This democracy is costly!

We are in a double-bind. On one hand, so much has been spent in the name of governance,  yet the dismal output which becomes our harrowing lot is malgovernance. The specifics of this paradoxical phenomenon are such that our living conditions are poor. But no. Our country is not poor. Rather, it has been impoverished. If the reader is sufficiently sensitive to language, the linkage between the two words ‘poor’ and ‘impoverished’ can easily be seen. In the former, there is a neutral and sanitized profile, whereas ‘impoverished speaks to poverty and some busy agents.

These agents are the legislators, the governors and an executive that is amply embodied in the president, his ministers and aides. Between and among these three social forces can be found the privileged men and women, who, in the course of their seemingly legitimate activities, continue to feed fat on this country. By contrast, the rest of us have to contend with a  Hobbesian kind of existence.

Probably, it would have been easy to put up with the antics of these post-colonial masters, but for the fact that we continue to pay them so much for virtually doing nothing. An instance of this can be vividly seen in a recent rport which spoke to the performance of the 7th National Assembly. According to this report, there was the revelation that a staggering 191 out of the 360 members in the House of Representatives spent four years  without sponsoring any bill of their own. This laid-back profile of the House of Reps can also be seen in the fact that, out of  a total number of 755 bills introduced to the House, about 679 were initiated by private members, six were sent from the Senate, while 70 were executive bills. The reader is invited to do the calculations and comparative analysis as regards the minimal inputs of the over-paid House of Representative members to their fundamental business, which is law-making. Since the Senate members are Nigerians too and not angels from outer space, one can easily discern that their performance will be as dismal as those of the House of Representatives.

As if to worsen matters, the official plunder which goes by the name of stratospheric salaries and allowances for these locust-like beings has since been complemented by another harrowing dimension. This relates to the fact that, while it is possible to categorize those out-of-the-world salaries and allowances as the visibles, this ravaged country also had to contend with invisibles. Such invisibles can be seen in the mind-boggling corruption which, in varying degrees, is being perpetrated by these conscienceless social forces.

Let us take the legislators. Oversight functions constitute one of their basic responsibilities. How such oversight is carried out can be likened more to the policemen on our roads whose stock phrase is “wetin you carri”. In other words, this counter-balancing function becomes just another platform for the fattening of already-bloated bank accounts.

How about those in the executive? it was the same game of plunder. After drawing all kinds of allowances which bear no relation to our daily realities, sticky fingers continue to abound in this branch of government. President Muhammadu Buhari must have been so incensed by what happened in the recent past that he has vowed to recover all the stolen funds. In other words, and as we speak, what has really happened in the executive branch in the last 8 years was looting galore. According to Buhari, even the Second Republic actors smell like roses when comparisons are made. Thus, when one remembers the massive looting  between 1979 and 1983, one can then begin to imagine what the GEJ executive has done to this country.

As for the governors, they come in a class of their own. What we have here is a long-running binge, with no remorse. Typical features are: convoys of cars, chartered jets, a retinue of aides and, of course, self-indulgent first ladies who are ready to give Imelda Marcos a good run for her hedonistic devices. Meanwhile, the governors have played the game so well that, in their pre-occupation with varying degrees of  revolting and stinking opulence, they have even forgotten to pay civil servants and pensioners for several months.

And here, another sad chapter opens up. Rather than show remorse, they continue to defend themselves on the pages of newspapers parroting lies and half-truths. But the issue is so stark that all their Gobellian  effusions cannot wish away this very sensitive and dispiriting issue. For as we write, even as the governors have dropped the ball in this sensitive area, they continue to draw security allowances while Human Security has been thrown to the dustbin.

Certainly we cannot go on like this. We must move away from this hell-hole. Unfortunately, what is being said here cuts across the political divide. On this note, Chinua Achebes memorable phrase, ‘there was a country, continues to haunt.

One can only hope that our current democracy will not come to grief courtesy of the monumental costs which come with governance  or better still, malgovernance.

Kayode Soremekun