Yari’s perks and perfidies

Some people are infernal spoilsports. They see someone else’s gravy train leechingly roller coasting and all they feel enthused to do – and that, from suspected vindictive biases – is throw slippery peels on ginger tracks to overturn the cruiser. What meanness!

This, in a manner of speaking, is what the present political leaders of Zamfara State have just done to former Governor Abdulaziz Yari and other beneficiaries of the state’s retirement largesse. They saw their ex-excellencies and ex-honorables quietly preying on the state’s coffers by way of humongous out-of-office benefits, and they voided the law that gave legal imprimatur to those indulgences. What blighted meanness!

But it was the ex-governor himself who rather impetuously denuded the parasitic deal of its cloak of complicit class silence. Just five months on out of power, he got somewhat impatient with fitful compliance by the state government regarding the benefits package and fired off a letter (dated October 17, 2019) demanding obligatory and timely adherence.

In the said letter addressed to incumbent Governor Bello Matawalle, the former Zamfara helmsman asserted his entitlement to N10million monthly “upkeep allowance,” which he considered the state bound to pay under a law that provisioned for every holder of the positions of governor, deputy governor, house of assembly speaker and deputy house speaker after they leave office. To be clear, this allowance was besides a pension equivalent to the salary he was receiving while in office.

Last year, civil society advocacy group, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), had in a publication identified other perks for the designated ex-Zamfara officials to include two personal staff, two vehicles replaceable every four years, two chauffeurs, free medicals for the ex-officials and their immediate family members within Nigeria or abroad as may be warranted, four-bedroom house, an equipped office facility, free telephone services and 30-day paid annual vacation abroad. It is likely these were beefed up under the new law Yari said was amended and assented to barely two months to the end of his tenure.

“Accordingly, you may wish to be informed that since the expiration of my tenure on the 29th of May, 2019, I was only paid the upkeep allowance twice, i.e. for the month of June and July, while my pension for the month of June has not been paid.

“As the law provides, the pension and upkeep allowance are not in the category of privileges that can be truncated without any justifiable reason, hence the need to request you to kindly direct the settlement of the total backlog of the pension and upkeep allowance as provided by the law,” the former governor wrote in the letter to his successor.

Even if you ignore the self-serving provisions as well as the timing of the cited law, it is difficult to see how N10million monthly qualifies to be referenced as “upkeep allowance” for an individual in the context of present-day Nigerian economy. Pray, with what was his ex-excellency being ‘upkept’: a daily menu of golden dinosaurs? Then, there is the factor of Yari’s early impatience with the state government’s fitful compliance with the terms of the deal – bogus as they were. It should be enlightening to compare compliance by his administration with payment of token pensions due to retired civil servants of the state. Matawalle said some bit about this that we will cite shortly, but in view of partisan undercurrents we probably can’t take that as gospel. But I digress.

If the former governor, from entitlement, had felt righteous indignation at defaults by the Zamfara government, he met a brick wall in current principals of the state who ostensibly felt he overreached himself. I say ‘ostensibly,’ because some people would argue their response was the cheapest card from the partisan playbook. Yari had ruled Zamfara for eight years on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), whereas his successor and current governor as well most members of the state house of assembly are of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). You really can’t foreclose that partisan tar-brushing partly informed their response, especially as it was most likely the government that leaked Yari’s letter to the public domain.

Still, the Zamfara principals deployed edifying sound bites in articulating their response to the ex-governor’s imperious demands. The house of assembly speed-tracked the repeal of the law Yari cited, arguing that it provisioned “jamboree payment” for the former officials to the detriment of retired civil servants “who have not been paid their entitlements over the years.”

‘With what was (ex-Governor Yari) being ‘upkept’ (with N10m monthly upkeep allowance): a daily menu of golden dinosaurs?’

Governor Matawalle equally gave speedy assent to the repeal, saying the controversial law was designed to pillage Zamfara’s scarce resources. He added: “It is on record that the backlog of pension and gratuity for local government workers and primary school teachers left behind by the Abdulaziz Yari administration stands at N3billion, just as that of retired civil servants stands at N3billion. What moral justification is there for jumbo packages for a select few when the social index has consistently showed that the majority of our population live in abject poverty?”

Good talk! Only that the outrage expressed by the Zamfara leaders amounted to sheer hypocrisy when you consider that the Matawalle administration had paid the former governor – by his own admittance – twice under the demonised law. Was the law tolerable until now? Chances are: if the ex-governor had not overreached his luck by the impetuous protest, there might have been no issue about the law and its application. Get the drift about the cloak of complicit class silence?

But political actors and their games aside, there is much to begrudge in Yari’s aborted deal. With a N10million monthly “upkeep allowance,” added to full governor’s salary dissembled as pension, you could easily sustain a private army, much less just your household and allied dependents which is what “upkeep” should be all about. Besides, for a state ranked lowest in federally allocated revenue in 2018, and 31^st in internally generated revenue in the first half of 2019 according to a recent National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report, the out-of-office benefits of designated ex-Zamfara officials was unreasonably, and to boot outrageously generous.

The repealed Zamfara law showed there is little that can’t be arranged with self-interested tag-teaming between a state assembly, which processes legislations, and the governor whose assent is required for those legislations. But it isn’t Zamfara alone that is hobbled with such specie of legislation. Most states of the federation actually are. Only last year, Bayelsa was compelled by headwinds of public rebuff to jettison a proposed law prescribing life pension for all state legislators, while Kano State squirreled through a similar legislation providing generous life pension for house of assembly speakers and deputy speakers after they leave office in the smokescreen of a far more controversial law fragmenting the historical Kano Emirate into five components.

Truth is that there are few states in the Nigerian federation without Zamfara-type largesse for ex-governors and other top officials. And that is a major motivation for the extreme desperation by political gladiators we see characterising our electoral environment. Rather than knocks for ex-Governor Yari, we owe him some gratitude for dramatically showing up the oddity of this peculiar feature of public office in Nigeria.

In repealing the Zamfara law, the state assembly said all past political leaders would no longer enjoy any entitlement outside those prescribed by the National Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission. That is one cue to be applied nationwide on a concerted scale if we would deescalate the primitive tendencies of our electoral culture.