In a country where more than 23 million of its youth are unemployed and the average civil servants with a misery salary is struggling through labour unions with industrial strikes to be paid 30,000 as a minimum wage that cannot buy a bag of rice; budgetary increment for an agency that has the highest share of annual budget and individuals who receive 13.5 million aside from salaries would be greatly inhuman and highly unpatriotic.
The lucrative benefits attached to political offices before and after service in Nigeria is exactly the single factor that makes politics do or die affairs.
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Nigeria as a country that slightly came out of recession and still being the most poorest country on earth where more than 70 percent of the population are living below the poverty line occasioned by corruption, hunger, conflicts and impact of COVID-19 pandemic in the global economies, such decisions can widen the deep gap of inequality present in the country and frustrate citizens.
It makes no sense that the National Assembly can be ‘broke’ with the history of its budgetary allocations showing monumental and dramatic increase in almost every year. If the agency is indeed broke, it cannot be for poor allocation, but mismanagement of resources. The agency is among the lucrative few that even the annual auditor general report is not allowed to capture in its reports.
Research data in 2020 has shown that 80 million working age Nigerians would not have a full time job if the employment rate does not improve; 33 million more people would drift into extreme poverty and 25% of the world’s poor would be in Nigeria by 2030, and of course things are getting worse than before.
The sum of 134 billion naira allocated for the legislative body in 2021 is equal to the whole of Borno State’s 2020 budgets with a population of almost 5 million, containing the highest number of out-of-school children and more than 1 million internally displaced persons in the state. What exactly are they running that consume this much? This insensitive declaration of the National Assemby being broke is emerging at a time when rampant kidnapping, terrorism and other insecurities have launched attack on the very foundation of our education system and turned the whole country into a shadow of itself, making it susceptible to all kinds of vulnerabilities of tribal and regional conflicts with tensions from all corners of the nation.
We have unemployed youth roaming like time bombs in addition to the 600,000 graduates coming out of higher institutions annually into an already saturated labour market which does not have the capacity to employ even half the graduates available.
The National Assembly should be looking for ways to cut their salaries and consider mechanisms that can help reduce these ugly curves capable of causing nightmares.
It’s necessary to question the integrity of our morality as the poorest country with a global highest number of under 5 mortality rate and record breaking corruption index to have one of the highest paid legislators in the world and still calling for increment. This is a sheer inhumanity at its Peak.
Amb. Musa Gambo writes from Maiduguri
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