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This is not a time many Nigerian workers are happy
about because things have become tough and critical. Most of them go
months on end without pay while bills continue to mount. At the other
end of the spectrum they see politicians glowing and moving about in
new convoys of cars, their wives and children shop and school abroad
while they at home can hardly pay their wards’ school fees or feed
them. In the midst of this gloom confronting the Nigerian worker is the
news that members of the National Assembly are seeking to inflate their
allowances.

According to reports, the members of the National
Assembly numbering 360 currently go home every quarter with a whopping
sum of N27.2 million. That has proved inadequate for the honourable
members. They now want to up it to N42 million each. This is
preposterous in a country where the national minimum wage is N7,500 and
the request by the Nigeria Labour Congress for N50,000 is still pending.

What justifies this raise that the assembly
members are demanding? Perhaps it is to oil the machine for the coming
elections. This much is denoted from the text messages which senators
are said to be passing each other. The text reads:

“My Distinguished, each member in the House of
Representatives has improved earnings from N25m to N43m. This is an
improvement of 40 per cent. Reps members are also getting one Prado
4by4. This is election year; we should rise up and demand from
leadership what is due us. Our entitlement in the budget is nothing
less than N100m per Senator.” The tone of the text is a demonstration
of the fact that politics in this part of the world is all about bread
and butter.

When last did the members of the National Assembly
discuss or table any motion that has to do with the well being of
citizens? This is a dangerous trend. The economy has been in a tailspin
and things are getting tougher for the populace who have continued to
wonder whether this democracy or the variety we have now is what they
bargained for.

The concern of the populace is shared by the
Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), which
in a recent report said state governments might not be able to pay
workers’ salaries in the next few months if the $3.2 billion left in
the Excess Crude Account is shared. The report states only Lagos State
out of the 36 states of the federation can generate enough to pay its
workers. This is frightening and does not show any cause for cheer at a
time when the world economy is down and many countries are thinking of
shifting attention from oil due to its environmental problems.

We must begin to think creatively about how to
fund our democracy; we have depended too much on short-term measures,
which do not offer long-term solutions.

Several times arguments have been made about the
need to make political office less attractive than it is at the moment.
It is because of the out-of-the-world benefits that politics in this
part of the world confers and the attendant path to stupendous wealth
it offers that people approach it with a do-or-die attitude.

In the light of what the National Assembly
members are proposing for themselves and the reality on the ground as
made public by RMAFC, the time to drum some sense into the political
arena is now.

We cannot afford this profligate politics.