Date: 2017-05-25

Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki in this Interview on Channels Television monitored in Ilorin spoke on the recent opening of the Budget of NASS described as one of the legislature finest moments in recent history among other burning national issues.

You must be very proud that you have finally delivered on your promise to open the NASS budget. But it has taken over a year. Why has it taken so long and why has it been so difficult to open it?

Change is always difficult and my view from day one has been that there had been a lot of noise over not so much and I think we were not helping ourselves by not opening it which made it appeared as if there were some things we are hiding. I have said it from the time I was seeking the office that i would look into NASS budget, which we had the first in 2016. But at the early stages of the senate, there were issues which we all know, we were not together and had different groups like unity and like minds. And when you want to take a big decision like this, you need everybody on board. Once we missed the 2016 budget, which was about 16 months after our inauguration, we had to wait till 2017 and i don't think that was too bad.

Did you face any resistance from your colleagues in doing this?

Well, some were sceptical and felt that we can never meet the aspiration or please the public, no matter what we do, that it has been like that for so many years and why do we want to change it. There were different views. But gradually with time, I was able to convince everybody that we must be seen as a parliament that listens to the people. It was the wish of Nigerians for our budget to be opened and we all bought into it to show that this senate is different from previous ones. We have always said the 8th senate will leave a lot of milestones that has never been achieved before.

Some Nigerians still want you to do a lot more like replacing the voice voting system, a functional website to take attendance of members when they come to work and review of NASS members salaries and an audit for the funds received by the legislature, do you think they are asking for too much?

I don't think so. On the other hand I think that for them to be engaging us on these issues shows that they believe this is the national assembly that will listen. These are things that have been on for years and none of them have been achieved. But the fact that we have done the most difficult aspect of it which has to do with the opening of the budget is significant. The issue of electronic voting is more of a technical issue in the sense that we must put in place a system that makes it easy for us to have electronics voting.

(Cut in) How do you mean difficult?

The way it is structured in the chambers, you have to inform members ahead to come with their voting card. We need to adopt it in such a way that there and there, when something comes up. You can just vote. That is configuration and it's not difficult. Some of these issues, I think people say them and think there is a kind of big resistance to it. But no, most of us are people of change and reform and we want to see our senate been able to do best practices as done anywhere in the world. Its not that by the people alone that is making us do some of these things, we believe very strongly that things needed to be done differently and that we will like to see more of electronic voting instead of voice vote. But we will get there. Let me reassure Nigerians. But how soon, i cant say because it has to do with how we reconfigure the process. Over the years, it has been that when you become a senator, you have a voting card and if you are voting normally, you announced to all senators to bring their voting cards to the chamber to vote on any issue like constitutional amendment, etc. What we need to put in place is system where that is already configured and we carry out the voting on that basis. But I want to assure Nigerians that it is not a big issue and we are on the same page on this.

For some Nigerians, details of the NASS budget are not very flattering, the senate personnel line has a cost of N1.8 billion and we see N25 billion for overhead which implies that it cost about N229 million to service a senator annually.

That is not being fair because the money is not going to the senator but the cost of running an arm of government. In as much as we will take our criticisms, you, me and everybody has the responsibility to get across the right message. You don’t take the overhead of executive and say this is the amount it cost in having a president or a vice president or minister. To now personalise it, I think its not fair.

But do you think the NASS can defend very fairly, its N125 billion budget? Its three per cent of the entire budget and if you now factor that against other arms of government

We have about 5 trillion naira going into recurrent and just a little about 2 trillion naira for capital expenditure. Do you think this system of government is sustainable?

Yes. I don't doubt that we can still be more efficient, government all over the world are not very efficient organs whether in UK, USA or anywhere. Where the problem of this country is, is the leakages. The other day, we passed a legislation that all MDAs should submit their budget. In most countries, their independent revenue, should be at least a third of their revenue. If you look at our independent revenue in 2016 was as low as about N400 billion and the budget was about N1.5 trillion. Try and imagine if we met budget on revenue, the percentage that are looking bad all of a sudden will not look bad anymore because revenue would have jumped up to about N6 trillion and percentages will be better.

It sound nice or i think we can do that if we are playing to the gallery. But I think serious minded leaders must be able to address what are the major issues. Yes, we should cut cost but no matter how much cost we cut, apart from retrenchment, you cannot reduce that cost by a certain percentage, i am saying this because i need to be honest and very frank on this issue. i am not saying that we cannot reduce some of the travelling. If you cut all the cost, we might go back to the issue of retrenchment which is not an action we are likely to take. The area all of us should be focusing on is the leakages in revenue. So is it that the NASS as not doing their oversight functions effectively or why an agency of government will be inefficient especially one that has do with revenue.

We are and I agree we can improve. You might not like this, but the budget we have is not even sufficient in some areas. Think about this, we are meant to carry out oversight on NNPC, CBN and transport sector, I just gave you example of 53 agencies. These are specialised areas that if you want to catch them, you must have people that really know their business. National Assembly is populated with members with broad based background and it doesn’t mean most of them are specialised in those areas, you've got to pay good money to have that. we have not got there yet. We first need to win the confidence of Nigerians to know that we are truly committed in bringing results. The NASS is the strength of our democracy and we have to strengthen it, not Saraki or Dogara because we will come and go. Under my leadership, I promise you will see a difference in those areas and we need the confidence of Nigerians for that because we are going to be stepping on very powerful people in doing that. That is why people prefer to be executives of agencies to even ministers because little level of accountability is done there and with huge budget.

You have been speaking very recently on the fight against corruption and you even gave a statement which many perceived to be your own assessment of the issue, some views out there is that you are saying that this government lacks sincerity in the manner it is fighting corruption?

I think people always try and be mischievous and let me tell you why. There is no doubt at all that this administration led by President Muhammadu Buhari has done the best so far in the fight against corruption even if it is just the fact of making it a front burner issue unlike the past governments. Today, the newspaper, radio, television, internet and everybody is talking about it. That is an achievement on its own because we have the buy-in of everybody that this is a problem that we must address. That is an achievement on its own and where the political will is coming from. The next step is implementation. What i am saying is that we must complement and look at all the efforts that are required. Yes, some achievements have been done in the area of recoveries. But as we all know, people that are corrupt are very patient and they can sit eight years and let the president leave the saddle and then continue their game. So what we should do is strengthen the institutions using the political will that we have now so that even after Buhari is gone, Nigeria will never go back to that position because he would have left a legacy.

But what did you mean when you said we should fight corruption with sincerity?

That we should address salient issues of corruption that might not be front pages. What are those reforms on training of officers, increasing the capacity of proper investigation among others? Those are things that rarely excite the public and never reported. There are things when you do are slow, quiet but more effective. The point is about having a strong institution.

The Senate has been accused of blocking legislation that can strengthen the anti-corruption fight...

There are four bills to that. The Mutual Assistance has already been laid and that can be passed like this week because if you follow activities of the senate, that is like almost done and that is why I didn’t give a date for that. Why I have given a date of June for the whistle blower bill is because it has not been finish and I have given a target to the committee. The Proceed of Crime bill was debated and it has come to the committee level and in few weeks, that should come back to the Senate. The other one is the constitution amendment. So these are where we are on these four bills. The constitution amendment on Special Court for corruption might take a while and I don’t know how long. But even that is very debatable and I don’t think it will pass because some believe very strongly about it and others feels its not necessary. So we will wait to see what happens next.

We are very much on track on those three bills to fight corruption. Apart from that, I think there are more amendment we need to do. My view and which are going to start working with some of the institution is to strengthen the mechanism by which we make it difficult for proceeds of crime to find home somewhere. But you also emphasised deterrent instead of punishment...

Cuts in... as well as punishment. You see this is why i say that we should try not to be mischievous about the whole issue. All of us, the executive, judiciary, legislature, we are all complimenting one another. We all agreed that we must fight corruption and my position is that we must come from all angles t

o complement each other for the success of the fight. So, I strongly believe that punishment should also be strongly emphasised but will that stop the corruption alone. I don’t think so. When we are in a position of authority, we have to look at what is good for the country and not what is popular that the people will clap for you on and years later it might not be the best. If we are going to get to the Promised Land as a country where we have minimised corruption, we must do both as done sanction and punishment in other advanced countries in the world. I would be so unfair to say don't sanction, but as we do that we must look at what else we need to do.