On Bola Tinubu's Chatham House Visit

 By Wole Olubanji

I find it funny that political leaders in Nigeria are more inclined to speak to foreign entities about their country than they are with their people. I am not saying there is anything wrong with openness to cross-national ideas, but there is a problem with suggesting the unworthiness of the press or people of one's country. 

It became a tradition with Buhari that some of us started awaiting the next presidential trip abroad to know the take of the President on policies and national issues. Is it the case that these people think us unworthy of their perspectives on the job they were hired by us to do? 

Magu's Rejection: I Stand With The Senate (II)

By Ochereome Nnanna

Having examined the retired Colonel Hameed Ali versus the Senate saga, let us take a look on another contentious issue: the Ibrahim Magu screening controversy.

President Buhari and Sen Pres Saraki 

So many people have said their minds on this matter, which is their constitutional right. There are those who blame the Senate for the long-drawn impasse and difficulty in getting Ibrahim Mustapha Magu confirmed as the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC. Some have alleged that in rejecting Magu’s candidacy, the Senate constitutes itself into a “parallel government”. Others say they want to “collect the power” from President Muhammadu Buhari and frustrate him from implementing the “change” he promised Nigerians.

The one I found most interesting was the submission of Chief Robert Clark, a respected lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, with usually sound perspectives on legal and current affairs. He appeared on Channels TV and was all over the place, lamenting that the Senate’s treatment of Magu was “a slap on the face of the President; a slap on the faces of Nigerians”.

The impression being given by all these shades of opinion is that the Presidency has played its own part neatly only to be messed up by the Senate. Another impression is that the Federal Government is all about President Muhammadu Buhari, the Presidency he commands and the Cabinet he has at his disposal. In other words, the Executive Branch alone is the Government. On both counts I beg to disagree. First of all, let us track the facts of this story.

Following the sack of Ibrahim Lamorde as the EFCC Chairman, Magu, another police officer, was nominated as his successor in acting capacity. One would have expected that President Buhari, cognisant of the sensitive nature of the EFCC Chairman’s duties, would immediately send Magu’s name to Senate for confirmation. Instead, Buhari delayed this issue between 9th November 2015 and 14th July 2016, when his Deputy, Professor Yemi Osinbajo as Acting President, submitted Magu’s name to the Senate for confirmation when the President was away on his foreign medicals.

Buhari, Stop This Charade Of War Against Corruption, Please!

By Okey Ndibe

President Muhammadu Buhari should admit, today, not tomorrow, that his so-called war against corruption is unserious, tiresome, illegitimate, hypocritical, and a waste of Nigerians’ time. Right away, he ought to end the charade that claims to be a war. And then he should seek the best help he can find to focus on Nigeria’s grave economic and political crises.

*Buhari 

Last week, the Nigerian Senate, citing the damning content of a security report, declined to confirm Ibrahim Magu as the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The senators would not divulge the details of the security report. However, the online publication, Premium Times, stated that it had obtained the report. According to the medium, the report accused Mr. Magu of fraternising with persons who are targets of corruption investigations; of flying first class on a trip to Saudi Arabia, despite a presidential directive that public officials must fly economy; of illicit possession of sensitive documents, and of living in a house whose rent was allegedly paid by a businessman who was in the EFCC’s radar.

In other words, the Department of State Security (which authored the report on Mr. Magu) accused the country’s anti-corruption czar of being an enabler of corruption, a man embedded with the virulently corrupt.

I don’t know whether any or all of these allegations are true. At the time of my writing, several days after the Senate’s refusal to confirm Mr. Magu, President Buhari had said zilch on the issue. That presidential silence symptomises a disease that afflicts the Buhari administration, a tendency to respond to the most everyday issue after maximal delay.

Juxtapose the presidential silence against the alacrity of Premium Times, and you begin to see how luckless Nigeria is in this Presidency. In revealing the content of the DSS report, the website also disclosed that its independent investigation exposed the falsity of the allegations against Mr. Magu.

After a dismal run with the Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan administrations, the governance of Nigeria is yet again, with Buhari, debilitated, marred by paralysis, inertia, and confusion. And if media reports are credible, there is a deep schism in the ranks of Mr. Buhari’s closest associates.

For months, the media had reported that elements within Team Buhari were working to remove Mr. Magu from the EFCC, or else to scuttle his confirmation. Those reports suggested that the anti-Magu coalition was bent on sabotaging Mr. Magu’s investigation and prosecution of the corrupt, inept and often laughable as that process had become.

Is The Nigerian Senate So Bereft Of Shame?

By Simbo Olorunfemi

It is difficult to tell exactly what to make of the Nigerian Senate. It is that redundant contraption, an after-thought, mindlessly foisted on the Nigerian system by the drafters of the 1979 constitution in a bid to blindly copy the American system. Unfortunately, neither the 1990 nor the 1999 constitution corrected this anomaly, leaving us with a sore that has continued to fester, since then. The Green Chamber, that ant-infested arm of a bloated legislature, might yet be the greatest undoing of the present democratic dispensation.

*Senate President Bukola Saraki

Under the parliamentary system of the first republic, there was the Upper chamber or “House of Chiefs” fashioned after the largely-ceremonial British “House of Lords”. Its task was as ceremonial as it was institutionally redundant. But rather than for our Fathers to learn from that misadventure and embrace a nimble and manageable unicameral parliamentary system, they opted to embrace an expansive and expensive Presidential system. The Senate personifies everything that is wrong with the present system. It symbolises the waste, insensitivity, inefficiency that have come to define the system, over the years. The Senate is a symbol of disconnect between those charged with making laws and the people they purport to represent. Nothing in their words or action indicates that they understand where we are coming from or an understanding of the change of paradigm being witnessed in other arms of government. 

The Senate has always struggled for relevance, no doubt. The Enwerem-Okadigbo-Wabara era was one for internal schism over the spoils of office. The dust settled only for the chamber to transit into the pocket of a cabal, who for 8 years, turned it to a mere rubber-stamp for legislating acquiescence to anti-people policies and pronouncements. The Mark of the just-ended era was the military precision with which opposition was silenced in the chambers. ‘Bow and Go’ was institutionalised, as the serious assignment of screening and confirmation of nomination to high offices was reduced to a tragicomedy, played out to the full glare of the world.
 
With the exit of the first set of state Governors from office in 2007, the Senate soon became the favourite retirement pad for former Chief Executives of states. Those ones, standing on the ruins left behind in their states, simply picked Senatorial seats, transitioned to new offices and continued the life in Abuja. Some are Governors-emeritus, running the states from the Senate. Many are godfathers, dispensing favours at will - appointing, disappointing, nominating, engaging in all manner of shenanigans, while pretending to be Senators. The only use of the Senate being the perks, fat allowance and the opportunity for ‘oversight’, as many are known to be perpetual absentees from sittings. Those who show up hardly bother to make any contribution, spending time mostly for banter and inanities, when they are able to manage to stay awake.

 

Ordinarily, the Senate would do well to avoid media or public attention, as much as possible. There is hardly anything about it that commends it to us. From its filthy car-park to the disorderly face it presents to the public, the Senate should be content to be silent, while at ‘work’. But the Senate operates only in accordance with its own rules when it comes to the matter of shame. This is not even about the interesting circumstances under which the present leadership of the Senate emerged. It is not about the treachery, so alleged. Not about the Leader having to sit in the car park, hours before sitting, to be able to make it inside the chambers while other party members are at a meeting called by the party.  This is not about refusing to tow the party line and teaming up with the opposition to up-stage the position of the party, simply for the sake of personal ambition. It is not about all that, for integrity is not in high supply, when it comes to politics and struggle for power. It is not even about the budget.

Why Next Senate President Should Be Christian

By Dan Amor
At a time when the alleged acrimonious campaign to Islamize Nigeria by an emerging power bloc is almost gaining currency, few members of the public, the Press, or the political class have never actually presumed – in context or in full –the hidden agenda of the new clique of powerful anti-Christian elements whose ultimate design is to implement the secret accord they had with their sponsors using Professor Yemi Osinbajo, a pastor, as dress rehearsal. The clamour by a section of the political class to push for the emergence of a Muslim as the new Senate President in spite of the its inelegant religious statement since the President-elect General Muhamadu Buhari is a Muslim and the sure bait of another Muslim emerging from the Northeast as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, flies in the face of rationality.

*David Mark: outgoing senate president 

(pix: Sun)

This dangerous maneuver puts at risks, to say the least, nothing less than the survival of the structure of our government as set in place by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria which in its wisdom recognizes the Federal Character and ethno-religious paradigms of our Union. If this terrible gamble scales through, what now passes for constitutional theory in our most prestigious law schools, in many of our courts, and in much of liberal society is not legal theory at all, but an egalitarian political agenda which no elected legislature will enact, thereby prompting an elite intellectual and political minority to use the courts as a means of fighting the imposition of religious agendas. 

Open Looting Of Nigeria By Nigerian Lawmakers

Salary Of Nigerian Lawmakers – Incredible!

Do You Know That A Senator In Nigeria Earns - N29, 479,749. 00 Per Year And They Still Want More!

Who says politics doesn't pay in Nigeria? Not me.
Check the frivolous breakdown out.

 You can't but laugh in pity.

                                      

The National Assembly In Session

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Basic Salary - N2, 484, 245.50.
Hardship Allowance @ 50% of Basic Salary - N1,242,122.70 (I love this kind of hardship)
Constituency Allowance @ 200% of BS - N4,968,509.00
Furniture Allowance @ 300% of BS - N7,452,736.50
Newspaper Allowance @ 50% - N1,242,122.70 (Which kind newspaper be this,  shey na online or hard copy?).

Wardrobe Allowance @ 25% - N621, 061.37
Recess Allowance@ 10%: - N248, 424.55
Accommodation @ 200% - N4, 968,509.00.
Utilities @ 30% - N828, 081.83.
Domestic Staff @ 35% - N863, 184.12.
Entertainment @ 30% - N828, 081.83.
Personal Assistance @ 25% - N621, 061.37.
Vehicle Maintenance Allowance @ 75% - N1, 863,184.12.
Leave Allowance @10% - N248, 424.55.

One Off Payments (As Advised by Sagamite Severance Gratuity) @ 300% - N7, 452,736.50 (Once they get fired.)
Motor Vehicle Allowance @ 400% of BS - N9, 936,982.00 - Every Four Years

Senator’s Salary Per Month. - N2, 456,647.7

Total = N29, 479, 749.00

* 109 Senators Grand Total = N 3,264,329,264. 10
A feeding frenzy!!!

 

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Salary U.S. President: $250,000/yr.
GDP U.S. Economy: $13Trillion/ yr.
Allowance Nig. Senator: $1,500,000/yr
GDP Nig. Economy: $45 Billion/yr.

 

And They Want More!! Doctors, Teachers, Civil Servants Can't Boast Of N1m A Year And These Guys Want N30m Every Month

SAY NO TO THIS OPEN LOOTING OF NIGERIA !!!

Nigeria’s Perpetually Diminished Assembly

(First published Tuesday, September 4, 2007)

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

 Last Sunday (September 2, 2007) , The Guardian carried an interview with Professor Pat Utomi in which he lamented that contrary to every expectation that the 2007 electoral exercise might somehow console the nation with some form of improvement in the quality of lawmakers that would be dumped in the National Assembly, Nigeria still, sadly, found itself saddled with a class of legislators that is ten times worse than any it ever had. The worst evil “those who conducted the last election did to Nigeria” he said, was  “to put in place a National Assembly that is 10 times inferior to the one we had before.  The last Assembly was bad enough, but we were supposed to make progress from there. Most societies would make progress and in the next elections get better. But what we got is a much more inferior National Assembly this time around.” 

Indeed, Pat Utomi spoke my mind on this issue! Any reader of this column would easily recall that in several essays here, I have never been able to contain my sorrow and deep pain over the quality of lawmakers we end up with each time, and how such a misfortune continues to sabotage our best expectations for progress and development, since all it does is to extend generous incentive to the Executive to celebrate its insufferable ineptitude and directionlessness with indecent fanfare. As our decadent politics and the mostly base characters that star in it continue to inflict the nation with grossly underweight and light-minded fellows as lawmakers, that is, individuals who neither have any acquaintance with sound ideas nor the capacity to appreciate the gravity of the assignment they are supposed to be performing in Abuja, what the nation gets in return can only be retrogression and unchecked decay. What has remained sadly true is that for most of the lawmakers who had diminished our legislative chambers with their uninspiring presence these past few years, their real reason for showing up in Abuja was just to scramble over dirty naira notes like wanton street boys over balls of akra suddenly falling off the tray of an indiscreet hawker. Indeed, these were mostly down-and-out fellows dusted off from here and there, easily excited by such little things as a sumptuous lunch with the president, and they emerge each time from such encounters feeling so high that they forget their very important brief in Abuja. In  them, we found the best example of a prodigal House in hapless nation! And if indeed, as Prof Utomi reminded us last Sunday, the present set of lawmakers is ten times worse than the others before them, then the future, dear reader, is indeed scary. We are already seeing the signs, aren’t we?  


Everyone can now appreciate my pain and sadness. Nothing seems to change in our National Assembly, whether it is their strange mindset or the way their leaders are always handpicked by external forces and imposed on them. When Anyim Pius Anyim became Senate President by the “vote” of one man, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was not even a member of the National Assembly, and he began to place his godfather’s interests over that of the nation, I lamented here in an essay I titled: “The President Obasanjo Gave The Nigerian Senate.” Anyim had ensured the Senate remained an appendage to the Executive, until he fell out with Obasanjo, due to a clash of their individual interests. When Adolphus Wabara also came on board, through the same route, that is, by the decree of the same man, and then continued to lead the Senate through the same path of irresponsibility and unproductivity, I also cried out in another essay captioned:  “Wabara: How Long Shall We Suffer Thee?”

 In fact, until the inauguration of the present National Assembly, Wabara’s Senate had remained the best example of a rudderless, unfocused and totally purposeless Assembly. It was a Senate which believed in nothing, stood for nothing, without any sense of history, and clearly had no plans of changing anything or achieving anything. 


Now, virtually everyone recalls with refreshing nostalgia the dignity and sense of direction the former Senate President, Mr. Ken Nnamani brought to the business of lawmaking in Abuja, but as far as I could remember, his tenure had practically made little or no noticeable effort to transcend the Anyim/Wabara demoralizing paradigm until on Wednesday, September 1, 2005, when I focused my sad eyes on the drab National Assembly over which he was presiding and screamed in this column: “Where Is the Senate President?”

Prof. Pat Utomi: Disappointed With An Underperforming Assembly


 Although the article, unfortunately, attracted a very abusive rejoinder from Nnamani’s media adviser, there were also rejoinders from several Nigerians who shared my frustration and pain over the almost lifeless National Assembly he was leading, while a ruthless civilian dictator rode roughshod on Nigerians.


Please, permit me to quote the concluding paragraph of that essay:

 “As an implacable Executive drives the nail hard on a hapless populace, the unspoken question everywhere is: Where is Senator Ken Nnamani, the President of Nigeria’s Senate and leader of the National Assembly? Does he ever pause to ask himself the real reason why he is in Abuja? Has he ever told himself that his office demands more ennobling engagements than supervising the cutting of cakes at society weddings and chairing some multitudes of largely unedifying events?  What is his response to the undisguised programme of perpetual impoverishment which the current government is executing with chilling dedication? What can Nnamani say is the achievement of the National Assembly under his watch? Where is Nigeria’s Senate President? Sorry, he is on a permanent leave.” 

Now, I refuse to take any credit for Ken Nnamani’s sudden recovery of his focus, which caused the National Assembly to start showing a sense of direction and purpose, thereby reclaiming the respect and confidence of Nigerians. Who am I to move a whole Senate President? All I keep insisting is that I consider the National Assembly a very essential and strategic institution in any nation, and how it chooses to discharge its constitutionally assigned roles may sink or advance the progress of that nation. That is why, during the dark years of Obasanjo, when he operated in utter disdain for laws and decency,  I had heaped greater blames on the National Assembly. Indeed, I do not think that other nations whose rulers try to behave like human beings waited until they had elected angels into office before they began to get quality leadership. It was clear to me that if by any stroke of misfortune  America suddenly found itself with the kind of legislature Nigeria regularly gets,  President George Bush will make the Obasanjo disaster pale to total insignificance. In fact, each time I look at Bush, the picture I see is that of a thoroughbred dictator held on a strong leash by a responsible Congress. What this means is that leaders can be compelled to rule responsibly if countervailing institutions and relevant laws are strong enough to keep them within the bounds of reason, patriotism and decent conduct.  

So, Obasanjo was able to ride rough-shod on hapless Nigerians and impoverish them as suites his fancy because, he was merrily aware that the principles of Separation of Powers, Checks and Balances, which differentiates a democracy from a dictatorship never made any meaning to the good-for-nothing and totally debased National Assembly headed by the light-minded fellows he personally handpicked and installed. All we had got were a gaggle of disoriented and misdirected lawmakers, who idled away at Abuja at huge expense to the nation, while the people whose well-being they were supposed to safeguard were grossly brutalized, impoverished and re-enslaved by a irremediably wayward Executive. In fact, at one point, after examining the quality of National Assembly Nigeria was cursed with, I had to commend Obasanjo for resisting the temptation to totally become another Idi Amin, because, from all available evidence, there was no Assembly with the requisite will and patriotism to scuttle such a vile ambition. 

Well, the expectation had been that all these should have since become part of our dark, distant history. But, unfortunately, in 2007, we are still stuck with an even worse variety, a species no one could have imagined would still be with us at this time and age. Whatever modest advancements Ken Nnamani may have recorded in his time have been rudely reversed, and the nation dragged further backwards. While small countries like Kenya, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Liberia, are all advancing and refining their electoral processes and strengthening the instruments of democracy in their domains, Nigeria is still a willing captive to the backward, vile fancies of a few prehistoric men, who, it would seem, have vowed to ensure that Nigeria never moved forward. 


In 2007, we have a Senate President and Speaker of the House of Representatives, who are there, not because of any special qualities or superior ideas they may possess, but because some fellow, whose eight year siege on Nigeria now ranks as the nation’s worst trauma, thinks they should be there, to solely represent his narrow interests. That’s where we are, dear reader, and if you watched the recent nausea-inducing farce they called Senate screening of ministerial nominees, and saw how would-be ministers in whose hands the nation’s destiny would soon rest were either merely entertained with perfunctory and even frivolous questions, or just asked to “take a bow” and go, you would then appreciate what Pat Utomi was saying about the quality of lawmakers we are stuck with today.    

Senate President, David Mark, may even be sincere, and probably wishes to preside over a Senate which Nigerians would happily respect, but these are hardly enough. One may be sincerely wishing to assist another person to make some meaning out of the directions for administering a life-saving drug written in Greek, a language both of them are blissfully unfamiliar with. His good intentions notwithstanding, he would be of no real help to the other person. That’s how these things go. I appreciate Mrs. Patricia Etteh’s admirable struggles to move the House of Representatives forward. But it is also easy to see that she is already overwhelmed, like the fellow battling to interpret Greek words he is unfamiliar with to another person. It is usually a pitiable spectacle. 


One admires Etteh’s zeal, courage and struggles to take charge of the situation, but how long can a nation in crying need of persons with sound ideas wait for perpetual learners. Well, a child confronted with a highly complicated toy can only dismantle it, to bring it to his level. That is exactly what is happening in the National Assembly today. And so, instead of bright ideas and quality lawmaking going on, we only hear bellyaching tales of pursuits of vanities and revolting contract scams and other obscene tales. And mind you, this will continue to assault our sensibilities until we decide to put our fifth eleven aside and go for the first. But can we?

———————————————————
scruples2006@yahoo.com