‘Leeches’

It is official, the National Assembly, NASS, is broke. Looks like it’s’ members now find it difficult ‘to meet their financial obligations’. The Senate Leader, Ali Ndume, is reported to have lamented that ‘the situation was so worrisome that legislators were not receiving their allowances as and when due’. ALLOWANCES he said, not salaries. He went on to say that he and his colleagues used to receive running costs or allowances quarterly but ‘now it is monthly and it doesn’t come as and when due’.

When the legislators demanded that the wardrobe allowance be increased, Nigerians asked for the salary grille of the NASS members. We were given information about allowances only. Don’t know much about accounting or economics. What I know is people living off perks must have fat salaries. NASS never made available its’ members’ salaries to the public. We went on the internet to check but there was nothing for NASS though we found information on the legislators of other countries. We saw how much David Cameron, ex-British PM earned annually. Available to the public also was the remuneration of Barrack Obama, the American President and the most powerful man on earth. But our own legislators concealed their salaries from our prying eyes. We only got a sneak peek on their allowances. We manifested our discontent with these perks but no one listened.

Early this year, a fleet of vehicles (4 x 4) was purchased by the NASS leadership for the members. Chairmen of various committees – so numerous were they that Nigerians wondered how effective they would be – were ‘settled’ with the state-of-the-art vehicles. A news analyst on one of the radio houses even suggested that, since the membership of these committees wasn’t that large, a fully air-conditioned coaster bus could be purchased for each NASS committee. We expected voices of dissention to come out of NASS. For where? Mum was the word. Money was spent as if it was going out of circulation. It was, ‘better life for better people’. Again we screamed o, we shouted o, we yelled o. NASS members didn’t seem to hear us o. You remember that saying that the dog that will get lost will never hear the hunter’s whistle.

Is there someone out there who knows the salary grille of the NASS members? One’s intrigued by the clamour of people to get in there by hook or by crook. The salaries must be ‘out of this world’ for the contestants to treat it as a ‘do or die’ game. But this is our money. Out of us this people have come, out of us also the money paying them comes. This money belongs to all of us. How can our commonwealth be a bottomless pit for a few of us who don’t even work as hard or as long as many of us? Ibirinade, my Mama, used to say, ‘Alufa nsanra, ijǫ nru’ meaning the pastor grows fatter while the congregation members cheeks become more hollow. There are leeches in the church, in the neighbourhood, even in the family.  Everywhere we look we see nothing but leeches. They’re everywhere. Just look around you.

The legislature has not shown itself to be ‘a model of financial and moral rectitude’. But the citizenry seems not to be outraged by or interested in the ‘culture of greed’ of those ruling over us – our ‘Lords spiritual and temporal’. A columnist writes that the House is ‘daily descending into an institutional billboard for the graft and financial recklessness that (has) sent Nigeria to the wheelchair …’  So ‘how much have we, the people, as provided in the (Nigerian) Constitution been able to hold the government, our governments, accountable to us?’ The confession of one of the actors in the allegation and denials of the budget padding saga in the House of Representatives is becoming a soap opera. Life imitating art, n’est-ce pas? Sometimes I don’t join Kongi in singing, ‘I love my country, I no go lie …’

Pastors buy private jets

We still follow them

We even deify them

Politicians ‘chop’ our commonwealth

We still shout

‘Baba o!’

When will Nigerians wake up

What will make them stop wishing

‘O come, O come Emmanuel

And ransome thy people’.

What would make them know

That in their hands is their fate

And not in the hands of

Any pastor or Imam or politician

What would keep away that

‘Ranka dede’ mentality

From ‘my people’

He came and conquered

– That young man impressed me o.

– Which one?

– That one that founded Facebook.

– Ha-a-a-a! Mark Zuckerberg.

– Yes o!

– How did he impress you?

– De boy simple jor.

– How now?

– No bling-bling, not even a wrist-watch …

– Only that?

– I neva finish now. Na you de jump inside me throat o.

– Sorry o. Continue.

– He wore T-shirt. Only when he went to ‘dobale’ for Sai-Baba did he wear suit and tie. The boy too much.

– That’s how life should be – very simple.

– Why we dey make am ‘garagara’?

– We must prove a point.

– Which one?

– Colo-mentality.

– I go die o.

– He, he, he, he.