Fourth Republic never passed through screening without being padded.
This is done to cater for fake and dubious constituency projects, which by themselves are a duplication of Executive functions.
The furore at the NASS, coming barely three weeks after Honourable Abdulsamaad Dasuki and his group of 60 in the House of Representatives came up with the Bill to return the nation to Parliamentary democracy, is quite interesting and instructive.
The nation, with the ongoing scenarios may just have discovered some unexplained reasons and facts behind Dasuki’s group’s effort to adopt Parliamentary Democracy.
The expensive nature of the Presidential System of government was cited as one of the reasons.
Dasuki and his patriotic group as members of the lower legislative chamber must have seen the rot thrown up by the elite sharing arrangement among and between the senators, whereby they corner sizeable portions of our national resources into their pockets through dubious constituency projects allocations.
This is in spite of the humongous salary, allowances and other out-of-the-world pecks fixed for themselves to manage their expensive lifestyle. Their lifestyle itself is apparently out of tune with the living conditions of those who elected them into power.
In other words, Ningi’s revelation of padding, which the Appropriation Committee members are still struggling to explain and justify, is an indication that Dasuki and his team are embarking on an uphill task already dead on arrival.
Except we have a national upheaval and understanding, similar to what occured in Senegal some years ago where they scrapped the Bicameral Legislature and replaced it with the Unicameral one to save costs, Dasuki and his men might just have lost the battle before the race started.
The revelation by Ningi, though coming from the opposition, is also an indication that there is no difference between the legislators in all political parties, except the quest for money and power.
It is apparent that among and between all Senators and Reps members in the National Assembly, when issues of money and materialism are concerned, there is unity of purpose on that.
It is also necessary for us to be reminded of the ‘Ghana Must Go’ episode in the NASS during the aborted Third-Term project.
Ironically, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was also alleged to have distributed money in ‘Ghana Must Go’ bags to the defiant legislators to facilitate the amendment of the Constitution to pave way for his Third-Term project, also, recently described the NASS as a cesspit of corruption.
Though he never confessed his own arm-twisting of the NASS during the episode mentioned above, his recent comment is one of the proofs that introduction of constituency projects remains the ‘poison chalice’ that distorted the job of our NASS members.
For it, they abdicated their primary role of making laws for good governance, but prefer to extend their brief by showing interest in who got which contract in the ministries and patastatals.
Until we all collectively remove or redefine the financial oversights, which have become the ‘feeding bottle’ of our legislators both in the state assemblies and National Assembly, we have a long way to go in waging any war against corruption.
This is because the lawmakers have joined the recalcitrant law breakers feeding fat on the nation’s resources to the detriment of its citizens.
Time to checkmate the NASS is now. Tomorrow may be too late.
