Dulue Mbachu
WHEN Okey Onwa decided to run for a seat in Nigeria’s House of Representatives, a ruling party leader laid out the terms to the 52-year-old lawyer.
He would have to pay 2 million naira (R120 000) as an expression of interest and sign post-dated cheques, forfeiting half of his income as a lawmaker to gain the support of the party boss, commonly known as a “godfather” in Nigeria.
“When I complained, he told me this was business, that I can try going it alone if I wanted,” Onwa said in Awka, the capital of the south-eastern state of Anambra. He said he decided against running because he knew that on his own, he could not raise the 100 million naira he needed for the campaign.
As Africa’s biggest oil producer prepares to elect a president and parliament on March 28, at stake for most politicians is the power to dispense and receive cash and patronage rather than competing ideologies.
The main opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), has said it will maintain many of the economic policies of President Goodluck Jonathan’s ruling People’s Democratic Party.
Godfathers control
With annual salaries and benefits of as much as $2m (R24m) a year, Nigeria’s lawmakers earn more than four times Barack Obama’s salary as the US president. Whoever wins the presidency has a critical say in dispensing about $70 billion a year in state revenue, more than two-thirds of which comes from oil and gas exports.
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There’s no country in the world that has that kind of remuneration for its lawmakers,” Jibrin Ibrahim, the director of the Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development, said.
“Money plays such a huge role and the political process is very expensive, making it for the richest and not the best. Essentially, the godfathers are the ones that control the parties and determine candidates.”
Both Jonathan, a 57-year-old southern Christian from the oil-rich Niger River delta, and his main opponent, Muhammadu Buhari, a 72-year-old northern Muslim and former military dictator, have pledged to fight corruption and make the petroleum industry more transparent.
Corruption has dogged Nigeria’s political system since independence from the UK in 1960. Transparency International ranked it 136th out of 174 countries assessed in its 2014 corruption perception index.
Former central bank governor Lamido Sanusi was suspended by Jonathan last year after he alleged that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) hadn’t remitted about $20bn in oil revenue to the government.
Highlights of a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) limited liability partnership audit into the NNPC said it should refund a minimum of $1.48bn, with the state-owned company claiming the report had absolved it of Sanusi’s allegations. The full PwC audit hasn’t been released.
“Anyone who has state power controls everything,” said Jideofor Adibe, a political science lecturer at Nasarawa State University in the city of Keffi, 60km east of Abuja.
“The group that produces the president can reward itself and punish the others. You can make a billionaire out of an ordinary man overnight.
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State power
“I lost because I didn’t share money,” said Gozie Agbakoba, who lost his bid to return to the House of Representatives in 2011 for the Action Congress of Nigeria, which is now part of the APC.
Apart from the 109 seats in the Senate and 360 in the House of Representatives, candidates are also vying for the state governorships and places in regional legislatures. Each level of government shares in the oil revenue, with the national government receiving 52.7 percent, the states 26.7 percent and local councils 20.6 percent. Of the 36 states, only Lagos, which generates 75 percent of its own revenue, could survive without the monthly cash allocations from the central government.
This year’s races are set to be the tightest ever, with both parties having 42 percent support among possible voters, according to an Afrobarometer poll released January 27. About 68 million people are registered to vote. – Bloomberg