Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, currently the minority leader in the Senate has carved a niche for himself as somebody who is not afraid to speak his mind or take a position on any issue since he was elected into the upper chamber of the National Assembly in 2007. The Senator, who was also a former deputy governor of Abia State has thus become a leading opposition figure not only in the National Assembly but in the country. He spoke to the Managing Director of The Nigerian Xpress, STEVE NWOSU and AKANI ALAKA on the politics of the Senate, the 2023 presidency, ongoing agitations in the Southeast, the performance of the APC government and the seeming crises in his party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP among other issues in this interview.
You’ve been the minority leader of the Senate for over two years now. How challenging has it been galvanizing the opposition not only in the Senate but also in the National Assembly to perform its expected role?
Well, I can say that it’s been very, very challenging in the sense that the concept of opposition is alien to the thinking of a lot of people, including people who are elected into the National Assembly and the executive – If you see what happens in the states where every governor becomes a mini-god and at the federal level, where the president is deified and there is now the impression that he can do no wrong. For somebody like me who has to critically assess or question what comes in, it will now look like you deliberately want to challenge the president or you are not worshipping at the feet of god. Let’s just put it that way. And it manifests in different ways and it’s pervasive – you are seen as somebody who is just a non-conformist because you are challenging something that you actually ought to look at. And I think that’s why Nigerians also look at the National Assembly with derision – because we had put it out there in the public that anything that comes from the president or the presidency, as the case may be is in the best interest of the country. But it may not necessarily be in the interest of the country. And, of course, now that we know that there is a difference between the president and the presidency in Nigeria, it tells us that you must question so many things that come from there. And we have seen evidence of serial breaches of the law, the constitution – but you would always want to ask, if you say ‘this is not right,’ why should somebody look at you as somebody who is ‘not playing ball’? That’s the situation.
Have you had any instances in which the minority caucus agrees to an issue at its meeting and members later changed their views during the plenary?
No, we have never had that. Our people are very firm and strong in their beliefs and the things that we agree on. And anytime we agree on something as a minority, we keep to that. But we also deal in a democratic space and I think the only unfortunate thing about the democratic space of the National Assembly is that anything that comes from us as the minority is immediately seen by our colleagues from the ruling party, not for the worth of it, but as a contest between APC and PDP. And with those kinds of blinkers, we no longer see Nigeria’s interest within what we discussed. The issues surrounding the Petroleum Industry Act and the Electoral Act clearly show that. In the Petroleum Industry Act, it was agreed during an informal discussion at the committee level led by the deputy Senate president who is also from the majority party and we agreed that for the host community, five per cent is a done deal. But when we got to the floor of the Senate, a senator from Katsina State now got up and proposed three per cent as opposed to the five per cent. And every effort that we made to say we have reached an agreement on this was frustrated. And when it was time for voting, you could just see everybody on the APC side going one way – which was why I talked about deification – it is like ‘this is coming from this side, the president is from a particular place, the person opposing it is from here, so I don’t want to be seen to be opposing, because I may be reported to the president and whatever I want, I may not get it’ – those kinds of things. I have to be very clear. Democracy was better under the PDP government than under the APC government because, under the PDP government, PDP senators would challenge whatever is coming from the president and say, ‘No, this is not right for the country.’ And this also comes back to what I have said earlier – when it is done, people from the party will go back to the president and said ‘this man is against you, he hates you’ and all that, Nigerians’ interest will now be suborned under that. But like a good friend of mine always said, you can’t have democracy without being democrats and what we see today is that a lot of non-democrats are playing in the democratic space.
Some of us outside are scandalized by the decision of the Senate on the electronic transmission of election results and all that. What are the problems?
This is what happens when people want to maintain an unfair way of winning an election. Everyone that is discerning in Nigeria knew that APC never won the 2019 elections. It was won by the PDP. But it was manipulated – remember that at that time, INEC came to court to say that they never had any server, which meant that the results were more or less manually crafted – let’s put it that way. And so, what would direct transmission do? What direct transmission does is that it removes that human element of manipulation – simple. It has been tried in Nasarawa House of Reps election, tried also in Edo and Kaduna and Ondo elections. And one thing that has come out of those elections was that there was no challenge on the veracity of the results. The challenge was now whether the person was qualified or not qualified to run and all that and that also means that those who are against electronic transmission were doing so to maintain that. And that’s why there is an allegation against APC that all they wanted was to rig election again. Before that date that we had that vote, this aspect was thoroughly canvassed. INEC came, being the agency that was saddled with the overall authority to conduct the election and said that they had the capacity and that they had tried it and that it has worked and that there is nowhere in this political space called Nigeria that they could not do it – even in the hard to reach areas. Now, what was the problem in hard to reach areas? The device they use is simple- you snap, just like you are taking a photograph and as you move to a particular point where there is a network, then, it automatically sends. But somebody now says, ‘no my constituency doesn’t have network, therefore, we will not support it.’ But you can see that it is some clear and simple, but some people will prefer that we still have that possibility of people writing results at collation centres and the local government centres and so on. That’s just it.
What would you say are the major achievements of the present Senate for the past two years?
It is not always good to rate yourself. It is always good for an outside agency to rate you because when you rate yourself, you tend to indulge in blowing your own trumpet and that’s something I think we shouldn’t do. We do that too much in Nigeria and little things that we ought to take for granted, we now blow it up. I mean, a governor pays salary and you blow it up – ‘he is paying salary.’ What is he supposed to do? He is supposed to pay salaries. ‘I’m paying pensions,’ – but is he supposed to do something else than paying pensions and building roads? That’s why he was elected. So, we also have to change the way we do the rating of ourselves. Some things are routines, you just leave them, they are routines actually. You wake up in the morning and you take your bath, are you going to hail yourself that you are taking your bath? That’s the kind of thing that I see going on around us. And this has also brought the ‘Kabiyesi syndrome’ around our executives. I deliberately call it the ‘Kabiyesi syndrome’ – this fact that every executive from every level – local government chairs, the governors, to the speaker, Senate president, the president – the heads of everything are seen that way and, of course, you have a coterie of people around them who always have to keep the king happy and things are said and done to keep them happy.
Do you think there are lessons to be learnt by Nigeria in what just happened in Afghanistan and what is your reaction on the alleged repentant Boko Haram being taken out of the battlefield to the society or even reabsorbed into the military and so on?
Of course, we can draw some parallels – I watched and listened to the speech of the President of the United States, Biden and he said that ‘those that we trained and assumed that they should be able to take care of themselves refused’ – in other words, they didn’t believe in the US ideology or whatever training they were getting and all that. They rather would have gone with their people and I think that that is where the analogy with Nigeria comes in. At a particular time and up till this moment, some of us, including me – have told the chiefs of our armed forces this – I do not believe that the Nigerian armed forces had fallen to the extent that the rag-tag bunch can easily run them over. And I have had discussions with the military people and I have asked them this question- I said ‘you went to Sierra Leone and imposed order on this same type of people. You went to Sierra Leone and imposed order on this same type of people. You went to Liberia and imposed order on this same type of people. Why is it difficult for you to impose order in Nigeria?’ And you can also situate it with what happened in Afghanistan now – it is now an open secret – but it was something that was happening, but everybody pretended that it was not happening – that there were people in the military, the security forces and so forth who had sympathies for the Boko Haram, the bandits and all those kinds of people. Of course, there were stories, people would say ‘when we told the troops that this is going to happen, they didn’t do anything about it.’ And then, the worst one was where people defended themselves, then, the next thing was that the security forces will come to arrest the man who defended himself. In other words, there was collusion in certain places and until that is dealt with; we will continue having these insecurity problems. And people would have to make up their minds whether we want a country or not because we can’t continue this way. I read, I think in one of the forums, a pathetic story about someone from the South-west who had a farm and said that after they have attacked his farm many times, he got information that the people who were attacking his farm are only afraid of the OPC people. He went to get the OPC people and then when the attack came again, they successfully repelled them and killed one or two of them. But rather than it being a thing for celebration, security forces now went from Abuja to arrest the OPC people. They took all their guns, thinking that they were illegally armed. But it was later that they found out that the OPC people were registered that they were able to release these OPC men through the help of one of the chief executives in that state. And what did that guy do? He saw that everything is finished if these people are being protected in this manner. He, therefore, closed his farm. Of course, by closing his farm, unemployment is increased, food insecurity is increased because he was also providing food for people and at the same time, making someone who has faith in this country lose faith and not just him, everybody who depends on him. We say it and we will continue saying it, but the impression is created that you are unpatriotic if you now point out this matter. Now, coming to the position of those who have repented, I agree with the position of ACF. It is not everybody who shows up and says that ‘I have surrendered’ that you will just allow to flow back into the society. That is a recipe for disaster. First, you must have to debrief the person, be sure that he hadn’t committed any crime – if he had committed any crime, he must be tried. Thirdly, he has to stay somewhere. So, does that state have the resources to continue to keep that number of people in detention somewhere and if they have, does the state also have the capacity to do a debriefing, all those things or do you just say that you have spoken with him and the man has sworn that he has repented and then, he walks away. So, the guy walks away, what are you going to get? You are going to get very, very serious difficulties. And that is what I think is very worrisome to a lot of us. In all our containment strategies for Boko Haram and all that, was there any plan, assuming this kind of thing happens? So, you could see that there is a lot of confusion around. It looked to me that nobody had anticipated that this could happen. Now, we are looking at what happened around that whole Lake Chad region – the conflict between ISWAP and Boko Haram under Shekau, the conflict between the Shekau faction and the Al-Barnawy faction and we don’t know – these people who are coming, the assumption was that they are members of the Shekau faction who don’t want to go with ISWAP. But who knows whether they are brainwashed people who were told to go back into society and give them information? Are they members of the Al-Barnawy faction? And then, we are looking and seeing thousands of women and children – where were they staying? That’s one question that nobody had asked. This government told us that they have decimated and dislodged all these people and that they were no longer around. But you are getting these thousands of people walking out of where? Questions upon questions. The evils that have befallen this land is coming from this APC and their lies and propaganda because they have made the people lose the focus that they should have used to tackle the festering problem. And, of course, that is also the problem of Nigeria – we tend to ignore problems and we think that they will fade out on their own. But they won’t fade away. They will be there, staring you in the face and that is what we are facing in the North-east now. I have my sympathy for the governor because I am sure he will also be wondering ‘what should I do?’ All these people too – the women, the children, the youths were also the people that were used to do the bombings in the market and so on. What are you going to do with them? Are you going to create an IDP camp for them or move them to an existing IDP camp? If you move them into an existing IDP camp, why is somebody in an IDP camp? They are there because they have been dislodged from their houses and they know that you dislodged them. And you are now coming to stay with them in the same IDP Camp? The questions are just many. There is a need for us to be able to interrogate our scenario-building because I think that it is not that this thing has not happened anywhere before or we don’t have the capacity. I think Nigeria can bring to bear proper thinking on what to do. The question is whether you can get those who have those special skills to do it because, as we say, the government of APC has weaponised nepotism and so, it doesn’t matter what skills you bring, you are given a job that you are not qualified for.
There are fears that with what is happening in PDP, the expected change of power in the country in 2023, which you have also said may be accomplished through the explosion of part of the ruling party may not be realized? But PDP itself seems to be facing an implosion?
No, PDP is not facing an implosion. PDP is going through the normal strains of an incumbency preferring to stay in office. So, you can now see that this question of people trying to sit in an office is also pervasive everywhere. There is just a school of thought seeking dominance. I think it is also better that it is happening now because if it had happened just before an election is due, then, we would not be able to get our acts together. But we have a convention coming and these whole things are things that would be resolved by the time the convention is done. Usually, when leadership is leaving – I think it is a human thing- you can see what Trump did; he did everything to remain in power and all that. So, there is always these trials and stresses. What I said in another interview was that they have what is called APC – different strains of people who just have a special purpose vehicle to get power from Jonathan. And on getting power, they first didn’t know what to do with it – that was why it took Mr President six months to form a cabinet. And at the end of the six months when he formed the cabinet, it was still the same underwhelming people he put there. That told us that they didn’t know exactly where they were going. There is a glue holding APC and that glue is just the president. And by the time he gets to the point in which the party does a convention to get its presidential candidate, the president will become what the lawyers called a functious officio – that glue will now break. It is the new man that will now have power. So, they are breaking and we can see the different strains – what is holding them is that thing, ‘oh we still have presidential power’ and, therefore, can mete out sanctions or benefits as the case may be.
But the APC is snatching key members of your party, including governors?
The point is this and we also said it too –the governors who have decamped, some promises were made to them and they, as we say in our local parlance, they ‘fall mugu’ – because they have all gone in there now and we have all seen that they have actually been swallowed and subsumed and no longer have a say in anything in APC. At the time they were in PDP, they were actually everywhere, very visible and all that. But now they have dropped into the ocean, they are no longer visible, just like a drop of water in a bowl. The reasons why they went there, only they can tell and I have had to say if the governor of Ebonyi says it is because PDP hasn’t talked anything about Igbo presidency, he is going to APC. Is APC talking about the Igbo presidency today? No. So, you can now see that there is no nexus between the reasons for leaving and the Igbo presidency. Now, the Governor of Zamfara on leaving said he was doing it for security reasons so that they will help him to tackle it. Has security problems in his state reduced when he went there? No, Zamfara is still under the same siege of bandits that was there before. So, he has nothing to do with getting extra support to tackle insecurity. The governor of Cross River said he is going because he saw that the president has managed the country well. How could he say such a thing? Last week, I think the World Bank came out with some statistics. But the most blistering was from Sanusi, the former Emir of Kano who said that all the gains that we have made as a country for over 30 years were wiped away within the five years of APC. So, the governor of Cross River could not have talked about economic management. How can he talk about economic management when inflation is in double digits, naira to the dollar is in haywire, the debt burden has more than quadrupled. And so, you can now see that there was no basis for such movement. And we in PDP know that they are being induced in certain ways to go where they are going. I would prefer that one is a man. Look, if God blesses you and you have become a governor – 36 persons out of 200 million and you got there, what is it that would make another man induce you in such a way that you lose your self-respect and integrity? What is it in this world? Maybe they don’t look at it that way. But we still feel that at the end of everything, there are still those values that should be imbued on anybody who is in charge of the lives and welfare of others.
Why do you think your party’s national chairman, Uche Secondus does not deserve a second term and I don’t know if you agree with those who have linked his ordeal to the 2023 ambitions of Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State?
When you say ‘why do I think’ you are making an assumption. From what I get from all those we have discussed with and from what people say – maybe the feeling is that the challenge to APC, to be able to win the election of 2023 and all that – needs another face. I don’t see that fact in saying it was mismanagement this and that. I think they just feel that ‘oh, you are not hitting hard enough’ and all that. But I think that party management is a little bit more than that and by the time we continue with the discussions that we are having, maybe we will be able to get a better idea of what is needed. When a party is in power, the person that is looked upon is the president, nobody looks at who the chairman of the party is and all that. But when a party is not in power, then, automatically, the chairman of the party becomes the person that everybody looks upon to show that same type of presidential direction that the party in power enjoys. And I think that maybe our members too may have to review their expectations of what somebody could do or not do while in office.
The 2023 presidential ticket of PDP, where should it go because some have said that is one of the things that may cause trouble for the party, especially in light of the quest for Igbo presidency?
You see, my very good friend and brother, Peter Obi has a very unique perspective on it. He said ‘if an engine is knocked, why are you looking for a driver?’ But I guess what you need to do is fix the engine. So, I guess what Nigerians need today is a top-class mechanic to fix the engine and the best mechanics are in the South-east.
But are you sure that when it gets to the crunch, the PDP will give the ticket to the South-east, because the permutations now are that a governor of your party from the South-south want to be a vice president to a candidate from the North and the chairmanship position of the party is now being pushed to the South-west and so on…
I think we need to know one thing- zoning is a gentleman’s agreement. It is not embedded in the constitution of the party because of the implications of exclusion of anyone or zone because that will affect the constitutional right of persons. Two, parties want to win elections and most of the time when a party wants to win an election; they look for a person that will be able to take it to that point of winning. Any party that doesn’t want to win an election is not a party; it can be an aggregate of individuals who want to push just a point of view. It is the same – APC, PDP, APGA whatever – every one of them will look for whoever can win an election. And it is those types of considerations that now come to play when you get to the crunch time. We used to have this traditional ruler. Unfortunately, he is late now. He used to say this Igbo proverb that the person who stretches out his hands is the one the dispenser will give tablets to. That means you also need to stretch your hands, also come and let’s know if you are interested. But you can see that right now, there is muted ambition – you are not even sure. If you ask this person, he will say, ‘No, I am trying to get my acts together, this and that.’ So, I think those questions will be answered when we now see those whose hands are at the dispensary.
You said zoning is a gentleman’s agreement, but unfortunately, we don’t have so many gentlemen in Nigeria…
But it has worked for us in the sense that if you notice – Christian/Muslim, yes. But Muslim/Muslim – ‘oh, it can’t work.’ How can you have two Muslims – as the president and the vice president? So, those are the kind of permutations and calculations that we have used to make peace in the polity. And then, you can also see that those who have broken this kind of permutations have also paid dearly for it. (Governor) El-Rufai felt that we have passed that stage, went ahead, brought a Muslim as his deputy and look at the turmoil in Kaduna. He doesn’t even have anybody to even talk to people in Southern Kaduna and, of course, what that brought was a sense of distrust that has continued to snowball into what has been going on there. Once a situation is created where there is distrust, any little incendiary thing ends up in a conflagration. So, you will see that there is always what we use – in a state, if somebody comes from this zone, he will go to another senatorial zone to take a deputy. Those are the kinds of things that are more or less settled issues now. But everybody wants to win in an election.
The agitations in the South-east are still going on despite the arrest of Nnamdi Kanu. We witnessed the stay at home order. But what do you think the Federal Government, the governors and other stakeholders like you can do to douse the tension in that region?
I have had to make this known to the government, to friends of government – the knee-jerk reaction of government at all times is always to apply force and this has not always worked. It just increased the cycle of violence and we had suggested that the government made a big mistake. And this is the mistake they made. There have always been agitations, there have always been a group of people who feel that that is the best way to go. But this is the only government that has refused to talk to people to say ‘what are the issues?’ Can we sit and can we go through the issues? What the government just did is to apply maximum force and then went ahead to go to court and label them terrorists. Once that was done, of course, it now also foreclosed the chances of any negotiation or discussion because are you going to be discussing with a terrorist? So, the government shot itself in the foot. And at any point that we now say why don’t we talk to these people, the government will now say ‘how can we talk to them, they are a terrorist group.’ Meanwhile, these same people are watching you as government and you are pandering to the wishes of bandits, the Boko Haram people, you are going ahead to even pay ransoms and so on. And they now move it back to say ‘you are doing this because you are dealing with us.’ And who are ‘us’? it is those of us – Igbo speaking people, South-east people – so you treat us differently. And that takes us to the fundamental that we have always said – that is you have to treat people with equity, fairness, fair play. And that’s why I said the government shot itself in the foot. And that also radicalized even those who are moderate and who felt that there could still be a way of discussion because they now said, because it’s us, you are treating us this way and all that. You saw when the president had to make a speech and he described all of us as a dot in a corner and whatever. And then, the attorney-general, in reacting to the Southern governors equates grazing with somebody that is a spare parts dealer and by providence, most spare parts dealers are from the South-east. That shows you that there are some kinds of mental blocks that those in this government have about how to go about it. And maybe, it has to do with the fact that Mr President is among the dinosaurs of the civil war era and still feels that we are still fighting. I think there is an interview which I did where I said the impression is still being given that the civil war is still being fought despite the three ‘Rs’ that Gowon initiated at the end of the civil war. The thing to do, if the government wants my opinion, is that you must get some credible people who can engage all these groups. Unfortunately, people think that it’s IPOB only but there are too many separatist groups. Just like people think it is only Igboho, but there are other separatist groups in the South-west, they are all over the place. And even the separatist groups in the Niger Delta are not being looked at. So, we must have somebody who is empathetic enough to the problems that can take a step back and say why don’t we look at these issues? But the unfortunate thing today is that there is so much lack of trust because those who ought to have shown statesmanship simply devolved into partisanship. If you talk to the youths in the South-east, they don’t trust anybody. But you need a president that will be able to reach out and show that he means what he says.
Your analogy of the fixing of the engine takes me back to the clamour for restructuring and each time we talked about it, we are directed to go to the National Assembly and coming to the National Assembly, we can always tell what will happen. Do you see any genuine effort or commitment to fix this country from the National Assembly?
I don’t see any genuine effort at restructuring.
Even with the ongoing review of the constitution?
What we are doing is an amendment to the present constitution. We are not making a new constitution. Maybe, if we do parts of the amendment and it passes successfully, then it may help. But I can tell you this too- as much as the constitution is flawed in several ways, if it is faithfully implemented, you will see a great change in this country. And I can tell you just one simple thing- I brought a bill to the National Assembly to create an Armed Forces Commission- it is embedded in the constitution, but it has never been utilized by anybody. Section 219 – it is right there, that we should set up an Armed Forces Commission to ensure that every appointment, especially of the officer corps reflects federal character. It is written there. I brought it and said it is our responsibility to activate it, but people shouted me down and we have this big argument on doing what is in the constitution. Now, in the constitution amendment, we are trying to find a way of giving some independence to the local governments. But in the constitution, what is actually there is not for state governments to take the funds of the local governments. What is there is simply is that you create an account where you as the state government now brings 10 per cent of your internally generated revenue for sharing, in addition to whatever is coming from the Federal Government to the local governments. But what do the states do? They hijack the whole thing. They don’t even put in anything. They take over what is there and go and do something else against what is there in the constitution. So, if you go through this constitution, you will see too many things. But I guess it is because this present government has so distorted the usage of the constitutional provisions and justified it in the way that you can never imagine that has now made most people – PANDEF, Ohanaeze, Middle Belt Forum and all others to now say,’ jettison it and let’s start afresh.’ Why people are saying that is that they have seen that there are no genuine efforts to even follow what is in the constitution. A particular section of the constitution says clearly that the president is under obligation to operate all the laws of the Federation. But what do we see? The president looks at the law, ignores it, does what he feels like and tries to justify the unjustifiable. And because the rest of us and especially those of us who are in the National Assembly don’t have any sanction – the only sanction being the most extreme sanction – which is removal from office- so, everybody shies away from confronting the president. So, you could see the reason why we are where we are. So, to come back to your mechanic analogy, I believe that you just need to have someone that has all these traits – management of our diversity, a thorough understanding of economics to be able to know how to grow an economy, a properly educated person to be sure that we know that we are now going to the next century and we have to compete with the rest of the world and then somebody who believes in the rule of law. Once you do that, I don’t believe Nigerians will not care where you come from. And I go back to one person- Murtala Muhammed at the point he became head of state, he came out and declared his assets as a military person – that sent shock waves throughout Nigeria at that time. That was somebody who wanted to follow the law. Of course, mistakes were made and we don’t know what would have happened if the coup had not taken place. But you can see that there was this outpouring of patriotism. Nobody saw him as coming from anywhere. All that they saw was somebody who believed in Nigeria.
You’ve been a deputy governor and you are a senator. What’s next for Abaribe because there are speculations that you may want to go back to your Abia and seek the ultimate political prize in the state in 2023?
Let me put it this way – I have been in the National Assembly. I spent a short time in the executive. I have seen the flaws everywhere. I have also been at the centre and I have seen also the differences between the centre and where I come from, my homeland. And I have realized that our people say that if your homeland is not good, there is nothing you are going to do outside that will give you any respect.
There is also the issue of what percentage of our national budget comes to this National Assembly
I can tell you. What comes here is two per cent of the National Budget. Our budget is over N10 trillion this year and what comes to the National Assembly is N128 billion – two per cent. I know where you are going and I can clear it with you so that you can also let the readers know. Unlike every other part of executive offices, running costs of our offices is being attributed to us personally by the media. But for other offices, their running costs are not attributed to them. So, I have a situation in which I earned about the same thing with Ministers, Governors – just about N2 million. So, the governor, his office will pay his bills if he wants to travel, his airfares and all that. They will say it is the governor’s office and that’s it. And I also need to travel and then, my office – the office of the Senator for Abia South, I am entitled to run this office, but the funds are attributed to me, they will say ‘the man is stealing our money and that is just what is going on.’ But there is budgetary provision made for travels, aides, and all that, for the office, just like for every other office. The minister, the provision is made for his office. In fact, for the ministry, a minister can decide that I’m travelling today with 10 persons and the permanent secretary will just approve funds for the ticket and all that. It used to happen here, but it became too cumbersome and I will just tell you how it became cumbersome – 109 senators; 360 members of House of Representatives. Let’s just take the 109 senators, so I need to travel, and there is only one office and that office cannot approve anything because they have to take it to the chief executive – that is the Senate President to sign. And so, you prepare your voucher and everything to say that I am going to Abia, I have to stop in Owerri; I am going to use, let’s say United Airlines – it’s N38,000. And I’m travelling with my media aide, another N38,000 two of them and you say okay N76, 000 and I take that there and that is now put in a file and you have to go and stand in the office of the Senate president to sign off on it. So, he signed off on it and then, you bring it back and go to accounts, then the accountant will approve it. Of course, if I am travelling tomorrow, this process will take one week. And so after a while, I think during the presidency of Pius Anyim, everybody saw that this was just a system that can’t work. So, what do you do? Since there is a budget, let each constituency office has its budget. And so, what you now do is that the budget is audited. That is what is going on. There is N128 billion that is coming to the National Assembly, but people forget that you have the staff, you have the senators, you have the House of Reps members, you have the whole bureaucracy here, you have the National Assembly Commission, you have the Public Complaints Commission, you have the NILS and everybody under that same budget. But they now look at us and say, ‘Okay, 469 people, divide it by N128 billion, that is what they are taking.’ And so, outrageous figures are bandied about. I was the spokesperson for the Senate under the David Mark presidency and I took time to sit with journalists and I said to them, go to any other parliament in the world- you can go the US, UK or any other parliament, the office of that person is funded in some way. I now brought to them the ones for the offices of the Senators in the United States. I say to them,’ look at it, it is there; go and check it, look at the Congressional salaries and look at the running costs of those offices.’ For every senator in the United States, the cost depends on the size of the constituency, but we have equality here, rather than on size. That’s why some areas like Rhode Island have one senator and California has more. We now found out that the highest paid in terms of the offices is in California because they have the largest constituency. I now used Obama as an example. I said ‘Obama, the money for running his office was $4.6 million, but his pay was $172,000.’ And what the Nigerian press has done, which is unfair to the National Assembly, is to compare his salary to what we get in running the office. And they now say these people are being paid so much. And so, we have these stories of we are the highest paid and so on, but that’s not true. It is either we have the bureaucracy – and that will mean you will have a whole army of people who will be shoving papers. I sit here, my secretary is running the office and gets the budget every month, but I will now say, ‘okay, we need toilet tissue, go to that place and we have to go through that whole process. That’s what was going on then. In every system, there are abuses and all you need to find out is ‘how do you curb those abuses.’ But the reverse is what you get here. Rather than an effort for efficiency, all that you get is that you are just denigrated and all manners of stories are told and so on. We also suffered it because if I open my phone, all I get are very pathetic pleas by all manners of people from everywhere and part of it is motivated by an assumption that you guys are just swimming in so much cash and you are stealing Nigeria’s money. A couple of senators left to become ministers. And we berated them, that ‘how can you?’ But they said ‘no, if I’m out there as a minister, all I need to do is just to call the Perm. Sec and say I need this, I need that. They will go and arrange it, you don’t know how.’ And we have had a situation in which somebody will call the director of finance that the minister is travelling this weekend, he needs N10 million, go and find it. And it happens and we know. But it is easier for them there because Nigerians are not asking questions of those offices.