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.
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.
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| *Senate President Saraki and House Speaker Dogara |
