From: Biodun Sowunmi <sowunmi@hotmail.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:40 PM
Subject: [NaijaPolitics] Jeyifo: The National Assembly's mega bonuses -Biopsy Of A Dying Extractive Socia
To: NaijaPolitics@yahoogroups.com
Jeyifo: The National Assembly’s Mega Bonuses â€" Biopsy Of A Dying Extractive Social Order
Sunday, 25 March 2012 00:00 By Biodun Jeyifo
When the axe first came to the forest, the trees said “the handle is one of us, it came from our stock.â€
A Turkish proverb
Epa n pa’ra e, o ni oun pa’ja (Epa, the parasite, thinks it is finishing off its host dog, forgetting that it, too, will die with the dog).
A Yoruba cautionary adage
Ko ni su wa, ko ni re wa (We shall not grow weary, neither shall we allow exhaustion to overwhelm us).
A Yoruba bon mot
Last week, the House of Representatives came out with new rates of “quarterly allowances†for the honourable members of the House. Reportedly, the figure announced was 27 million naira per quarter per Honourable. Since there are four quarters in a year, this means that every Honourable gets 108 million naira a year as quarterly allowances. Please note that these allowances do not include other emoluments and perquisites that our legislators receive such as salaries, entertainment allowances, house maintenance allowances, vehicle maintenance and fuelling, and hardship allowances. The grand total of these payments make Nigerian legislators the highest paid lawmakers anywhere in the world at the present time; arguably, they are the highest paid legislators in history. For instance, they are much better paid and remunerated than the lawmakers of the United States, the richest country in the world, the heartland of the developed consumer economies of the planet. Our legislators are even better paid than the President of the United States whose publicly posted annual pay is $400,000 (four hundred thousand dollars) per year. At current rates of exchange, this is 62 million naira, much smaller than the 108 million and 180 million that our members of the House and Senators get paid respectively for “quarterly allowances†that do no include their salaries.
But you have heard or read of these shocking facts about our legislators’ surpassing greed before, in this column and in other columnists’ tirades and fulminations in newspapers, newsmagazines and internet blogs. Indeed, bitter condemnations of our legislators’ great “longthroat†have become rather routine. Last year, both Chief Segun Osoba, the former Ogun State governor, and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank Governor, made passionate, stinging denunciations of these National Assembly bonanzas. Because neither Osoba nor Sanusi is exactly a consistent progressive or a firebrand radical, their denunciations of the National Assembly bonanzas were widely publicized and debated. But nothing came out of the debates. Thus, there is not the slightest doubt about it: our legislators have become extremely thick-skinned and are totally indifferent to public outcries about the humungous allowances they are paying themselves from our national coffers. Asking them to change their ways, to recognize that Nigeria being not even a middle-income economy but a low-income society, the allowances and emoluments they are paying themselves constitute nothing short of social cannibalism is like asking the vampire bat that lives on sucking blood from its victims to change its ways and begin to feed on plants and fungi.
So, if we continue to denounce this unrelenting practice of legislative brigandage in our country, it is not out of a desire to change the hearts and minds of our legislators. Quite simply, it is because “ko ni su wa, ko ni re wa†: we shall not grow weary; neither shall we allow (moral) exhaustion to get the better of us. For that is what they want of us, our legislators: moral exhaustion, spiritual defeatism. In this, we must not let them succeed, we must not let them turn us into the order of natural victims who, like the quarry of a deadly poisonous snake that has been stung into paralysis, can only watch helplessly as it is consumed and digested while still living and breathing. The hundreds of thousands, or even millions of our old-age pensioners that are never paid on time - if at all - are not the “natural†victims of these legislators who not only “vote†stupendous allowances for themselves but have them paid promptly; these pensioners are living, suffering human beings who will never cease from crying out against their ill-usage by a seemingly ungrateful social order they have served all their adult, working lives. The scores of millions of young people whose futures are being stolen from them will never, we hope, keep quiescent and confounded like the rodent caught and transfixed in the glare of the python about to consume it.
To the reader who has noticed that I have in the ongoing discussion been contrasting the social cannibalism of our legislators’ culture of brigandage with natural hierarchies and orders of the hunter and the hunted in the animal kingdom, let me hasten to say that this contrast is quite deliberate. This is because even though the morality of our legislators is akin to that of the natural bloodthirstiness of the vampire bat, the logic behind that morality is anything but naturally ordained. It is a logic rooted in history and economics, precisely the history and economics of a rentier state wholly dependent on an extractive industry that overwhelmingly dominates the economy and the polity as well.
In this logic we find extractive political-juridical-legislative institutions superimposed on an economy dominated by the extractive oil industry. As a practical illustration of this observation, consider the fact that Members of the House of Rep justify their jumbo allowances on the fact that Senators get even more “generous†quarterly allowances than the Honourables. Then consider also the fact that all members of the National Assembly, House and Senate, justify the size of their allowances on the alleged fact that the officeholders and appointees of the Executive and Judicial branches of government get more “hidden†but bigger payoffs from our national coffers. Meanwhile, all three arms of government presuppose the stability, the durability even, of this double extractive system.
But the oil wells, onshore and offshore, will either dry up or generate near terminal crises. Extractive economies, as long as they remain unreconstructed, are perilous, even if they historically turn out to have a long life. This is because long before the oil wells dry up, extractive political institutions erected on rents collected from them unfailingly generate colossal crises that cannot be permanently managed. This is all the more apparent if the size of extracted rents is complicated by tremendous demographic and social pressures like population size and ethno-religious diversity. In concrete terms, in size and socio-cultural diversity, Nigeria is not Saudi Arabia, it is not Kuwait, and it is not Norway. Indeed so great are the pressures on the extractive order in our country that there seems to be not enough financial wherewithal from rents from oil exports to manage distribution of wealth between contending political elites, let alone distribution between the elites and the masses of severely disaffected working and unemployed poor that now constitute the human and demographic majority in Nigeria.
If the central arguments or presuppositions of this piece are not yet apparent as I move to the conclusion of the essay, let me make them more explicit. By all estimates, Nigerian oil wells still have several decades of reserves left at current rates of drilling and exportation. But because at least so far in our recent history, the extractive order in our country â€" economic-political â€" has remained unreconstructed, there are significant signs of decay and perhaps even premature death in the system. A few telling examples are perhaps in order here: political parties and the electoral process at the present time are infinitely inferior to our experience of the first decade and half of the post-independent period, even with its own crises; our educational system, primary, secondary and tertiary, are far worse now than at any other time in the last five decades since we began exporting oil; installed capacities for industrial or factory production are significantly down and are worsening by the months and years; and the physical infrastructures are nearly all overtaken by obsolescence and decay. Only human capital, actual and potential, remains vibrant and promising, but it too is monumentally wasted in terms of productive capacities. Decay and death stalk the land, literally and symbolically.
Against this background, the colossal greed of our legislators seems like a desperate process to extract as much as possible from the system before it either completely self-destructs or is blown away by revolutionary storms of the Left or the Right. In this, much ideological cover is provided our legislators and officeholders by the fact that, for most Nigerians, anything at all is deemed preferable to a coup de tat, to the return of the rapacious, autocratic soldiery. But that cover is already blown, rent apart by the level of desperation and insecurity in the land. In other words, our people know now all too well that there is little to choose between the soldiers and the present order of politicians. With coming of the politicians in place of the military, one era of great insecurity and despair has replaced another. This is how the first of the epigraphs to this essay puts the matter: “when the axe first came to the forest, the trees said the axe is one of us†.
I do not wish to end with this sardonic Turkish proverb: the trees have no defense before every visit of the axe to the forest, first, second, third, and repeated visits. But consider the second epigraph concerning the parasite which, unbeknownst to it, will die with the host organism on which it is feeding. Unlike the trees in the forest, the host organism, especially a human one, can make an intervention in the drama of life and death. It can take steps to dislodge or expel the parasite or, more appropriately, excise a cancerous growth deep in the tissues of a diseased organ. On this view, confronting the brazen and unprecedented brigandage of our legislators is like taking a biopsy of that diseased, cancerous organ: you get to see and evaluate how the whole corrupt, bloodthirsty system operates; and you prepare for the surgical operation that will cure the patient. There is absolutely no guarantee that the parasite, the cancer will not kill the patient. There is some comfort in the knowledge that the parasite will not escape the fate of the host organism, but that is not what I personally hope for. What I fervently hope for: that the looting, the hemorrhaging of the national body politic will end, as surely as the extractive political-economic order will end, even if things will get far worse before they get better…
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