Post 49 - Nigerian Politicians Fleece Their Constituency

 

I don't often publish posts in such quick succession; too busy with other things. But today my heart is bleeding at the way the Nigerian populace is being fleeced, not this time by western governments, banks or corporations, but by their own politicians. The main part of this post is an article in the Nigerian daily Premium Times.

You may be wondering why I publish a post about Nigeria. Well, in case you don't know, I spent most of 30 years in Nigeria and consider it one of my homelands, whose people I love and among whom I still have many friends. I knew how much they were taken for a ride by their politicians then and sought to equip the people within my large orbit to resist it. Alas, it is still going on full force. My heart bleeds for them.  By thus sharing this sad information with my readers, I bring darkness into the light, one of the recognized means of opposing and overcoming it--at least to some degree. 

It is possible that I have some enlightened readers who object to this disclosure, arguing that similar corruption and fleecing occurs in our own Canada or USA. Yes and no. It is there, as the current Duffy scandal is making all too clear. Indeed, but nothing to the degree it is happening in Nigeria. It does considerable damage in our western countries, but it brings Nigeria to near collapse.

Here, then, the article. To understand it you need to know that $1 (US) is worth N220, the "N" standing for "Naira," the Nigerian currency.Thus, if you want the dollar equivalent to the Naira amounts in the article below, divide them by 220.

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         Nigerian Senators, Reps cornered N600bn in 4 years

                             but passed only 106 bills

                       (May 12, 2015Chinenye Ugonna, Richard Akinwumi and Joshua Olufemi)

Nigerian lawmakers managed to approve only 106 new laws out of 1,063 brought before them in the last four years, despite spending more than half a trillion naira within the period, earning the notorious title as the world’s highest paid legislators.

The figures mean for the National Assembly, with a combined annual budget of N150 billion since 2011, returned 10 per cent in efficiency and averaged about two bills each month.

Each year, the Senate, House of Representatives and allied institutions, compete for government funding with projects designed to provide jobs, healthcare, education and roads to the citizens.

While the Goodluck Jonathan administration has shown its preparedness to cut financing to those vital services to Nigerians in the face of dwindling revenues, the government has helped the lawmakers retain their super N150 billion budget per year in the last four years.

Not even the present oil crisis has been enough to force the government to minimize the lawmakers’ comfort, by redirecting funds to critical areas badly starved of resources.

A typical example is the 2015 budget, affected massively by sliding oil price. The dwindling revenue forced the government to slash spending for roads – Ministry of Works – from about N160 billion to N11 billion for the entire nation. But the federal lawmakers refused to allow even a dime to be sliced off their N150 billion annual budget.

While the National Assembly budget also covers legislative aides, the National Assembly Commission and the Legislative Institute in Abuja, the biggest chunk of the appropriation goes to the 109 Senators and 360 members of the House of Representatives, each year.

But while the lawmakers take so much, their work rate has been dismally poor, PREMIUM TIMES analysis shows. The miserable worth of Nigerian legislators’ output is amplified when compared with their American counterparts, for instance.  While the legislature, under the leadership of David Mark and Aminu Tambuwal at the Senate and House of Representatives respectively managed to clear 106 bills in four years, the U.S. Congress passed 29​7​ just between 2013 and 2014. That figure was indeed one of the lowest for any U.S. Congress session as the two chambers passed 604 in just 1999, and 460 between 2007 and 2008.

Yet, the Nigerian lawmakers are the highest paid, according to a 2012 analysis by the UK-based Economist.The report compared lawmakers’ earnings with their countries’ GDP – what each citizen is worth if their nation’s total wealth was shared by the population. The analysis found Nigeria ahead of all other countries of the world, with its lawmakers taking 116 times what an average citizen takes of the GDP. Kenya and Ghana followed with ratios of 75 and 29.8 respectively. Norway’s ratio was 1.8, while U.S. lawmakers took 3.8 of what their citizens received. The United States pays its lawmakers an average annual salary of $174,000 while Britain pays parliamentarians $105,000.

Nigerian lawmakers officially receive a modest pay of about $50,000(about N12m) yearly.
But they also pocket several illegal allowances, including the huge quarterly allowance which is nearly a $1m (N220m) a year.

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My youngest son, a Yale Ph. D,  works for a powerful Nigerian foundation in Lagos that is seeking to improve the business climate in Africa. He is rightfully annoyed with the attention paid to corruption in Nigeria. There is a more important story developing in the country, he argues, namely the boom in the Lagos economy with its spin off in the rest of the nation. I am grateful for that story and pray that it will soon outshine the negative story of national fleecing.

This paragraph is being written several weeks later--on July 11, 2015. The news yesterday was that both the new President of Nigeria, General Buhari, a pious Muslim, and his Vice President, a Pentecostal pastor, have offered to reduce their salaries by 50%.