Twenty one states of the federation are seeking loans amounting to N1.65 trillion to fund their 2024 budget deficits despite the increase in the allocations they have received from the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) in the last one year. 

From June 2023 to June this year, all the 36 states and the 774 local governments received a total of N7.6 trillion from FAAC. This increase in revenue is largely due to the removal of petrol subsidy by the federal government on May 29, 2023. 

Findings by Daily Trust show that the 36 states are projected to receive N5.54 trillion from FACC for this year as against the N3.3 trillion disbursed to them last year.

Under the current revenue-sharing formula, the federal government receives 52.68 percent; while states and local governments get 26.72 percent and 20.60 percent respectively. Such federation revenues, in addition to internally generated revenues of each tier, are expected to facilitate development across the three tiers of government, and also ensuring that the governments fulfill their financial obligations. 

The FAAC allocations to local governments for June were paid directly to the state governments.

 The Supreme Court had, on July 11, affirmed financial autonomy for the local governments. The apex court directed that the financial allocations meant for all the 774 local government areas in the country be paid to them directly. It said it is unconstitutional for state governments to keep and manage allocations on behalf of the local governments. 

States’ borrowing patterns 

Investigations by Daily Trust show that 21 states have expressed intentions to borrow a total sum of N1.650 trillion from both internal and external sources to fund their 2024 budget deficits.

Other states are yet to upload their borrowing plans. 

According to details of the borrowing plans made public, the Adamawa State Government is to borrow N68.46 billion; Anambra N245 billion; Bauchi, N59.08 billion; Bayelsa, N64 billion; Benue, N34.69 billion; Borno, N41.71 billion; Ebonyi, N20.5 billion; Edo, N42.71 billion and Ekiti State, N27.15 billion. 

Others are Jigawa, N1.78 billion; Kaduna, N150.1 billion, Kebbi, N36.7 billion; Katsina, N163.87 billion; Kogi, N37.08 billion; Kwara, N30.76 billion; Osun, N12.36 billion; Oyo, N133.4 billion; Nasarawa, N32.93 billion; Gombe, N73.75 billion; Enugu, N103 billion and Imo, N271.34 billion.

Breakdown of states’, LGAs allocations in 1yr 

The monthly FAAC allocations to the 36 states and the 774 local governments from June last year to June this year stood at N7.6 trillion. This represents an increase of over 40 per cent. 

In June 2023, states got N299.92 billion; local government councils (LGCs), N221.79. July: states, N310.670 billion, LGCs, N229. 409 billion. August: states, N319.52 billion; LGCs, N236.23 billion. September: states, N361.19 billion; LGCs, N266.54 billion. October: states, N287.07 billion; LGCs, N210.90 billion. November: states, N379.41 billion; LGCs, N278.04 billion. December: states, N396.693 billion and LGCs, N288.928 billion.

In January this year, state governments got N379.407 billion; LGCs, N278.041 billion. February: states, N366.95 billion; LGCs, N267.15 billion. March: states, N398.689 billion; LGCs, N288.688 billion. April: states, N403 billion; LGCs, N293 billion. May: states, N388.419 billion; LGCs, N282.476 billion. June: states, N461.979; LGCs, N337.019 billion.

Allocations from Value Added Tax also rose year-on-year by 228.8 percent to N2.42 trillion in the first five months of 2024, up from N736.06 billion in the first five months of 2023. 

The 13 percent derivation fund received by oil producing states also rose by 234 percent to N519.83 billion in the first five months of 2024, up from N155.5 billion in the first five months of 2023.    

20% of June allocation enough to build 320 PHCs

In June this year alone,   the FAAC allocations to both states and local governments crossed the N1 trillion mark with N1.3 trillion.

If the standard of N500 million outlined by the World Health Oganisation (WHO) for establishment of an averagely equipped primary healthcare centre facility is anything to go by, 20 percent (N160 billion) of the June allocation is enough to put in place 320 of such health facilities nationwide.

There’s need for accountability – Experts 

The Executive Director of the Centre for Fiscal Transparency and Public Integrity, Umar Yakubu, said there is a need for accountability regarding how the allocations to the states are being spent. In an interview with Daily Trust, Yakubu noted that the removal of the petrol subsidy has led to a significant increase in revenues, especially at the states and local governments. 

He said: “The major issues is that governments think the more they make revenue, the more they solve problems because the accountability mechanism is so weak and the audit processes are not good enough to check excesses. 

“So, what you have is more Naira into the system and the few who have access to them will convert them to dollars, which is the major reason our foreign exchange market has not stabilised because of too much Naira chasing few dollars. 

[DailyTrust]

“Therefore, we call for accountability which has to be in place to check corruption because as you can see, more money has come, but no state is recruiting, no state is increasing pensions or allowances of workers or event increasing capital expenditures because they are just siphoning money without accountability”, he said.  

Also speaking to Daily Trust, a development expert, Victor Agi, said if the issue of accountability at the sub-national level is not tackled head-on, the challenges at the grassroots would continue. 

 Agi said state governments must be accountable with the increased revenues to drive growth at the grassroots.  

“One of the issues is that people always blame bad governance on the federal government, forgetting that governors also get huge allocations to develop their various states. 

“In the last one year, revenues have grown by almost 50 per cent, yet the governors can’t improve welfare of their workers and the people in general. For instance, the president signed the national minimum wage of N70,000 and some of the governors are kicking that they can’t pay despite increase in revenues. This indicates that something is wrong. 

“What is more disturbing is that the same issue will now be encountered in the local governments now that their allocations will be paid directly. There is need for more awareness from civil society to ensure that development at the grassroots is implemented now that revenues have increased,” he said.

The Federal Government says it is working on introducing a training scheme equivalent to the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, for graduates of the Nigeria Certificate in Education, NCE.

The Minister of State for Youth Development, Mr Olawande Wisdom, made this revelation during the opening of the BEMORE OYO 2024 Summer Bootcamp in Ibadan on Monday.

Wisdom said the ministry would partner with the Ministry of Education to introduce new training reforms, one of which is the equivalent of NYSC training for NCE holders and others.

According to him, social vices had been around for long but the training of youths by organisations such as the Boys’ Brigade, Girl Guides and others had kept many away from them.

“The major priority of the ministry is citizenship and training, and we are bringing them back.

“We have NYSC for those who finished from universities, but what of those who finished from NCE and others?

“So, we want to set up training such that you don’t need to go to other states to have it – you can have it in your state and the camp.

“A lot of reforms are going on and we are trying as much as possible to bring a renewed hope to people; to the girls and boys,” he said.

[DailyPost]

The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr. Wale Edun, yesterday reaffirmed the Federal Government’s commitment to local economic development and agricultural resilience.

The minister spoke during his visit to Kebbi State on the efforts by the Bola Tinubu administration to reinforce economic partnerships and tackle the challenges posed by natural disasters, including floods.

A statement by the ministry’s Director of Information and Public Relations, Mohammed Manga, said Edun’s visit was meant to address the significant impact of flooding on agricultural productivity.

The minister restated President Tinubu’s unwavering dedication to fortifying local economies and addressing the pressing issues caused by natural disasters.

He emphasised the proactive measures the Federal Government had taken, especially those facilitated through the National Economic Council (NEC) and supported by Kebbi State Governor Nasir Idris. 

The measures, Edun said, included the allocation of N3 billion each to the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

Edun, who was accompanied by Governor Idris and the Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, Senator Atiku Bagudu, toured the WACOT Rice Limited’s facility in Argungu.

The state-of-the-art rice processing plant boasts an annual milling capacity of 120,000 metric tonnes and plays a critical role in supporting thousands of local farmers through its extensive procurement network and 8,000-strong out-grower farming programmes.

The facility is pivotal to bolstering local rice production and driving economic growth in the region.

The finance minister and his entourage also visited a rice farm facing the adverse effects of flooding, which poses a threat to agricultural productivity in Kebbi State.

Edun lauded the resilience of the local community and underscored President Tinubu’s dedication to improving security and boosting the productive capacity across the Northwest.

[TheNation]

Akeem Bello, the director of public health in Osun, says only two cases of mpox have been recorded in the state since January.

Speaking with NAN on Monday in Osogbo, the state capital, Bello said surveillance activities have been intensified.

“We have had only two cases this year, one in March and the latest in the last week of August,” he said.

“The new case was in Ilesa, and we promptly conducted contact tracing to determine if others had contracted the disease.”

He said the August patient was stable adding that the state government had activated an emergency operations centre (EOC) for mpox.

He said health workers are undergoing training and retraining to improve their ability to identify and manage the spread of mpox.

Bello added that weekly meetings would be held to review events, noting that residents are advised to prioritise personal hygiene.

“Although the m-pox vaccine is not readily available in Nigeria, the government has assured residents that they will receive it when it becomes available,” he said.

Bello reassured members of the public that the situation is under control.

In a separate statement, Jola Akintola, Osun commissioner for health, said a meeting of the mpox emergency operations centre (EOC) was held at the ministry of health in the state capital.

Akintola emphasised that mpox is a preventable disease and commended Ademola Adeleke, the state governor, for his proactive leadership and dedication to public health.

[TheCable]

So this is what ‘’E mi lokan’’ is all about? Splurging billions of public money to indulge President Tinubu’s penchant for over-the-odds luxury while millions of Nigerians wallow in abject hardship which he brought upon them?

Last week amid embarrassing reports of Chinese companies seizing our valuable national assets abroad over defaults in contract agreement with some states and worsening conditions of living in the country, an Airbus 330 aircraft costing 150 million US dollars reported to be the new presidential jet made an in-your-face landing at Zik airport Abuja.. The week before, it was also reported that the presidency had taken delivery of a full option presidential car, a Cadillac Escalade worth about 500 thousand US dollars. When you throw in the presidential Yacht which was purchased sometime last year at the cost of some 6 billion naira you get a sense that President Tinubu who had repeatedly called on Nigerians to bear his harsh economic measures will not by any stretch of the imagination lower down his indulgence as he had preached to Nigerians. His answer to Nigerians who questioned the need for such profligate indulgence by this is that whether on air, land and sea he will not be denied one bit, his desire to live it up maximally at the expense of Nigerians because that is what the ‘’E mi lokan’’ which he bought by his own money during the elections as he told us, was all about. If Nigerians cannot comprehend that this is what his presidency was about we can go take a running jump off a cliff for all he cares.

But while President Tinubu’s brutal, in-your-face candour on this issue is appreciated, the part that galls most is the rather clumsy, pathetic, unsophisticated and ignorance shown by some of the president’s aides in trying to explain or justify the purchases. The most common of such explanations is that just because we are in a situation of dire economic straits, our president should not be denied the means of decent and safe air travels befitting the country’s status in Africa and the world. In effect that means the planes in the presidential fleet are not worthy of the president’s use and should rather be mothballed.

Harping on this line of thought one presidential aide displayed his preposterous ignorance by stating that the purchase of the A 330 presidential jet will save the country money in terms of maintenance costs being a relatively newer one than the others in the fleet who have been gulping a lot of money in that regard due to their age. If that aide had checked deeply, he would have realised that a plane is as good as its maintenance not necessarily its age. And whatever its age, a plane must go through mandatory calendar checks like the C and D when the times are up for it whether it has been put to use or not. And this entails costs depending on the aircraft type and the maintenance service agreements. What is more if the A330 will be run by a foreign crew then the costs will not be significantly less if at all. Long and short of it is that to say that the new presidential A330 will entail lesser costs in maintenance as the presidential aide said is a display of either ignorance or deception, or even both because in addition to the cost of purchasing the plane, the cost of mandatory maintenance and associated costs that come along with running the aircraft is also included.

Another influencer who is on retainership with the administration even went beyond the pale of his characteristic unreasonableness in defending this purchase by comparing Nigeria’s situation with that of the United States of America. He claimed that the cost of buying a new plane for the US president was around 4 billion dollars and so Nigerians should not gripe over the 150 million dollars cost of buying the A330 presidential jet for President Tinubu. Many Nigerians consider that as comparing apples with oranges for the simple reason that Nigeria and America are not in the same bracket by any parameter of comparison.

In all if we add up the billions budgeted for the renovation/refurbishment of Dodan barracks in Lagos turning it into a nest of opulence and luxury as well as the residence of the Vice-President both in Lagos and Abuja, it is hard not to arrive at the conclusion that the Tinubu administration is engaged in a contradictory and wicked deception over its call on Nigerians to bear the prevailing harsh economic policies in the country.

What is patently clear from all this and which Nigerians have to come to terms with, is that President Tinubu came to power with a mission of building and consolidating a personal economic and political monopoly in which Nigerians of whatever status will be beholden to him. This is in tandem with the E mi lokan proclamation that he made to Nigerians which is clearly unfolding as we go along. Nigerians should therefore not be surprised or expect that President Tinubu would inconvenience and deny himself the full range of available luxuries and perks of the presidency he laboured for so long one way or the other to get to.

And by the same token Nigerians should not expect a let up in the prevailing harsh conditions because the resources embedded in the system that are needed to build education, health and other essentials of life are needed more to build the economic and political empire President Tinubu had be angling for all this while. Thus Nigerians must not just bear it, they must come to accept it as fait accompli because it is President Tinubu’s time to fulfil his manifest destiny and he will pursue it with minded ruthlessness whether Nigerians like it or not. The only form of succour and benevolence that Nigerians can expect are the puny ‘’palliatives’’ thrown at them periodically when they cry out.

(Being a Distinguished Public Lecture Delivered by Prof. Tunji Olaopa, professor of public administration and Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, at the Maiden Annual Association of Retired Heads of Service and Permanent Secretaries of Oyo and Osun State – ARHESPSOOS - held at the International Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, on Wednesday, 21st of August, 2024)

The recently concluded maiden annual distinguished public lecture of the Association of Retired Heads of Service and Permanent Secretaries of Oyo and Osun State (ARHESPSOOS) held at the International Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, provided another opportunity to brainstorm on the present challenges and future possibilities of the civil service system in Nigeria. The occasion is a significant one for the fundamental reason that it pools the administrative experiences of retired heads of service and permanent secretaries who in their own rights constitute a legitimate institutional memory that ought to be harness in all the conversations that reflect on and rethink the capability of the civil service in Nigeria.

For those familiar with my public commentaries on the civil service and its institutional reform, my preferred methodological approach is to deploy a mix of historical and analytical methodology to outline a trajectory of administrative development, philosophies, and management design thinking to interrogate the current state of the civil service in Nigeria, as basis for our reflection on the future of public administration in Nigeria. This method not only allows us to make critical deductions from the narrative about administrative history and praxis in Nigeria and how they have influenced and affected the series of reform strategies and programmes that have been put in place to redirect the civil service system. Further than this, these deductions allow us to explore extrapolations and scenarios for future reform possibilities, with the objective of excavating a number of recommendations that could possibly feed into the policy intelligence of the political and administrative leadership in Nigeria in their spirited efforts to transform the institutional capability requirements of the civil service necessary for achieving democratic service delivery, infrastructural development and ultimately, national socio-economic transformation.

Public administration has come a long way in historical reckoning. From the ancient pharaonic society to the height of Roman sociopolitical requirement, public administration was a phenomenon whose necessity has increased in complexity today. The ancient Pharaohs needed to dam the River Nile and build the mathematically complex pyramids. The ancient Romans needed to efficiently win many complex wars and ingeniously build many engineering feats. From the scribal authority of the ancient pharaohs to the tenured and salaried profession that public administration demanded in the Roman Empire, public administration eventually evolved into a noble vocation that mirrored the Levitical spiritual order of the Hebrews. With Max Weber, the bureaucracy was modelled into a legal-rational command-and-control structure that reflects the Prussian military governance system.

This is the origin of the “I-am-directed” Weberian administrative tradition that Nigeria, as well as most countries of the world, inherited. This tradition conceives of the bureaucracy as a neutral, hierarchically organised, efficient organisation, which demands precision, continuity, discipline, strictness and reliability. The framework of the legal-rational authority privileges written rules and procedures. Each position in the bureaucracy has its duties and rights, which are clearly defined; rules and procedures are laid down to determine how the given authority is to be exercised. Bureaucracy therefore promises a stable organisation, despite the fact that its incumbents come and go. How did the bureaucracy then earn its bad reputation? A better question is: What is it about the bureaucratic system that makes it so powerful as to threaten its very own essence as well as the service it is supposed to carry out on behalf of government? The short answer is that as the locus of governmental power, the bureaucracy is saddled with the coordination of complex administrative that raises the possibility that street-level and front-line bureaucrats follow rules for their own sake.

This is the origin of the bureau-pathologies of the civil service system, a pathological predicament that is aggravated in a postcolonial context like Nigeria. Douglas McGregor characterized that tradition as Theory X, a transactional model that conceive of the administrator as a thermostat regulating an organization founded on a bleak picture of employees. Theory X is undergirded by the perception of human nature as indolent, lacking motivation, naturally egoistic and resistant to change. This is why it became necessary to impose a legal-rational framework. The General Order (GO) represents the codified operating standard for this administrative model.

By 1968, the Fulton Report had already been submitted as Britain’s concession to the new managerial revolution of that time, and the urgency of reforming the British civil service that had become a great rock in the tideline. By 1974, the Udoji Commission Report had taken the challenge of reorienting Nigeria’s civil service system away from the Weberian tradition towards managerialism. The Report’s assessment of the system is its administrative inflexibility which makes it difficult to anticipate and respond to governance and administrative challenges and positive institutional transformation. This particularly concerned, for example, the generalist-professionals rivalry, and the need to inject the system with new blood working within a result-oriented performance management model. Since this Report, and the failure to ground its fundamental recommendation that would have strategically transformed the civil service system, Nigeria has been swinging between moving away from the Weberian tradition (as in the Dotun Phillip Report of 1984 that would have managerialism as the foundation of the civil service) and the Allison Ayida administrative revisionism that reconstituted the system along the Weberian order based on the conception-reality gap it detected in the Philip Report.

And yet, since the 1999 commencement of Nigeria’s democratic experiment, the civil service system has witnessed a series of institutional reforms that keep pushing the system towards the goal of being a world class institution. These reforms include the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), SERVICOM, pension and pay reforms, the professionalisation of the FOS/NBS, FIRS/NEITI, the price intelligence and procurement reform, fiscal responsibility plus MTSS/MTEF, to name just a few. But these achievements are too small and far in-between to short-circuit the already distorted trajectory of organizational development through the five-stage life-cycle: birth-adolescence-maturity-institutionalisation-reformulation. We have majorly the military intervention in Nigeria’s political development to ‘thank’ for this.

An engineering metaphor helps make the point of reform very clearly: Whereas the Nigerian state urgently needs an administrative backend that is efficiently propelled by a jet engine, what the many years of administrative hiccups, institutional disruptions, reform misconceptions and fortuitous breakthroughs have equipped the bureaucracy with is the capacity inherent in the engine of a Beatle car. Essentially, the service workforce structure can be characterized by a situation where there are too many doing nothing, too many doing too little, and too few people doing too much. It is not surprising therefore that a key part of diagnosis of the system’s dysfunction is the execution trap derivable from the system’s inability to achieve capability readiness for democratic service delivery. And so, in a 2005 study, a World Bank review reported the finding that: 29% of development programmes ever got completed, 45% of on-going projects are rated satisfactory, and 26% of such projects usually get cancelled.

How then can we move from institutional debilitation to bureaucratic reform? Institutional reforms underscore the possibility of creatively evolving a developmental democratic state in Nigeria. Such a state, in global discourse, is backstopped by a functional, effective, efficient and optimal civil service system. And so, the reform of the public service is the first condition towards such objective. This means that the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs)—the engine rooms of the public service system and therefore of governance—must be adequately capacitated to become effective and efficient as the formidable institutional framework that would be ready at all times to meet the challenge of nation building, good governance and national development. This requires a change management framework that is anchored around three critical frameworks of significantly reprofiling:

a. the quality of bureaucratic efficiency;

b. the quality of service delivery and performance accountability within a democracy; and

c. the professionalism of the public servants

These critical frameworks focus the objective of institutional reform: the public bureaucracies must be transformed to become:

 Fast moving, intelligent, professional, information-rich, flexible, adaptable and entrepreneurial;

 Less employee-focused and rule-driven, deliver quality service;

 Performance-focused, accountable and productive—defined y objectives and measurable results, outputs and outcomes;

 Capable of creating the policy climate that will unlock the energy of the private sector and other sectors and to install a new productivity paradigm in the national economy;

 Operated by multidisciplinary team of new generation public managers and project teams signed on to performance agreements or contracts within carefully crafted ministerial scorecards to which everyone is held accountable;

 Bound within a framework of social compact stewardship that sees citizens as clients deserving of effective and efficient services

To achieve such a new public service demands several systemic and structural imperatives in change management that go straight to the heart of the old Weberian administrative tradition, and its business model and procedures. The first is that a developmental state demands neo-Weberian administrative framework. The idea of the neo-Weberian is useful for two reasons. One, the managerial revolution in most Western countries was not an attempt to entirely jettison the Weberian model. Rather, the reform efforts were an incremental attempt to recalibrate its efficiency and effectiveness. Two, the Weberian bureaucratic framework has not outlived its utility, especially when considering the African context. The implication of this is that the new public management has to be brought into conversation with the Weberian tradition to be able to achieve the effectiveness and efficiency of the new public service envisioned in Nigeria.

The second imperative is the urgency of rethinking the intellectual foundations of public administration as the vehicle for the administrative reconstruction of the Nigerian state and the quest for good governance. This will involve several developments. There is first the need to reflect on a non-adversarial and cooperative relationship between politicians and administrators. Secondly, the system demands a firm and meritocratic gatekeeping measure that is founded on the principles of public-spiritedness and professionalism. And thirdly, the necessity of keying into global and regional best practices in terms of competency and human resource framework for doing government business and articulating efficiency in the workplace.

The next imperative is correlative. The new foundation on which the public service must be based needs a new generation and cohort of public managers who are capacitated with the requisite values and competences to manage the demands of the new public service that the developmental state in Nigeria needs to make an appearance in the fourth industrial revolution. This will necessarily serve as the first condition for the possibility of instituting a new performance management system and HRM framework that could transform the workplace efficiency and productivity, especially in the face of the new normal that COVID-19 has imposed on the world, and the flexibility demanded by the Gen Z. This is the move that transforms the service IQ in the form of a strategic leadership intelligence through the creation of a multidisciplinary talents-reinforced senior executive service (SES) guided by a new ethical professionalism.

Next, the new public service must deal with the demand of facilitating public-private partnership dynamics, and moving them to a higher level that allows good corporate governance principles to drive the frameworks for democratic governance. This enables, as part of the HR function transformation, the possibility of incorporating commercial skills as part of the HRM capacitation of the public managers. Lastly, none of these reform imperatives would make any sense if the public service does not facilitate a paradigmatic shift away from an adversarial to developmental industrial relations that makes it possible for the workplace to generate the level of performance and productivity commensurate with the reform inputs.

Transforming the civil service system is not an issue to be politicized. And the simple but fundamental reason is that it is the fulcrum for achieving sustainable development that constitutes the most significant objective of the developmental state. That, in overall analysis, is where the Nigerian state should be headed.

The Federal Government has stated that only eight universities have been accredited to award degrees to Nigerians in Togo and Benin Republic.

The Minister of Education, Tahir Mamman, made this known on Sunday night while speaking on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics programme.

Mamman, during a press conference last Friday to mark his one year in office, disclosed that over 22,500 Nigerians obtained fake degree certificates from the two countries, and such certificates would be cancelled.

The minister said the revelation was part of a report submitted to the Federal Executive Council by a committee with a mandate to probe degree certificate racketeering by foreign and local universities in Nigeria.

He added that the development follows the undercover investigation report in which a Nigerian journalist acquired a degree from a university in Benin Republic in under two months and used it to get deployed for the National Youth Service Corps.

Speaking during the programme, the minister said the federal government only recognised three institutions in Togo and five in Benin Republic while identifying others as illegal institutions.

Mamman listed the public universities below as the federal government-approved institutions to offer degree programs in Togo for students from Nigeria.

1. Universite De Lome

2. Universite De Kara

3. Catholic University of West Africa

The minister also listed five accredited universities authorized to provide degree programs in Benin Republic of Benin for students from Nigeria.

1. Universite D’abomey-Calavi

2. Universite De Parakou

3. Universite Nationale Des Sciences, Technologis Ingenierie Et Mathematiques

4. Universite Nationale D’ Agriculture

5. Universite Africaine De Devlopment Cooperatif

The minister also insisted that there is no going back on the decision of the federal government to cancel about 22,700 certificates awarded to Nigerians by some “fake” universities in neighbouring Togo and Benin Republic.

Mamman maintained that the decision to invalidate the certificates was not harsh as Nigerians who obtained degree certificates from such “illegal” tertiary institutions dent the country’s image.

He said, “Most of those parading the fake certificates didn’t even leave the shores of Nigeria but got their certificates through racketeering in collaboration with government officials at home and abroad.

“The “fake universities” capitalised on the “gullibility” of Nigerians patronising such fake schools.

“The federal government, through the offices of the Head of Civil Service and the Secretary of the Federation, would fish out those in the government’s employment with such fake certificates. I also urge the private sector to follow suit.”

[Punch]

I MET a former Member of the House of Representatives about five weeks ago. He had established a huge institution with sprawling structures. He said as an Honourable he found himself receiving N7 million monthly. He quickly decided to establish the institution. So, monthly, he went to his home town and poured the funds into the project. By the time his tenure came to an end, he had all that was necessary in place.

The Honourable’s revelation was a well guarded secret as Nigerians are not supposed to know the income of their representatives in the National Assembly, NASS. This may be so because the figures are subversive of good governance.

However, his narration fitted into the revelation in March 2018 by Senator Shehu Sani that each Senator was being paid a monthly salary of N750,000 with allowances totalling N13.5 million. It meant that the then monthly package of each Distinguished Senator of the Federal Republic was N14.25 million monthly.

That was about $40,000 monthly or some $480,000 per annum. In comparison, Senators of the United States, the richest and most powerful country on earth, were each earning $174,000 per annum.

There was an uproar. Senator Sani was criticised by his colleagues not because he told a lie against them. Rather, the issue was that he revealed a tightly guarded secret that could lead to incitement.

This revelation led to three suits being filed. Justice Chuka Obiozor of the Federal High Court in consolidating the suits, on June 4, 2021 ruled that the remuneration was illegal as the NASS has no power whatsoever to fix its salaries and allowances. He ordered a downward review of the legislators income.

It was assumed that the law makers would obey the Constitution, the laws of the land and the court judgement.

However, in the last one month, former President Olusegun Obasanjo revealed that the NASS was still fixing its own emoluments and paying itself bogus allowances.

The Senate came after Obasanjo, guns blazing. It characterised his accusation as “uncharitable and satanic”.

The Red Chamber Spokesman, Senator Yemi Adaramodu, Ekiti South, accused the former President of attempting to “crucify the legislature by the centurions of political hypocrisy”. I am still in search of the Distinguished to explain if this is English language, a literary translation of Ekiti dialect, or parliamentary privilege that grants him immunity to fire nuclear-guided grammatical missiles from the sanctuary of the hallowed chambers.

Then Senator Sani threw a bombshell; rather than reduce their emoluments as ordered by the courts three years ago, the Distinguished Senators of the Federal Republic had actually ballooned them from N14.5 million to N21 million monthly!

He was presented as a blatant liar by no less a dignitary than the Chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC, Mohammed .B. Shehu, a recipient of the Order of the Federal Republic, OFR, the third highest national honour in the country. He is, indeed, the highest authority in the land on the salaries and emoluments of public office holders as he presides over the agency responsible for the revenues accruing to and disbursement of such funds from the Federal Account.

The Chairman claimed that “each Senator collects a monthly salary and allowances of the sum of N1,063,860:00…” He then mumbled that “some allowances are regular while others are non-regular”. That is not the issue, rather, it is what are the monthly emoluments paid a Nigerian Senator?

So, do we believe this RMAFC Chairman or serving Senator Sumaila Kawu, Kano South, who on August 14, 2024 responded on BBC radio: “My monthly salary is less than N1 million (but) in the Senate, each Senator gets N21 million every month as running cost.”

Does the Commission Chairman expect anybody to believe him that the total monthly entitlement which accrues to a Senator is N1,063,860 when we are all witnesses to the fact that each legislator was allocated a Toyota SUV with a minimum N130 million price tag?

If all a Senator takes is a monthly N22 million, the cries from the public might not have been so strident. But the truth is that the legislators take far more than that from the national purse. For instance, the NASS annually pads the national budget.

Then President Muhammadu Buhari accused the National Assembly of padding the 2018 Budget by introducing 6,403 projects of their own, amounting to N578 billion. He also claimed legislators smuggled 6,576 new projects into the 2022 Budget.

When Senator Abdul Ningi of PDP Bauchi, claimed the NASS padded the 2024 Budget by N3.7 trillion or over 10 per cent of the N28.78 trillion budget, he was hounded out of the Senate and suspended on March 12, 2024. He was recalled after ten weeks based on pleadings that he had learnt his lessons.

Also, legislators were allocated constituency projects with some individuals netting billions of Naira. The process is so opaque that, until now, the precise amount allocated each constituency has not been made public.

The question is: must democracy be so costly that we virtually have to empty the Central Bank to pay the emoluments of political office holders?

If the basic duties of the NASS are law making, representation and oversight, is that arm of government not overpriced? Doubtlessly, if we scrap either the Senate or the House of Representatives, the quality of legislation we are getting will not reduce.

But does high cost translate to quality service? A comparison between the Cuban Senate and the Nigerian Senate puts a lie to this. Senators in the former do not get paid for their legislative work which is considered as patriotic service to the country. If a Cuban Senator wants to research a matter, he asks a university to do it for him. Yet, the quality of legislative work by the Cubans is not inferior to that of the Nigerians.

So, while the Cuban is freely voted for, the Nigerian Senator virtually pays the electorate to vote for him. The amount of funds available to the Nigerian parliamentarian is so much that in many cases, mini wars are waged to get elected.

The legal and ‘cornered’ funds flowing freely in the NASS may also be why governors find it one of the best places to retire after their tenure in office.

We cannot continue like this without endangering the democratic project and instigating the populace to insurrection.

The immediate step the NASS can take is to reduce parliamentarian emoluments and allowances to legal and constitutional levels. The second, is to stop corruption-inducing programmes like ‘constituency projects’ and the tradition of budget padding which, to me, is a crime. By the way, who says parliament should not be part-time as it is in practice? The ‘Ayes’ have it!

France held the Russian-born founder of Telegram Pavel Durov in custody for a second day of questioning on Monday over alleged offences related to the popular but controversial messaging app, which insisted he had “nothing to hide”.

His arrest after flying into the Le Bourget airport outside Paris late Saturday is the latest extraordinary twist in the career of one of the world’s most influential tech icons.

The detention of Durov, 39, was extended beyond Sunday night by the investigating magistrate who is handling the case, according to a source close to the investigation. This initial period of detention for questioning can last up to a maximum of 96 hours.

When this phase of detention ends, the judge can then decide to free Durov, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes magazine at $15.5 billion, or press charges and remand him in further custody.

Russia has accused France of “refusing to cooperate” while fellow tech mogul Elon Musk swept to Durov’s defence and called for his release. Durov holds a French passport in addition to other nationalities.

Durov had arrived in Paris from Baku, Azerbaijan, and was planning to have dinner in the French capital, a source close to the case said.

He was accompanied by a bodyguard and a personal assistant who always accompany him, added the source, asking not to be named.

France’s OFMIN, an office tasked with preventing violence against minors, had issued an arrest warrant for Durov in a preliminary investigation into alleged offences including fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organised crime and promotion of terrorism, another source said.

Durov is accused of failing to take action to curb the criminal use of his platform.

Telegram said in response that “Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe.”

“Telegram abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act — its moderation is within industry standards,” it added. “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”

– ‘Assault on basic human rights’ –

Durov founded Telegram in 2013 after his first project, the Russian social network VKontakte (VK), ran into ownership difficulties he blamed on the Kremlin. He left Russia in 2014.

Telegram has become hugely popular partly due to the ease of viewing and posting videos on its messaging “channels”.

But critics accuse it of hosting often illegal content ranging from extreme sexual imagery, disinformation and also services for buying drugs.

Russia’s embassy to Paris said it had demanded access to Durov but had had no response from France, saying “the French side is refusing to cooperate”.

Musk, who leads the Tesla car group and the X social media platform, formerly Twitter, posted the hashtag #FreePavel on X and commented in French, “Liberte Liberte! Liberte?” (Freedom Freedom! Freedom?).

US whistleblower Edward Snowden, who took asylum in Russia, blasted “an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association”, saying he was saddened Paris had “descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications.”

– ‘Express their freedoms’ –

One of the key questions is why Durov flew into France when he would have likely been aware he was wanted in the country. “Perhaps he had a feeling of impunity,” said a source close to the case, asking not to be named.

Telegram, an encrypted messaging app based in Dubai, has positioned itself as a “neutral” alternative to US-owned platforms, which have been criticised for their commercial exploitation of users’ personal data.

It also plays a key role in the war between Ukraine and Russia after Moscow’s invasion of its neighbour.

The app is used by Kyiv including President Volodymyr Zelensky in regular video statements to push Ukraine’s message across but also by the so-called Russian “Z-bloggers” who strongly back the war and report from the front.

In a rare interview given to right-wing talk show host Tucker Carlson in April, Durov predicted Telegram would have one billion users next year and insisted that despite his wealth his priority was to be “free”.

“My mission in life was to allow other people to also become free… and using the platforms that we created my hope was that they could express their freedoms. This is the mission of Telegram.”

[Vanguard]