She spoke with so much authority on the sleaze and dirt that make our lawmakers so fat like the well-fed pigs in Animal Farm. The headline above is from a trending, obviously leaked, video of a committee clerk at the National Assembly levelling unimaginable allegations against politicians in both chambers.
I have received that video more than ten times from social media users who keep forwarding it with unceasing interest. The clerk in the video is a woman who identified herself as Ifeoma (Ofili). I have also learnt that she is an about-to-retire Level 17 director in the service of the National Assembly.
I asked and was told that she dropped her trending bomb at a staff forum meeting at the National Assembly. She said our legislators talk about oversight of government agencies but “how do you account for the fact that the flight ticket to go and oversight somebody was paid for by that somebody? What are you coming to write?” Madam Ifeoma asked, and added, sensationally: “You go there, they tell you what to write. They give you money, they quarter you, they give you flight, and the (National Assembly) members will come (back) to fight over the money that was given to them.”
U.S. Senator Carl Levin (1934-2021) once said that “you can’t get good government without good oversight.” Political scientist and 28th president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, in his classic doctoral thesis, ‘Congressional Government’ published in 1885 wrote that the legislature should “look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice, and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents.” Our legislators in Nigeria do not think their constituents have wisdom, but they do oversight, they also “look diligently into every affair of government”. The problem is what they look for and why. The more the oversight, the brighter the sight of their purse. Now you should understand why federal roads, particularly my Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road, are difficult to fix. The supervising ministry is in full charge of legislators who should oversight it.
Director Ifeoma also spoke about the threats regularly issued against ministries and agencies of the Federal Government by our lawmakers. “We are talking about punishing MDAs. They would come on TV and say this MDA did this and that…(but) all the atrocities that are being committed in the National Assembly, who punishes them?”
I have read ‘A Legislator Looks at Legislation’ published in October 1937 by T. V. Smith and Garland C. Routt. The authors propose that “lawmakers themselves must be governed by law” and that “rules of etiquette should always be observed.” That was in the last century and in the authors’ far away country. Here, the legislature is the Baba, clearly empowered to sit atop the law. Our angry director was being naive and, even rude, in asking who punishes “atrocities being committed in the National Assembly”. I should tell her that legislators are creators of the law and so they are naturally above their creation, the law. Just like their senior colleagues in the executive, Nigerian legislators have the right to use and misuse the powers conferred on them by INEC, their elector.
Then I heard the word ‘collapse’ from Madam Ifeoma: “They will budget money for staff training, money for clinic, money for books…they then collapse everything. It is in the National Assembly that I started hearing about ‘collapse’. What is collapse? Collapse is…Allowances that are budgeted for National Assembly staff are collapsed…And then, we don’t have the power to go and hold a press conference because we are sworn to oath of silence.” I like this ‘oath of silence’ coinage; it is more ghastly appropriate than the ‘oath of secrecy’ which we inherited from the British.
I am not done with Madam Ifeoma; or I should say she is not done with our husbands who make laws for us. The woman spoke about her director-colleagues who retired into want and suffering and death because their retirement benefits have been “collapsed” by politicians whose throats are the only routes to Oyo.
“Go and see them (retired directors). They look like scarecrows…they beg for money to fuel their cars… So, apart from what the constitution says (about oversight), who is looking at what they (legislators) are collapsing and chopping? They chop their own; they chop our own and (even) put excesses there.”
Put simply, the question she asked above is: who oversights the oversighter? She ought not to have asked that question because, as we say in Yorubaland, if one’s father has married a new wife and she is older than your mother, you call her mother. The legislators are the boss; you don’t question or query them.
Now, let me quickly say my own and withdraw into my shell: Oversight, appropriation and representation through law making are the three reasons the legislature exists all over the world. This Nigerian democracy is 26 years old. I will laugh very loudly if anyone says our National Assembly has scored above 30 percent in each of those categories. Yet, we keep pumping money into that opaque system. This year alone, almost half a trillion naira is their budget. Do not complain. They need even more than that. Remember in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, only the pigs take milk and apples because it is for the good of all that the pigs’ brainpower and leadership’s health remain topnotch. It is for the farm’s success. If our pigs are not healthy, Mr. Jones will return, and that will be a tragedy for this democracy.
But then, if politicians fail us, their constituents, without consequences because we are collectively stupid, should they fail their staff also? Politicians, if they ever leave, leave government solidly made for life; retired civil servants leave service to be bedridden; they die waiting for their benefits. What a democracy!
An Ilorin musician sings in an album that God is the adjudicator and judge between cat and rat. That is the relationship between those who have kidnapped this democracy, and we the people. As Madam Ifeoma said: They chop their own; they chop our own. They even put jara.
