By Omoniyi Salaudeen

The controversy set off by the seeming innocuous remarks made by Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai, urging the leadership of the National Assembly to make the budget of the legislature transparent, and the salvo fired back at him by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, challenging him to disclose his security vote, has gone up a notch higher.
As tongues continue to wag, some prominent Nigerians who spoke with Sunday Sun weighed in and expressed regrets that both sides were feeding the public with half truths.
Senator Ayo Arise, in a telephone interview, said: “All I can say is that we are getting close to transparency. One just released his security vote, while the other released his pay slip but kept silent on allowances. If the salary of the Speaker is N346.577, then it cannot even fuel his car from his village to Abuja. The real question is about the allowances. The people have unhindered access to the legislators and they demand a lot from them. Certainly, money to meet all these demands comes mainly from somewhere. I know there are constituency allowances and other emoluments, which are packaged together and are being paid quarterly. Ditto for the security vote for the governors. That is what they use to take care of political patronage. So, if they really want to go the whole hog, they should explain the detailed expenditure of their budgets.”
On the need for transparency and accountability, he added: “I know security for some governors is in the region of N200 million. Some N300 million. Only a few will go below N200 million. In my state, Ekiti State, it is about N200 million. Official figure is what they have both released. El-Rufai is not talking of his own personal security vote as a governor. Again, nobody will be interested in going to the National Assembly if there will be no pay. It is the issue of corruption we need to face squarely. The problem with Nigeria is not the money the National Assembly is being paid or the governor is being paid. What is important is to ensure that public money is used for the good of the people.”
Also speaking in the same vein, a member of the seventh Senate, Senator Anthony Adeniyi blamed the raging controversy on the leadership of the National Assembly for keeping the budget in secrecy even to the floor members. He said: “What the people should be asking for is the budget of the National Assembly and not how much is being paid to each lawmaker as salary. They should ask the leadership of the National Assembly how the budget is being spent. The public should put pressure on both the Senate and House of Representatives leadership to publish what they earn as allowances and not the official salaries they published. The only way to get the true picture of what they earn is for them to publish the budget of the National Assembly and what they spend per head. Let them publish how allowances are disbursed; you will discover that the allowances they earn are in hundreds of millions per quarter. You can’t believe it.”
“What they do is to award all manners of contracts. Sometimes, they will come and give you calendars, which you don’t know when the contract was awarded. And if we make noise, people will stone us. They will call all of us thieves. There was a time there was to be uproar in the Senate, when we went for a retreat in Uyo. People started complaining and asking questions about of our pay vis-à-vis our budget. They won’t even show you the budget. If we really want to go into the issue, we have to beam the searchlight on the principal officers,” he posited.
According to him, the list of allowances paid quarterly to the lawmakers in addition to monthly salaries include: car, housing, constituency maintenance, personal assistant, dressing and newspapers, among others.
He explained: “The earnings of legislators are divided into several heads. When I was in the Senate, my monthly salary was N1.2 million. And what they deducted from the Federal Inland Revenue Service as PAYE was about N500-and-something thousand. So, what I went home with as monthly salary was about N600, 000-plus. But there are other allowances such as car, housing, constituency maintenance, personal assistant, dressing, newspapers and other things attached to the monthly salary. But sometimes it is not stable.  At times, what they paid into our account used to be in the region of about N5 million quarterly. It could be more and sometimes it could be less.”
A former governor of the Old Anambra State, Dr Chukwuemeka Ezeife, in his own submission, advocated abolition of security vote for the governors, saying it has been abused. “Let me tell you my view, security vote should be banned. If it must be retained, there should be control of it outside the governor. You cannot give a vote, which only the governor can spend and not be accountable to anybody. When I was a governor, I never had security vote. It is necessary for some secret things that will be in the interest of the state, but it is now being abused. The way it is now, it is money they give out to their girlfriends as gifts. It is not wise the way it is being spent. And the country is going down.”
He further bemoaned the legislature for their insensitivity to the plight of the ordinary Nigerians. “What senators and members of the House of Representatives are getting a year is outrageous and unreasonable. People are dying of hunger.  And that is why some of us said there should be no two houses,” he stressed.
For now, there is no end in sight to the raging war of words between Governor El-Rufai and Speaker Dogara. By and large, the face-off has rekindled the public agitation for openness and transparency at all levels of government. And there is no doubt that with the increasing level of indignation of the oppressed and recession-battered Nigerian citizenry, public functionaries would not be able to resist the demand for public accountability any more as El-Rufai succinctly suggested in his remarks at the closing ceremony of the five-day management retreat held by National Assembly in Kaduna, and pointedly reminded the National Assembly it was perceived by the public to be working at cross purposes with the anti-corruption crusade of the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
He said: “The National Assembly is seen as an opposition to the fight against corruption, the National Assembly particularly the Senate is seen as one of the fighters of the war against corruption and that image has to be worked on, now that we are going towards election year, the leadership and members of the National Assembly have to do something about the narratives. I don’t believe that it is entirely true‎, I also don’t believe it is entirely false but it is important that the National Assembly should do something about its image.”
As El-Rufai noted, what Nigerians expect from the leadership of the National Assembly is to make the actual budget of the legislature public. He added that demand would not go away as there is a strong civic constituency that is asking for the full disclosure. “The sooner all of us in public life recognised that the game has changed and that segments of civil society and indeed everyday citizens of Nigeria are much more aware, astute and advanced than the state of our politics, the better for our democratic health,” El-Rufai said.