The Speaker in announcing the sack of the committee chairman Wednesday last week admitted that Abdulmumin had approached him to say he could no longer cope with the pressure of the position, and wanted to resign. Rather than accept the resignation the Speaker proceeded to sack him on the excuse that the House Leadership had decided to remove him. Abdulmumin was apparently displeased with the manner of his removal, especially when he had offered to resign voluntarily.
Abdulmumin did not go quietly. On Thursday, he brought in a letter to explain why the House Leadership pushed him out. In doing so, he confirmed the worst fears most Nigerians have had about budget padding by the National Assembly and the scope of the corruption in the institution. The leaders of the House, he said, had unilaterally allocated to themselves N40 billion of the N100 billion allocated to the entire National Assembly. The leaders included Speaker Dogara himself, the Deputy Speaker, Yusuf Suleiman Lasun, the Chief Whip, Al-Hassan Ado Doguwa, and the Minority Leader, Leo Ogor.
He called on the Speaker to resign for creating the budget impasse which delayed the Appropriation Act and which many observers hold responsible for the current economic recession. He held the Speaker responsible for the much discredited push by the National Assembly to amend the Constitution in order to insert immunity clauses to protect the leaders of the institution. He said his crime was his refusal to cover up the actions of the House leadership in their allocation of “wasteful projects worth N20 billion to their constituencies.”
“My inability to admit into the budget almost N30 billion personal requests from Mr. Speaker and the other three principal officers also became an issue,” he said.
“I gave the Speaker statistics of 2000 (two thousand) new projects introduced into the budget by less than 10 committee chairmen without the knowledge of their committee members. He did nothing about it because he was part of the mess yet he is talking about improving the budget system.”
Dr. Junaid Mohammed once said that “ours is a parliament where members decree constituency projects for themselves, award constituency projects to their companies and make corruption more popular in Nigeria.”
Earlier in the week former President Olusegun Obasanjo told State House correspondents that he has been vindicated. He has been a consistent critic. In 2012, he described the National Assembly as an institution filled with “rogues and armed robbers.” In January this year, as if he foresaw what was going to happen, Obasanjo wrote a letter to the President of the Senate, Dr. Bukola Saraki and House Speaker Dogara, accusing federal lawmakers of corruption, greed and impunity.
That 2000 projects could be inserted into the budget by “less than 10 committee chairmen without the knowledge of members of their committees” is an indication that even in the conspiracies to loot the treasury, the left hand often does not know what the right hand is doing. The Speaker and Abdulmumin were said to be good friends earlier in the tenure of the 8th Assembly and the ousted chairman said the Speaker took great offence with him for meeting President Buhari without the Speaker’s permission, which gives an inkling into the dictatorial structure of the House and how it is organized and run. But the meeting was apparently to smoothen the budget process by the President meeting the chairmen of the Senate and House Committees on Appropriation.
“Dogara took it extremely personal that we saw the President without his knowledge and went on to scuttle our efforts to help the president during the budget process because he wanted to be seen by the president as the only good man.”
“He (Speaker Dogara) forgot that he sees heads of MDAs daily which he enjoys doing more than his job as Speaker for reasons best known to him anyway, without Mr. President’s knowledge. That is how petty and narrow-minded Dogara can be. A coward, hypocrite and pretender of the highest order. Mr. President must be very careful with him. He wines with Mr. President and dines with Mr. President’s enemies. I am glad I’m finally free from his emotional blackmail of constantly trying to make me see my appointment as appropriation chairman as a favour.”
The committee system has been a tool to loot the treasury and keep friends and allies in check. There are nearly 70 different committees in a house of 360 members. Same number in the 109-member Senate. The committees are classed between the juicy and the less juicy; the juicy being those where members expect a great deal of monetary benefits of all kinds not excluding bribes from the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) and it is these MDA’s which turn the paddings into cash for the members. Indeed Abdulmumin revealed some handwritten documents by House leaders arbitrarily earmarked funds for “fictitious” projects by hiding them in genuine projects by the executive branch. In one of the documents one of the leaders wrote that projects worth N594 million be embedded in the ministries of Agriculture, Labour and Trade and Investments as well as in the National Boundary Commission.
The budget padding scandals is yet another strand of how corruption is executed by the National Assembly members in addition to the unbelievable emoluments they awarded to themselves. It is one of the reasons many Nigerians are cynical of the fight on corruption, seeing that the legislature which should be at the forefront of the cleansing is deeply embedded in the rot. The fight on corruption seems Sisyphean, to say the least, in a situation where monies recovered from the looters are ploughed into the budget from where it would once more be looted through the national assembly.
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