El-Rufai calls out NASS

THE maverick in Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State re-emerged last week when he noted with a straight face that National Assembly (NASS) members are not committed to the anti-corruption efforts of the Buhari administration. He was lending an important voice to what Nigerians already knew. “The National Assembly is seen as an opposition to the fight against corruption…particularly the Senate is seen as one of the fighters against the war against corruption.” The maxim is of course that when you fight corruption, corruption fights back, and the Senate today symbolizes the corruption incubus.
Mr. El-Rufai did not seem to be on fishing expedition. I think he was offering his party colleagues in the National Assembly brotherly advice. “I can be blunt, and that image (that the Senate personifies corruption fighting back) has to be worked on, now that we are going towards election year, the leadership and members have to do something about the narratives.”
“I don’t believe that it (the narrative) is entirely true, I also don’t believe it is entirely false, but it is important that the National Assembly do something about its image. (Again) no transparency in your (NASS) budget, nobody knows your budget, how much you get paid. Publications are made about your salaries and allowances that I don’t believe are true, but they cannot be defended because there is no transparency about your budget, personnel cost.”
A less arrogant body, knowing the governor was correct in his assessment, would have found a humorous way to parry the jibe. But this is the almighty National Assembly (“We are democracy, without us there is no democracy.”) Senate Leader Ahmed Lawan replied caustically that “in the National Assembly we fight corruption through our support and as a matter of fact, the anti-corruption agencies are our creation and for our budget it is always in the public domain.” That sentence is typical Senate-speak, and it contains at least three untruths.
Not to be outdone, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dr. Yakubu Dogara, promptly piped in, “…so I will like to challenge you (Gov. El-Rufai) to champion the call for transparency in budgeting and budgetary process of NASS to other arms of government. We want to see clearly how chief executives of states are paid, what they spend monthly as security votes, and also publish what happens to local government funds.”
Speech being a verbalization of thought, Speaker Dogara’s view revealed that, just as he told Nigerians last year that budget padding was normal, he did not see anything wrong in the fact that in 17 years of democracy, Nigerians, even state governors, have no idea what the budget of the National Assembly looks like. By his reasoning, therefore, before the National Assembly would let Nigerians know its budget, the state governors must show how much the governors are paid, how much the governors spend on security votes, and the publication of their local government expenditures. Again, NASS has kept its expenses and running costs as deep secrets apparently until state governments begin to show how the funds allocated to local governments are spent. I have heard other NASS members argue that they had to award themselves stupendous salaries and allowances because they don’t have governor’s mansions and the equivalent of state houses and other concomitants that come with the office of governor.
I wager that when Dr. Dogara threw down the gauntlet, he did not expect the governor to pick it up. Fortunately, the governor did, from which Nigeria was able to see that the governor’s gross pay in February 2017 was N555,926.25 made up of N185,308.75 basic salary and N370,617.50 hardship allowance, less Pay As You Earn Tax of N85,401.51which leaves him with a take-home pay of N470,521.74. He went further to detail the contentious security vote revealing N4.5 billion and how it is going to be spent in the year.
Stunned, Speaker Dogara for the first time released publicly his pay slips. A breakdown showed he earned N205,425.83 as basic salary; N175,461.96 is for Constituency allowance; N20,642.68 is for recess allowance less N55,952.50 Pay As You Earn (PAYE) tax leaving him a take-home of N346,577.87. Many considered it a shame that it took the El-Rufai challenge for a Speaker of the House to release his pay slip for the Nigerian public to see in 17 years of democracy.
Doubts as to the authenticity of Dogara’s released pay slips were raised immediately in the public mind and by the former House Appropriation Committee Chairman Abdulmumin Jibrin who noted that the figure was understated. For one reason, the Speaker is expected to earn more than Jibrin. The Dogara slips captured only two of the 17 allowances which the NASS members have claimed through the years.
The average Nigerian has known for years that the average pay of a Nigerian senator hovers around N29 million a month. These figures have been in the public domain since the Economist and others published studies and comparative figures of other countries, information which placed the National Assembly as the highest earning legislature in the world.
These facts were never controverted and the fiendish secrecy surrounding these figures was cult-like. As Daily Trust once lamented in frustration, “NASS keeps details about members’ pay packages sworn secret and refuses to provide information, even requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It is understood that a method of concealing the salaries of public officers is to quote low figures for salaries while granting lavish allowances.”
Jibrin also noted that if budget disclosure finally commences in 2017, as the Speaker is promising, then, “Nigerians will never see details of how a trillion was spent in the last 10 years.”
Typical of the National Assembly when it is caught out, it unleashed a furious attack on Gov. El-Rufai, as it had unleashed on ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo and others who had dared voice disapproval of the corruption and secrecy surrounding the affairs of the National Assembly. The spokesman of the House, Abdulrazaq Namdas, branded the governor as mischievous, the governor’s statement, he said, was “patently misleading and a terrible display of ignorance and falsehood or a deliberate attempt to blackmail the parliament.” Namdas thus resorted to the time-tested strategy which the NASS has used times without number to cover up its corruption and scandals by alleging that parliament is under attack. Yet all that Gov. Rufai did was point out the hypocrisy of the leadership of NASS, and the now open opposition of the National Assembly to the war on corruption, and the outrageous total absence of transparency in the conduct of the business of Nigeria in its parliament.
Everyday Nigerians are reminded by NASS of Hon. Abdulmumin Jibrin’s assertion that “there is corruption in the House of Representatives, and not only is there corruption, there is institutional corruption.” There is no known formula to save an institutionally corrupt organization. President Buhari could fight corruption all he wants, but unless the National Assembly is cleansed, corruption in Nigeria would remain self-perpetuating like cancer and will continue to spread until the host succumbs.