The idea is nothing new. But because of the nation’s cash crunch and cost of governance, the call has been resonant for Nigeria to rethink its present pattern of government and prune activities and personnel to make governance lean and mean.

The latest of such calls came from a former governor of Abia State and present senator, Orji Uzor Kalu. He broadcast on social media that the legislative houses in the centre and the states should adopt a part-time system and meet when necessary.

“I think it will be a very good idea if my colleagues and other members of the houses of assembly will agree that we can sit for three months and do constitutional amendment first,” the senator said.

“So we can sit four times a year and if there’s any emergency, there will be emergency sitting.”

We must note that such assertions reflect a desperation on the part of Nigerians who wish to make governance lighter and in touch with the greater majority of our citizens.

Such calls believe that the legislature will spend less on salaries and allowances and lower the cost of maintaining the offices and staff as well as the bureaucracy of the legislature. Such costs actually have infuriated many citizens. For instance, a senator’s salary may be a comparatively modest N2 million a month. But the allowances rack up to N13.5 million, and that amounts to over N14 million a month, and the full year pay is about N170 million per year. For a four-year term, a senator goes home with over N600 million.

The president just approved a minimum wage of N70,000. This is a wide gulf from what their lawmakers make. So, it goes without saying that the lawmakers will save Nigerians a lot of money if the government pares the lawmakers pay. But we must note that it will take the lawmakers to overturn their own prosperity.

Senator Kalu has exhibited courage to call for this chastening of their happy days. But he is just a lone voice. Again, it has also been a source of fury in the land that the lawmakers paid N150 million for sports utility vehicle for each of their members and this ran into billions that the average citizen could not fathom.

Lawmakers of all political parties embraced this, and it was a marker that our current crop of politicians are not averse to a wanton life.

The mistake of such calls for pruning the legislature is the assumption that the problem with Nigeria is system. The system, whether presidential or parliamentarian, is a child of culture. We have not grown above the showy decadence of one politician going to his village, filching their votes and then returning to build a palace in the same village. The same villagers would line up to feast with the local hero in that palace, and beg for money for school fees and casava processors. When they get the cynical requests, they hail the local hero again and fight and even die to return him to his life of contemptuous languor.

We should recall that this call for a smaller legislature and with a spare schedule is not only not new in rhetoric, but we have had it before in the First Republic. It was then that we began the so-called 10 percenters and the lawmakers were no different in lifestyle from what we have today, except that they have become more daring and increasingly morally footloose.

In spite of these drawbacks, we still believe that the idea of a new schedule for lawmakers and smaller pay is worth the try. But the campaign, like Kalu suggested, must start in the people’s assemblies, and the people must insist that they will only vote for persons who would oblige.

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