By Taiwo Adisa
Sometime in 2004, the then Senate President Adolphus Wabara left his office one morning and headed towards the lift that would take him to the office of the Clerk to the National Assembly in the White House section of the National Assembly complex. As the lift was about to close, he suddenly asked the operator to stop. He alighted and stood by the lift entrance while the operator held the lift, awaiting his re-entry. In less than a minute, one of his colleague senators sauntered into sight and it was obvious to the aides of the senate president that he stopped to greet the senator colleague.
Later in the day when I asked Senator Wabara why he had to stop the lift when the senator he wanted to greet had no idea of his presence in the lift, the former Senate President laughed. He said, ‘Taiwo, not greeting a senator could amount to gross misconduct these days’.
His conduct that day could be understandable, though. He had just escaped a grueling battle where some senators tagged “Villa Loyalists” had conjured some acts of “gross misconducts” in a plot to unseat him. The senators were said to have received the nod of then-President Olusegun Obasanjo to “shake the Senate President small.” As we learnt, the plot was originally meant to test Wabara’s loyalty to the system and it started like a huge joke.
The group, led by the maverick Senator Arthur Nzeribe, conjured a series of offences ranging from high-handedness, to failure to carry the senators along and sundry offences. The allegations were swiftly marketed in the media and in a matter of days, it had spread like wildfire in the harmattan. Wabara had initially taken the agitation with levity, thinking that those who lit the fire would eventually quench it. But when the signature drive appeared to be capturing more senators than expected, a frantic move was flagged off by the then-senate president. President Obasanjo was on a multi-country tour that was still expected to take him from France to South Africa. The pressure mounted by the Wabara camp and other stakeholders forced Obasanjo to make a stopover at the Abuja airport, en route to South Africa. He had asked all parties to the crisis to gather at the presidential wing of the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport before his arrival.
After listening to the two sides, Obasanjo was said to have told the plotters, “I tell una say make una shake am small, e don do. Una don shake am. The president asked the combatants to lay down their arms.
Even though the commotion in the Senate that year could be partly attributed to the machinations from the Villa, a key issue beneath the spread of the 2004 insurgency and many such uprisings in the National Assembly was due to what many senators had tagged the “tyranny of the presiding officers.” Whereas the presiding officers were supposed to be first among equals, the operation of the Pool Account made them lords over their peers.
That account warehoused the funds meant as the running cost of all the lawmakers. Each Senator or Rep member was expected to apply to the Presiding officer for his or her portion of the account at the point of need. Then, you would see senators or Rep members tuck in files inside their flowing agbada and suddenly pull out the same once they get the attention of the Senate President or the Speaker.
The lawmakers believed that such a process subjected them to the whims and caprices of the presiding officers and that discretion was also coming into play in the approval process. They also believed that the practice made the presiding officer too powerful and that it defeated the idea of the presiding officers as only first among equals. So the lawmakers regularly agitated for the dismantling of the Pool Account and after every agitation, the presiding officer was forced to slice off a bit of the giant pool. When Senator Ken Nnamani took over from Wabara in 2005, he nearly dismantled the Pool but the process was completed by Senator David Mark, in 2007. Mark was said to have vowed not to manage the funds on behalf of any senator and in the process, he succeeded in removing the proverbial banana peel.
What happened, thereafter, was that the National Assembly adopted the Self Accounting Procedure, which means that the funds that should be domiciled in the Pool Account are distributed to all the 109 senatorial districts and 360 federal constituencies every month. The presiding and principal officers get some variations in percentages. Initially, it was received quarterly but negotiations with the federal authorities ensured the funds were calibrated monthly to pull the payment in line with the natural flow of government resources. The figures thereby jumped from about N3.5 million per month to N10 million, N13 million, and now N21 million as claimed by Senator Kawu.
So last week, as the controversy raged over the exact pay package of the national lawmakers, it wasn’t strange to close watchers of the nation’s parliament. The controversy has always been there, leading at one point to the celebrated claim that Nigerian lawmakers are the highest paid in the world.
Penultimate week, former President Olusegun Obasanjo threw the matter back into the front burner when he accused the lawmakers of not only fixing their salaries and allowances, and that each Senator earns a sum of N200 million. The National Assembly will never allow that kind of claim to go unanswered, though. So the Senate and the House of Representatives fired back at Obasanjo, as they equally accused him of deliberately tarring their white apparel with black brush.
The Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission(RMAFC) appeared to have settled the matter when its Chairman, Muhammed Bello, told the nation that each Senator collects a monthly salary and allowances in the sum of N1,063,860:00. Kano South Senator, Sumaila Kawu, however, in an interview with BBC Hausa Service claimed that his take home was in the region of N21 million monthly. He affirmed that while salaries and allowances remained at about N1 million per month as stated by RMAFC, and could drop to a little over N600,000 after deductions, his total package in a month was in the region of N21 million. His submission was supported by Human Rights Activist and former Kaduna Central Senator, Shehu Sani, who reaffirmed his earlier claim that his salary was N750,000 monthly but he was receiving N13.5 million monthly as running cost while in the 8th Senate.
Though Senate spokesman, Yemi Adaramodu, had denied Kawu’s claims that senators were receiving N21 million as allowances monthly, he submitted that what was being received by the lawmakers was also applicable to officials in the other arms of government. He also said that the running cost allocated to the lawmakers was different from their salaries and allowances, as according to him, while no one retires salaries, the running cost is meant to be retired with appropriate receipts every year.
I believe that the distinguished Senator needed to explain further that the Self Accounting Procedure(SAP) adopted by the lawmakers is what guarantees the payment of the running cost to their accounts. He needed to state further that under that procedure, the lawmakers don’t need not apply for any funds for local and foreign travels, local and foreign medical allowances, entertainment in his office in Abuja and the constituency, constituency tours, and outreach and purchase of computer wares for use in Abuja and the constituency offices and the like. He needed to tell all that it is a homegrown model by our assembly. He probably needs to also let us into how commensurate the figures quoted by Kawu are to what is applicable in the presidency and the judiciary setup as well as what applies to the CBN Governor, GMD of NNPCL, Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Executive Secretaries, Directors-General and the Head of Service and such other offices being maintained with public money, such that we will be in the know of what truly constitutes the cost of governance.
