By Gab Ejuwa

IT is a time-honoured dictum that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Any normal human being – normal being euphemistic in this sense – becomes, as it were, swollen-headed when invested with the power to manipulate people and things generally.

And when this manipulative hold has no restriction whatsoever the power abuse becomes correspondingly unrestricted and even irrestrictable. Disbelieve any sentimental claptrap to the contrary; this is the dynamics of power and its overwhelming effect. This is human nature that always comes to the fore when there is no refinement of sensibility and indeed the human personality.

It is through this unflattering prism that Nigerians in their hundreds of millions must view the activities of our National Assembly. Even from the First Republic there were cases of senators and representatives wearing the toga of power as though they had undergone a circumstantial deification which made them larger than life and by that fact superior to the rest of us and which made their quotidian reality surreal and substantially different from the general experience of the homo sapiens.

If we go down memory lane, we would remember that Dr. Joseph Wayas’ Senate was bogged down by bickerings and outcries by our assembly members assigning succulently fat allowances to themselves. Chuba Okadigbo’s Senate did not fare any better and indeed corruptive tendencies and practices saw  the great Igbo man out of the Senate presidency. What of the cesspool of heaving bribes graft and scams? And especially in this dispensation of so-called ‘democracy, the two houses of parliament are in essence like the branch offices of Shakespeare’s evergreen character, Shyllock, of The Merchant of Venice Fame.

The first woman speaker, Patricia Etteh, came on the hot seat and was immediately enmeshed in scandal, precipitating her unceremonious dismissal. That was when a stupendously fantastic sum of money was used for mere renovation of the Speaker’s house. It was an eye-opener for the women liberation group. And now Dimeji Bankole is embroiled in a raging scandal of monumental import and instructiveness. How has the National Assembly come to be this notorious?

First and foremost, our senators and representatives earn too much for too little quality of legislation, going by contemporary standards. For an assembly most of the time squirming like worms and throwing chairs, brickbats at one another and imagined enemies, a house where members sleep through sessions presided over by an outocrat who once said that the telephone is not for the poor, it is rather unfortunate and  grossly unfair. If we examine the total budgetary allocation for the National Assembly, we would discover that it equals the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of five African countries put together. Why this monumental idiocy? Is it not rather unfortunate that in Nigeria, law-making is even more lucrative than the oil business?

So that our legislators can rub shoulders with the oil moguls of Saudi Arabia! Must we be so free with our hard-earned money that we lavish it on a set of people milking us dry? And yet Nigerians are groaning in poverty and wallowing in the mud of human degradation. What, I want to know,  are these pedestrian politicians deserving of all our oil revenue when there are better things to do for our country?

Furthermore, they enjoy too many privileges. Why, in the name of everything that is good, should the speaker have seven official cars, for God’s sake? Why do we have such a bloatedly expensive system whereby every public official has an army of  hangers – on all feeding fat on the nation? What wisdom or intelligence or even political sophistication are we trying to demonstrate.

We Africans are so enamoured of the devil that we adopt his pride and employ so many people to fan the fire of our ego. The logic is the more people that kow-tow to us and indulge our every whim, the more important or God-like we are. I think this is monumental illiteracy. It is in the same spirit we attach too many titles to our names. Imagine some so-called men of God who go by such titles as Pastor Prophet Doctor, or Rev Prophet Professor! As already said, this is quintessential illiteracy and lack of civilization – Duduism! Yoruba call such ‘ara oko’ – bushmen.

And deriving from this question of undue privilege, is this issue of legislators awarding and receiving government’s contracts. I remember there was an agency of government called Public Works Department, or, Ministry of Works. What is the function of this agency, really?

Mr. Ejuwa, a journalist, writes from Lagos.