A group which advocates accountability in governance, BudgIT, has dragged the Clerk of the National Assembly, Mr. Salihu Maikasuwa, to court over the legislature’s budgets from 2011 to 2015 worth N600bn.
Founder of the group, Mr. Seun Onigbinde, said on Tuesday that Maikasuwa rejected his request to know how the legislature’s budgets of the 7th Assembly were implemented.
Onigbinde said this during a radio programme on Nigeria Info titled, Midday Dialogue.
He said, “The budget of the National Assembly had been N150bn every year. So, I applied to the clerk of the National Assembly who is a civil servant and the custodian of the Assembly. I invoked the Freedom of Information Act and told him to provide the details of how N600bn allocated for the 7th Assembly in the last four years was spent.
“A month later, the clerk replied by saying that the information was personal and was not covered by the FoI Act.
“We found the response of the clerk very embarrassing. The response was that the details of how the National Assembly spends its money are personal and that they can’t release it. He said there were third parties involved and many other things.
“But the FoI Act protects only private and personal information. It does not cover those who spend public funds. When you are spending public funds, you have no right to call that personal anymore. But we have taken the matter to court.”
Onigbinde noted that the N150bn given to 109 senators and 360 members of the House of Representatives was excessive.
He explained that less than N2bn was spent on National Assembly staff. He, therefore, wondered how the remaining N148bn was spent since the total salaries and allowances of all the lawmakers were less than N20bn yearly.
He said, “Even most of the lawmakers will tell you that they don’t know how much they earn. So, it is whatever they find in their accounts that they take. This is opaque and leaves room for corruption.”
Onigbinde reiterated the call by the Senate President, Bukola Saraki and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Yakubu Dogara, that the Assembly’s spending must be made public.
“When they were campaigning for leadership positions, Saraki and Dogara said they would make the National Assembly budget open and well detailed so that you can know how much the person representing you is entitled to. We want the lawmakers to raise a motion in the 8th Assembly to this effect,” he said.
He said besides the legislature, other Federal Government agencies such as the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency; the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria and the Nigerian Communications Commission all operated secret budgets.
He said if the National Assembly could lead by example, other agencies would also be prudent.
Onigbinde said, “The National Assembly is the only one that can ask other agencies to make their budgets open. The danger here is that the budgets for FAAN and NCCA are not open and that was why a former Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, quietly got to buy two BMW cars from the budget because nobody knows how the NCCA’s budget is spent.
“When things are not open, there is always the opportunity for corruption to thrive. If two BMW cars were not bought for N255m, it could have been used to pay about 5,000 workers that are unpaid today. We don’t know that everything has consequences.”
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