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There is nothing wrong with the fat
allowances the federal lawmakers get quarterly, newly-appointed
chairman of the House Services Committee, Yakubu Dogara, has said,
insisting that his colleagues deserve the reward, not only because of
the amount of work they do, but also because of the billions of naira
they have saved for the country.

Mr Dogara, whose committee oversees the
welfare of members as well as the budget and appropriation of the
House, said the National Assembly gets a mere 1.5 percent allocation of
the total federal budget yearly, and upbraided Nigerians, particularly
journalists, for raising issues pertaining to the allowances of the
lawmakers instead of asking questions on what the executive arm does
with the remaining 98.5 percent.

The members of the House have been
demanding an increment in their quarterly allowances from N27.2 million
each to N42 million, while the senators want theirs raised from N45
million to N80 million. If the demand sails through, each member will
get N168 million per annum, while each senator will take home N192
million.

“What I want to talk about is this
issue of allowances that they heard that members have been collecting
N27.2 million per head and senators N80 million. In fact, some media
houses have speculated that what we now earn is N42 million per
quarter. Now this quarterly payment has become an issue,” he said.

“I remember, even the agencies involved
in fighting corruption are raising issues, particularly media reports
suggest that the Chairperson of the EFCC once said that there is
corruption in the National Assembly. To this, my response has been that
what Nigerians forget is that the entire money in the allocation. If
you check the 2010 budget, the entire allocation to the National
Assembly is 1.5 per cent. Unfortunately, that is what most Nigerians
focus on. But do we ask questions from those managing the remaining
98.5 per cent? Have we asked questions?

“This parliament has done a lot, but
Nigerians do not appreciate because they do not even know what the
parliament has done. When we came in 2008, in the course of our budget,
we raised the allocation of the National Assembly from one per cent of
the total budget to 1.5 per cent that year; we saved over N450 billion
for the nation in unspent and un-remitted budgetary allocations. In
2009, more than N350 billion was paid back into the national treasury
as unspent funds. Now, if you sum the two, we are almost hitting a
trillion.”

Mr Dogara, who addressed journalists at
the weekend, also said Nigerians should rather be worried about what
happened to these unspent funds from 1999 to the time they came in, and
start insisting that MDAs should return unspent money at the end of the
year.

“What happened? How much would it have been? That is the investigation that I thought media houses would have done,” he said.

The lawmaker, who was until June 3 the
chairman of the House Committee on Customs and Excise, said though the
discovery of the unspent funds will not be used as justification,
Nigerians have enough issues to raise with the executive arm, which
manages most of the budget.

Holding back billions

The PDP member from Bauchi State also
said he wondered why Nigerians are not asking institutions that
generate revenue for government how much of this they hold back for
themselves.

“And then we talk about revenue
generating institutions of government where billions, if not trillions,
are generated and not remitted.

As a result of our oversight functions,
we have said, look there are limits that some these agencies can go,”
he said. “That those monies must be paid back into the government
treasury. Nobody has ever given us credit for that. We do not want to
use that as justification for whatever allowances that we collect but
certainly they are issues worth looking at.”

On the demand by the “progressives
members” for investigation into the finances of the House, Mr Dogara
said they did not avail themselves of its standing rules and other
extant laws, in making their demand.

“They should have recourse to the
resolutions of the House that was passed vis-à-vis the Rules of the
House and the provisions of section 24 of the Legislative Powers and
Privileges Act. But, unfortunately, that was not done,” he said.

“I have heard a lot of people allude to
the fact that Integrity Group had similar campaign against Patricia
Olubunmi Etteh when she was the Speaker and nothing happened to the
members of the Integrity Group; they were not suspended, but they first
went to the press.

“The appropriate response to this is that you cannot say you want to
steal because there was thief somewhere that has not been caught. Once
you know this is a rule, this is what we have adopted in the House,
therefore, whatever the House follows is there in the rules and nobody
has ever challenged it since we have been members in 1999.”