What Legislators Don’t Earn

                          NIGERIANS have invested so much effort in discussing what legislators earn that the bigger question about what they do is rarely considered.
This is not a debate on return on investment – if resources deployed to legislators could be so addressed – but an inquiry into what all arms of government do. Our grudges with legislators are mostly personal.


We know them. We probably voted for them, possibly rigged for them. They promised qualitative representation, also known as “delivery of the dividends of democracy”. They said they were the best hands for the job of making laws for the common good. What is common good without tackling the bread and butter issues?

Before our eyes they prospered beyond our imagination, beyond reason and ironically against the preachments that things were tough, such that governments could not pay salaries to ordinary workers. Even in States with crumbled economies, the legislators got their pay. They would only be waiting for entitlements that could have been delayed.

There are lots of reasons to be angry about the jumbo pay that we hear legislators earn, but anger would not solve the problem, nor the additional mischief of demonising legislators by spewing salacious stories about money they do not earn, like the fabulous figures mentioned as wardrobe allowances. A lot of advocacy is required to engage legislators on their earning which was established during the prudent presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo.

It is equally important that we sustain a more wholesome approach to costs of running our governments. Is it not also necessary to know how much we spend on the executive? Again, what do people in government do for the much they earn? Are the waste we are against only in the legislature? Could we look deeper into other areas of mostly illegitimate earnings for the legislators and the executives?

Illegal earnings are part of the corruption in the system. The noticeable parts include enormously bloated government pay rolls across the country, and a corrupt system that ensures that once some names are triumphantly announced as ghosts and expunged, more names are added to the lists, to join those who were never discovered.

Entrenched interests count for more than the interest of the people. As we fight over figures, there is still uncertainty about what our “servants” earn while those they serve earn nothing in an economy that has shrunk to the point of almost choking many Nigerians.

The fight to retrieve our country from self-serving interests should be deeper than fighting over figures. Nigerians are in for more fights than removing one government for another. There are too many interests contending for Nigeria’s retracting resources. When they hype salaries of legislators, they draw attention to one section, while shielding sectors that they loot.