Former president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo has knocked Nigerian lawmakers for being insensitive to the plights of the masses, TheNewsGuru.com reports.
Obasanjo made this remark on Monday during a speech at the 60th anniversary celebration of legal hero Aare Afe Babalola’s call to the Bar in Ado Ekiti, the Ekiti State Capital.
According to the ex-president, the salary allocation for elected officials is the job of the Revenue Mobilisation distribution and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), which the lawmakers, he claimed, have abandoned in order to fix their own salaries.
“By the Nigerian constitution, the revenue mobilisation and fiscal commission is supposed to fix the salaries and emoluments of members of the National Assembly. But they set the constitution aside and decided to fix their salaries. Even if it’s constitutional, it is not moral. But it is neither constitutional nor moral.”
“The point in Nigeria which I have seen and which I can attest to is most of the people who are supposed to be operationalising or managing and seeing the constitution and democracy move forward, they are actually the ones who undermine the constitution.
“All elected people, by our constitution, their emolument is supposed to be fixed by the revenue mobilisation commission, but our lawmakers set that aside and they make laws and put any emolument for themselves.
“Even if that is constitutional, it is not moral and, of course, it is neither constitutional nor moral.”
He also stated that many other provisions of the Nigerian Constitution, such as the Federal Character, were “completely ignored,” and that the Federal Character Commission scarcely functioned.
When the constitution is “constantly violated like that,” the former President added that the country’s democracy becomes one in which anything goes.