The Dogara/el-Rufai face-off

THE Speaker of the House of Representatives, Honourable Yakubu Dogara, and the governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir  el-Rufai, have been lately in the news, contending on the need to be more open and transparent about the processes of governance as they relate to the different organs of government that they are heading. Governor el-Rufai fired the first salvo when he complained about the opaque processes of the National Assembly in terms of the budget and emoluments for senators and members of the House of Representatives, suggesting that it was the lack of openness in the operations of the National Assembly that had been a cog in the wheel of the progress of government and governance under the present system.

The  Speaker responded by suggesting that the problem of corruption in government should really be placed at the doorsteps of governors like el-Rufai who engaged in all kinds of deals with the way security votes were spent and manipulated, even as he authorised the release of what was termed his payslip ostensibly showing his monthly salary. The governor further responded by releasing the security budget of Kaduna State, perhaps to demonstrate that security votes were not manipulated in Kaduna State. He insisted that Nigerians did not worry about the salaries of members of the National Assembly, but about all the unknown allowances they collect, especially as the budget of the National Assembly had never been made public. Understandably, the office of the Speaker also faulted the governor for releasing the Kaduna State’s security budget rather than the security vote that is directly spent without accountability by the governor and advised the governor to concentrate on how to govern his state well instead of dabbling into National Assembly affairs.

What is clear in the exchange between the Speaker and the governor is the reality that those in government also know that they have been running the country without regard to efficiency and accountability, such that it is not for lack of knowledge that the country has remained prostrate under the politicians. The Speaker was quite certain that Governor el-Rufai was not running his state well and must have been manipulating the security votes just as the governor was also certain that the Speaker and the entire National Assembly were out to defraud the country by keeping the Assembly’s budget and the emoluments of members in the dark.

Yet the point has to be made that the Speaker did not respond  to why the National Assembly would keep its budget secret for the past 16 years, even as the governor also did not have  anything concrete to say about the opaque use of security votes by the governors, including himself. The hypocrisy of the two officials is further exposed when it is realised that neither of them made any attempt to use the exchange to promise improvements in the way that they run their different organs of government. The Speaker and the governor were thus only playing to the gallery and pretending to be interested in transparent governance when in actual fact they were not interested in such transparency within the governance processes under their different organs. It is therefore unfortunate that these are the kinds of leaders tossed up to preside over collective affairs of Nigeria when all that they are interested in is the preservation of opaqueness and lack of accountability when they are the ones involved.

In any case, this exchange provides evidence that Nigeria is really under the superintendence of people who would rather not run the country in line with the democratic best practices. For how would the officials be complaining about lack of transparency and openness in the use of public funds under a democracy?  The essence of democracy is that all public officials are holding the public trust for the people who are the real owners of public resources, such that the expenditure of public resources is done essentially in the open in order to ensure that the people have an understanding of how their resources are being expended. Yet, there is in Nigeria, a National Assembly that has a budget that is not known to Nigerians under a so-called democracy. And there are governors spending what they call security votes whose value is not known to Nigerians.  How could this be justified under a democratic rule that should be underpinned by full transparency, openness and accountability?

Nigerians therefore have to resolve whether they want to have real democracy or continue with the current pretence of democracy without transparency and accountability. Nigerians would have to demand that all public funds must be transparently stated and budgeted such that Nigerians would know what and where resources are expended. The truth is that the whole edifice of governance in Nigeria currently betrays a lack of accountability and openness and Nigerians must go beyond the farcical face-off between Speaker Dogara and Governor el-Rufai to demand that all tiers and organs of government make public funds truly public in terms of their expenditures. No organ of government should be allowed to keep expenditures secret under a democracy and it is only when such is done that the country would be truly on the way to practicing real democracy.