DANIEL: A METAPHOR FOR PATRIOTISM

Josef Omorotionmwan argues the need for public officers to do what is right and defensible

Our hearts bleed for the Nigerian public official. He is constantly in a dilemma, particularly when it comes to the issue of remunerating him for his services. If his pay is high, he is easily seen as a tax-eating parasite – over-paid and under-worked. Where his pay is low, and even where he volunteers free service, the conclusion is that he must be getting something by the side. In either case, he is a villain in the public eye.

In every situation, we have always advocated fair treatment for all. The public servant does not exist in isolation. His pay must be commensurate with the service he renders and must also be decent enough to enable him co-exist with his counterpart in private pursuits. After all, they both go to the same markets; and their children attend the same schools.

However, each time public officials became over-bearing and set for themselves remunerations that were unreasonable and over the bar, we also were in the vanguard asking for reasonableness. 

 This is where our legislative houses, both at national and subnational levels, are currently the undisputed heavyweight champions of the world! They can only appreciate this fact by our simple mathematics. Between their basic pay and humongous housing and transport allowances; between their lunch allowances and their committee sitting allowances and between the nebulous Constituency Projects and the bogus estacodes they draw both within and outside the country plus “the holiday tokens”, falls the shadow!

Sometimes, the legislators are unable or unwilling to appreciate their status as full-time employees of government. They are compelled by the Constitution to sit for at least 181 days in the legislative year; Add to this, 104 days of Saturdays and Sundays in the year; plus 30 days of public holidays in the year; and then add 50 days of paid recesses. You have a full year! Q.E.D.

Whatever happened to those attendance registers of those days? What is responsible for those vacant seats at the chambers, such that most times, the Houses are unable to meet at plenary for lack of quorum?

The easy excuse is that some of those absentee-members are either on committee assignments or engaged in one form of oversight or another. But we also know that some members are perpetually in their constituencies attending to their private businesses.

This is against the spirit and letter of the constitution. Like other government employees, the legislator is not allowed to engage in any other pursuit except subsistence farming during the tenure.

The situation in Nigeria today is precarious. But all hope is not lost. The signs and sounds emanating from the Tenth National Assembly are encouraging.

Senator Gbenga Daniel (APC/Ogun East), 67, is certainly not a professional politician but a professional in politics. Before venturing into politics, he was already making waves in the world of business, sitting at the head of various conglomerates, including Kresta Laurel Ventures and Conference Hotels Holdings.

He was Governor of Ogun State from 2003 to 2011. On the ease of doing business, he is a pioneer advocate of the Public- Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement, which came handy in the administration of Ogun State.

Have you ever seen a man, so cool, so calm and so calculated; a man of stoic discipline; and a total embodiment of human kindness? That man is our subject for today – Senator Gbenga Daniel. He is one man who knows even when his country is broke and it needs help!

He took the Senate, and indeed, the nation, by storm recently when he announced that he had transmitted a letter to his state government, asking that his pension be stopped for the duration of his stay in the Senate. He couldn’t see himself drawing double emoluments from a government that is desperately gasping for breath and even borrowing to service its debts.

Gbenga is a jolly good fellow, and a clear metaphor for patriotism! We salute you and we salute your courage and the spirit of volunteerism!

However, all those calling on past governors who are now in the Senate to follow Daniel’s example simply miss the point! First, why are they picking only on the governors, when there are many other categories of retired workers who are drawing multiple emoluments from the same government?

What is good for past governors is also good for retired permanent secretaries, ministers, directors, school principals, professors, lecturers, doctors and other retired workers who are in government service across the country, collecting multiple emoluments from government.

The spirit of volunteerism cannot go too far in this respect. If you like, call from now till next year for people to come and imitate Daniel. The response will only remain poor. After all, the people did not get their pension through volunteerism. The package came through legislative enactment. You can also only withdraw it through legislative enactment. What is urgently required now is A Bill For An Act To Abolish Multiple Emoluments To Any Body In Government Service. This will be the short title of the bill.

In other climes, this law would have been called the Gbenga Daniel’s Law. The bill can go through all the committee mazes and passed into law in less than a month. You will be amazed at the veritable source of revenue you just brought to governments at all levels!

Apparently, Gbenga took the shine off our President. For a man desperately in search of legitimacy, if on that day of his inauguration when he pronounced death on petrol subsidy, and was asking the people to make sacrifice and proceeded one simple step further, “This call for sacrifice will involve all and certainly, including myself. For a start, I have directed the Lagos State government to stop the payment of my pensions forthwith. As soon as the National Assembly is inaugurated, I shall forward to them, A Bill For An Act For The Prohibition Of Multiple Pay Points For Anyone In Government Service. While we shall urge the National Assembly to give the measure accelerated consideration, the subnationals shall be encouraged to domesticate the same law in their domains”.

In our disgust for the idea of one man, in one life time, collecting multiple pensions from one government, we once discovered one man who retired from the Army as a General; he became a Minister of the Federal Republic; and finally went to the Senate, where he became its president severally. Was he collecting pensions in all the points? We wrote an article in which we described him as a cat of nine lives.

We are reminded that Gbenga is not alone. For a very long time, particularly during the campaigns of the last general elections, one of the presidential candidates maintained, perhaps with monotonous regularity, that since leaving office as state governor, he has not got even a bottle of water from the state!

This would have been very instructive, if politicians were listening to one another.

All the same, it is not yet late. In times like these, we certainly need all the help we can get to pull us out of this bottomless pit!

Omorotionmwan writes from Canada