By Obi Nwakanma
MR. Dimeji Bankole, the young speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives is built like boxer. He’s also been known to have had at least one good brawl in office. Once, in fact, with my good friend and brother, the Honorable Independence Ogunewe, and this in the Chambers of the Federal House – and he did not pull his punches.

It was therefore not out of character that the House Speaker threw some heavy punches last week at the University of Lagos, where he gave a talk under the aegis of the Committee of Faculty Presidents of the University of Lagos. The House Speaker was responding to another heavy hitting voice in the public arena – Mr. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi – Governor of the Nigerian Central Bank. When it comes down to it he too does not pull punches.

Mr. Sanusi had stirred up some hornets with his widely reported comments made at the convocation of the Igbinedion University in Okada, Edo State.

In his convocation lecture, Sanusi had pointed to a rather dangerous fact – dangerous both in its implication and in its reality – that the Nigerian National Assembly gulps 25 per cent of the federal budget overhead. It is our sort of little family dirty secret that Nigeria operates the most expensive legislature in the world.

I have made this terrible truth the subject, once, of this column, and the dirty secret has long been outed that Nigerian legislators – they who should be the true and invariant face of Nigerians – live well above their constituents.

This is an uncomfortable truth that Sanusi Lamido Sanusi has basically brought more light upon. It placed Nigerian politicians in their proper place as indolent guzzlers of national resources to the degree of national incontinence.

Twenty-five of the federal budget consumed by members of the National Assembly – particularly an Assembly that has been a little more than a mutual admiration society – makes Nigerian democracy the most expensive, the most inequitable, and the most unjust in the world. It gives democracy a really bad rap. Nigeria’s democracy, it says, takes the cake of all corrupt oligopolies.

In other words, as far as corruption goes, it is without compare. Sanusi’s comments did raise the question of performance – specifically – why Nigeria is not performing. If the National Assembly alone can consume 25 per cent of the federal budgets in paying fat cat emoluments and turning the people’s representatives into millionaires, is it any wonder that Nigeria is like a country, very busy indeed, doing nothing?

This fact did not sit well with the House Speaker Dimeji Bankole. Banky did not, therefore, deign to take Sanusi lying low. No politician wants to be screwed from the missionary position. Politicians prefer it full frontal, and thus indeed, did Dimeji Bankole, in his defence of his peers go – full frontal – in placing the real culprits in the picture.

Aside from contradicting the Governor of the Central Bank on the actual figures, Bankole went further to reveal that the source of corruption in Nigeria is in the bureaucracy – the civil servants who generally administer government policies. Here, the House Speaker stirred his own hornets by uttering uncomfortable truth that corrupt civil servants are the sources of national corruption.

There are those who may wish to crucify the young speaker for saying this, but his statement is worth some significant truth. His statement is worth examining in some detail.

In his address, Mr. Bankole pointed to the practice in the federal service at least, and this presumably happens in the various state services, where civil servants report 90 per cent budget performances without actual record or evidence of such performances, and with incongruous return of federal funds to the federal treasury.

Much Federal Government money meant for basic services disappear in the black hole of a corrupt Civil Service.
Basically, Bankole pointed to the profound capacity deficiencies in the Nigerian Civil Service as the main source of the carcinoma of national corruption. Bankole’s defence of his peers and Sanusi’s critique of the National Assembly offers us two sides of the story. Indeed, they seem to me to raise the question of the witch step-mother before the mirror about the Nigerian Cinderella – that much abused orphan child. Who is more corrupt in the land?

The civil servants or the politicians? These public actors are, without question at the center of the Nigerian crisis, and are fully, inexorably intertwined.

As I said, in many ways, Bankole is right. The Nigerian civil service is a very inefficient and corrupt institution. It has been shielded by its own methods of anonymity from the scrutiny of Nigerians who prefer the public face of corruption – the politician; the public and visible man of power. But behind the anonymity of the General Orders is possibly the most powerful institution in the land – the civil service – whose top operators makes or mars any government of the day.

To put it bluntly, there can never be corruption in Nigeria, without the full complicity of the Permanent Secretary or even the least of the Administrative or Executive Staff of the Civil Service.

The Speakers statement is therefore timely and ought to compel us towards a reassessment of the protocols of recruitment, performance, and reward. Of course, the members of the National Assembly put the Central Bank Governor and the Minister for Finance through an inquisition last week for raising the issue of the 25 per cent consumed by the Assembly.

A defiant Sanusi, refusing to back down from his figures presented the image of a principled and dignified public officer, and the senators as a lynch mob prepared to lynch him or buy his silence. The legislators accuse him of inflating the real figures. It is only 17 per cent of the National budget, they say, not 25 per cent. Even this is extremely high, and the issue is serious.

It speaks to a dangerous hemorrhaging of federal resources whose true evidence is seen in the terrible impoverishment of Nigerians; the inequity of elite greed and the costly bottom-line of our kind of democracy. I think it is rather urgent to commence a downward review of the benefits for membership of the National Assembly as well as all political offices. Make it lean and reflective of the condition of the average Nigerian.

Nigeria’s legislature is too highly maintained. But it is also important to begin a real reform of the Nigerian Civil service. Very frequently, at the end of the year, the various levels of governments budget monies to various government ministries and programs. At the end of the year there is hardly evidence of any government.

The roads remain broken. Government hospitals remain understocked. The Niger Bridge in Onitsha remains unbuilt in spite of recurrent awards of contracts all also recurrently budgeted. It is time indeed, to rebuild the civil service by recruiting, training, and rewarding the best among us, who would act as gatekeepers to the excess and natural greed and ego of politicians.

Unless the civil service is reformed and its independence restored, and its mechanisms for sanction revived, Nigeria will continue to bleed from corruption.