By: EmtGeneral
10/11/2019
Public office holders in Nigeria enjoy economic appurtenances unheard of in civilised political economies. These benefits apart from helping to drive economic and social inequalities also help to promote and sustain poverty. Nosa James-Igbinadolor reports
It is quite obvious, after all, that public office holders in Nigeria, especially those, who hold high offices of state, perceive the country’s treasury as one massive grilled Ostrich delicatessen at their culinary disposal that must be cut into palatable pieces to satiate their gluttonous appetite.
It is no more mind numbing or conscience searing in most homes in Nigeria to hear and read of unspeakable heist of the country’s economic patrimony by office holders; it has become the accepted tale.
In his analysis of the relationship between prebendal politics and federal governance in Nigeria, Mr. Rotimi Suberu opined that, “The fragmentation of Nigeria into a multiplicity of centrally funded, subnational state and local governments has vastly expanded and multiplied the access points and conduits for the individual and sectional appropriation of public power and resources. Indeed, the Nigerian federal system operates almost exclusively as a mechanism for the intergovernmental distribution and ethno-political appropriation of centrally collected oil revenues. In short, the system abets, and is enmeshed and subsumed in an overall context of, prebendal, neo-patrimonial politics.”
Occupants of public offices, especially political offices at federal, state and local levels in Nigeria no doubt believe that their positions permit them unimpeded access to public resources which they use to not only satisfy their own material wants, but also service the wants of plebeian clients. According to Segun Ayobolu, this kind of criminal diversion of public resources for selfish private ends starves the polity of funds for development, increases poverty and inequality, and intensifies an unhealthy rivalry and competition for public office that triggers pervasive instability.
Earlier in the year, the Court of Appeal in Abuja described as morally wrong the payment of severance allowances to elected or appointed public office holders, stating that such payments “cannot be justified in the context of our present social realities.” Justice Emmanuel Agim, who read the lead judgement of the court asserted that, “The political appointees and elected public office holders who do not work as long and as hard as career civil servants quickly get paid huge severance allowances upon leaving office, in addition to the huge wealth they acquired while holding such offices and without having been subjected to any contributory pension schemes.”
The Justice further berated public office holders’ insatiable taste as “not morally right to pay an elected public officer or political appointee pension and gratuity or severance allowance for holding such an office for three to eight years as the case may be. It cannot be justified in the context of our present social realities; it amounts to gross social injustice”
Among the most sordid of indefensible salaries and allowances is that paid to Nigerian federal legislators, who, we now know are entitled to compensation packages unseen in most places except in very few deified spaces in the highest levels of the more competitive private sector.
An erstwhile Senator from Kaduna state, Senator Shehu Sani, had in what was probably a pang of conscience in 2018, broken from the code of ‘omerta’ prevalent amongst legislators when it comes to their horizonless pay and announced that the salary of senators is N750,000 per month plus allowances of N13.5 million per month; total package of N14.25 million per month. What this simply means is that the Nigerian legislators who exert very diminutive labour in a very uncompetitive, inefficient and ineffective legislature, take out some N7 billion every month out of the nation’s lean treasury as renumeration and compensation and a whopping N84 billion every year to preen and prune themselves in a country making little progress in eliminating poverty.
The situation is no different at the sub-national legislative and government houses, where governors and state lawmakers allocate obscene compensations to themselves.
The 2019 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) that sheds light on disparities in how people experience poverty beyond income as the sole indicator for poverty, revealed that in Nigeria, even though the proportion of people, who are multidimensionally poor has remained constant at just over 50 per cent over the past decade, the actual number of people, who are multi-dimensionally poor increased from 86 million to 98 million over the same period. Also, important to note from the report is that when compared to the national poverty line, which measures income/consumption, a larger proportion of Nigerians (51per cent) are multidimensionally poor than those that are income poor (46per cent).
The World Poverty Clock, a project of the World Data Lab which tracks income levels for individuals around the world, showed that more than 90 million Nigerians are now living in poverty. This is the second year in a row Nigeria has landed in the top spot of the World Poverty Clock. In May 2018 the country overtook India as the country with the most people living in poverty. World Poverty Clock defines poverty as living on less than $1.90 per day.
Comments