National Assembly And Its Draculan Car Proposal.

Jeff Okoroafor

While Nigerians battle with the idea of National Assembly members receiving an extraordinarily outrageous remuneration, and allowances -wardrobe inclusive, the Assembly has again proposed to spend an estimated N4.7 billion on cars for its members after they had been given car loans. President Muhammadu Buhari in his media chat sometimes last week, described the proposal as “unacceptable” and promised to liaise with Senator Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara, leaders of the Senate and the House of Representative, on the matter. Sincerely speaking, considering the pervading economic hardship in the country right now and with many people losing out of their jobs due to downsizements, it is insensitive for our legislators to be making such proposal at this time.

The Legislators argument was that the cars, be they expensively exotic or not, are properties of the National Assembly attached to them for strictly official responsibilities. They also opined that the cars are for committee assignments only and that it will be unfair to them, for anyone to suggest or expect members to use cars bought with their salaries to carry out official duties. Three weeks ago I overheard a member of the National Assembly arguing that a minister who did not run for any election gets a fleet of real exotic cars for himself and his family at government expense and no eyebrow is raised. That even the late Chief Bola Ige, when he assumed office as Minister of Power in 1999, was assigned 17 official cars. His argument was that if this it can be so for ministers, why then will a legislator, beg to manage just one car for official assignments?. I think its either our legislators don’t realize the situation we are in right now, that the oil business the country bank’s her GDP on isn’t as lucrative as it use to be, and that we still find it difficult to diversify, economically speaking, or they really don’t care what happens to the rest of us after they empty the treasury with their misguided proposal. What difference exactly does it make if every member of the Assembly belongs to more than one committee as they argued? We all know that what the legislators spend in their line of duty is like petty cash compared to what is going on in the Executive Arm of government.

Interestingly, some people are trying to help the legislators justify their draining proposal by providing series of arguments. A recent account I read stated that judges on the levels of Federal Appeal and Supreme Courts have a minimum of two official cars attached to them even though they barely leave their official base. My question to those making this sort of argument is this, should we be justifying such a monumental waste or we should be fighting to get it reduced, if not entirely stopped? The country is not in a good shape right now and we need to cut cost. If tough choices are what we get us back on our feet, why not make it? We have to cut down the number of official cars attached to a senator, honourable member, judge, minister et al.

My suggestion to Muhammadu Buhari, whose government I still see wastages, is that there must be a holistic review of perks available to all arms of government. We cannot take it from the top, it must be a wholesome reform that we must subject ourselves to. If we fail to make these tough choices today and now, we will have ourselves to blame tomorrow.

God bless Nigeria!