Showing posts with label Prof. Attahiru Jega. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prof. Attahiru Jega. Show all posts

Friday, June 1, 2018

Nigeria: Of Lawmakers And Bribe-Takers

By Olusegun Adeniyi 
From the judgement of a Federal High Court sitting in Lagos which orders President Muhammadu Buhari to “urgently instruct security and anti-corruption agencies to forward to him reports of their investigations into allegations of padding and stealing of some N481 billion from the 2016 budget by some principal officers of the National Assembly” to damaging allegations by both former Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and former Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, the spotlight is now on our federal lawmakers who are being perceived as no more than cheap bribe-takers. 
*Senate President Saraki and House Speaker Dogara
The situation is not helped by the widespread knowledge that the National Assembly has become the watering hole of high-maintenance ex-governors, semi-literate political contractors, wanted international criminal suspects and some yesterday’s men who are now in desperate need of economic empowerment. Yet, in a situation where lawmakers behave like gangsters, the various executive bodies like ministries and agencies will begin to see their assignments in transactional terms as oversight becomes a ritual of appeasement of the greed of committee members and the budgeting process, which ordinarily should be a serious assignment, degenerates into an annual bazaar.