By Paul Onomuakpokpo
What the citizens
would be confronted with at the end of the squabble between Kaduna State
Governor Nasir El-Rufai and the Speaker of the House Assembly Yakubu Dogara is
not a resolution of the crisis that redounds to the transparency of their
financial dealings. For the more either of the parties strives to portray
himself as the poster boy for fiscal prudence, the darker the opacity that
surrounds their remuneration becomes.
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| *House Speaker, Yakubu Dogara and Gov Nasir e-Rufai of Kaduna |
Clearly, we cannot indict these officials for
financial impropriety. That is a job for the anti-graft agencies and the
courts. However, they represent the political class who has been identified
with profligacy. In that case, it may be difficult for them to extricate
themselves from the cesspool of corruption that has engulfed the entire
political class from the heady days of the oil boom when our leaders did not
know what to do with money, through the military era and the current democratic
dispensation. For if there had been transparency in the financial dealings of
our public officers, this spat would not have arisen. It is because of the lack
of transparency that there have been speculations about the humongous salaries
of our political office holders. Obviously, the National Assembly and other
arms of the government have been so secretive about their remuneration because
it is in stark contrast to the nation’s economic crisis that has impoverished
the majority of the citizens.
If the lawmakers were keen on bequeathing a legacy of transparency in their
financial dealings, they would not have needed an El-Rufai to prod them onto
this path. In the past two years since this democratic dispensation, there have
been recurrent calls for the National Assembly to make public their
remuneration. Their failure to heed these calls has led to a situation where
the citizens have come out with a comparison of the remuneration of lawmakers
here and that of their counterparts in other parts of the world. The citizens
are shocked that lawmakers here are the highest paid in the world. This is
despite that they are not as committed to their duties as their counterparts
and the fact that in such other nations, their economies are more developed
than ours and thus they have more money to pay their lawmakers higher salaries.
