The bench warmers

On Thursday, August 10, the Daily Trust published an intriguing frontpage lead. The paper reported that 161 members of the House of Representatives have not sponsored one bill in the house in the past 26 months. 

So? 

You may think there is nothing wrong with their warming the bench in the house. There is no law against doing nothing in the legislative chambers, upper and lower. Legislative bench warming has a long history in our country. Still, you would be wrong to think we could do something better than split hairs or whatever over the newspaper’s admirable investigative effort that opened a new can of worms among many cans of worms in the national and state assemblies. The 161 honourable members fingered in this report are honourably paid for honourably doing nothing. Weep not, brother.

We put our legislators in the legislative houses for the primary purpose of making laws for the good governance of our dear country. That is what the constitution obliges them to do. If some of them fail in this primary duty but see nothing wrong with it, it means that the nation is reaping poor dividends from its handsome and back breaking investments on these people.

Let me try and get down to the brass tacks. We, the taxpayers, are paying a heavy price to sustain the luxury of their warming the bench. It is expensive. There are 360 members in the house. From the Nigerian taxpayers, each of them earns a princely N8.26 million monthly. This, according to the newspaper, is made up of N660,000 as salaries and N7.26 million in allowances, called overhead in legislative obfuscation. 

Every month, the 360 members cost the tax payers N2,973,600,000. In 26 months, the bench warmers have so far collectively pocketed N32 billion. Think of feeding your chickens with that and see how fast you turn your house into a house of chickens. 

The paper has done a very fine job of discharging its constitutional responsibility to hold our rulers accountable to the people. We should be grateful for its meticulous investigation. It gives us the number of bench warmers by zones and named them by their states of origin. 

I would not be so naïve as to think this expose would change the attitude of the legislators to their primary responsibility of law-making but at least, it serves notice that the eyes of small brothers are seeing what is going on, even if the small mouths can say nothing worth the attention of the big mouths. If some of the bench warmers wake up and throw in a patently useless bill, the paper’s investigative work would have done more than served its purpose.

The public and the press have never beamed their searchlight on what is going on in the national assembly as well as the state houses of assembly. We have never asked to know if we are reaping good dividends from our investments on the men and women we crowned distinguished senators and honourable members. We have never really been bothered by the fact that how money is spent or wasted in the legislative houses is uniformly opaque. Their salaries and allowances are constitutionally supposed to be fixed by the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Commission. 

But I bet you that if you open the books of the commission you are not likely to find these jumbo salaries and allowances approved by the commission for our legislators. The legislators have always assumed the power to fix their salaries and jumbo allowances because, I suppose, they believe that they and only they know how much work they do and the proper compensation it should attract for them. Our lawmakers are always in the forefront of law-breaking. It is legislative recklessness in action. 

There are two things we should look for in the work of the legislators. One is the quantity of legislation, i.e. the number of bills sponsored by individual members; the second is the quality of these bills. Many of our lawmakers went into the legislative chambers without a modicum of legislative nous. I believe most of the bench warmers exposed by the Daily Trust belong to this first group of lawmakers. Under certain circumstances, I think it is wise for the ignorant not to expose his ignorance. 

The lawmakers in this category who try to make an effort at rising from the bench find themselves lost in the lawmaking thicket. They cannot distinguish between the constitutional requirement that their duty is not just to make laws but to make laws for the good governance of the country. That constitutional brief presupposes that the laws they make must be good, fair, reasonable and enforceable.  

Linus Okorie, a member of the House of Representatives, missed that fine point. On June 14, he tabled a bill, known as Economic Amnesty Bill, which proposes to grant amnesty from prosecution to treasury looters who return 70 per cent of their loot to the state. Clearly, as I pointed out in my column entitled Okorie’s law, the bill could not, however generous one might wish to be, qualify as a law for the good governance of our country.

According to the newspaper report, each of the 199 members of the house who, perhaps, are not sleeping on the bench, has at least one bill to his or her name in the house. But it does not tell the whole story. We know nothing about the quality of these bills and what difference they would make in the proper and effective governance of our country. They could be like Okorie’s law, pieces of proposed legislation that are patently offensive to the rule of law and good governance. We might as well borrow from the once popular British sit-com and ask: Are we being served properly by our legislators? 

A bigger issue looms here. It seems to me that the executive branch has become the killing field of legislative efforts in the national assembly. Quite a good number of bills passed by both houses all the way to the tenure of President Obasanjo, are still warming the shelves in the executive chambers waiting in vain, it seems, for presidential assent. This adds to our trauma as taxpayers. Truth be told, we are not being served by both branches of government.