Investigations has revealed each Nigerian Senators’ allowances surpass their basic salaries of N2,026,400 per annum by nine times, amounting to a totalled sum of N18,642,880 on annual basis.
All lawmakers at the Federal level is entitled to 19 allowances.
These annual allowances include; vehicle maintenance and fuelling (N1,519,800); domestic staff (N1,519,800), entertainment (N607,920), utilities (N607,920), personal assistant(N506,600), constituency (5,066,000), wardrobe (N506,600), house maintenance (N4,053,800), newspapers (N303,960), recess(N810,560), accommodation, furniture (N1,519,800), severance(N6,079,200), legislative aide and medical allowances.
The Renumeration Package for Political, Public and Judicial Office Holders stipulates all these specified allowances prepared by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission.
107 senators, which excludes the Senate and Deputy Presidents, receive allowances in the tune of N1,994,788,160 (approximately, two billion naira).
The Senate President and Deputy Senate President is left out of some of these allowances due to the fact that almost all they need are fully provided for by the Nation.
Meanwhile, members of the House of Representatives each earn an annual basic salary of N1,985,212 while the annual allowances amount to N15,286,135.
With this it implies that N5,472,436,419 (approximately 6 billion naira) is what 358 members of the house, exclusion of the Speaker and the Deuty Speaker of the House who have their allowances all provided for by the state.
A member of House of Representatives is annually entitled to vehicle maintenance and fuelling (N1,488,909), domestic staff (N1,488,909), entertainment (N595,563), utilities (N595,563), wardrobe (N496,303), newspapers (N303,9500, house maintenance (N99,260), constituency (1,985,212) and personal assistant (N496,303).
All these allowances are categorised into regular and irregular allowances.
Regular allowances consists of those allowances paid alongside the monthly salaries while the irregular allowances are those ones paid on intervals, ranging form annual to once in four years.
Be it as it may seem, there are other various allowances not included in this analysis that are paid and have no fixed periods, credited to the lawmakers as many times as they occur.
The irregular housing allowance is 200 percent of the lower legislative arms annual salaries; furniture allowance amounts to 300 percent, recess allowance, 10 percent and severance allowances, 300 percent of their basic salaries.
Housing allowances is credited once a year while furniture allowance is paid once in four years.
The recess allowance is paid whenever the lawmakers are on recess and they go on recess four times in a year.
Severance packages are paid at the end of every four-year tenure.
Furthermore, there are other allowances that the lawmakers are not paid directly but provided and paid for by the government.
These allowances include wages for special assistants, security and legislative aides.
These implies that persons under this obligation are under the pay roll of the Federal Government.
Medical expenditures also behoves on the government whenever a lawmaker have need for the services.
Tour duty and estacode allowances are also an entitlement of the lawmakers whenever they travel out of the country.
A senator is paid N37,000 per night as tour duty allowance with an estacode allowance of $950 per night.
For a House of Reps. member, N35,000 per night is the tour duty allowance while the estacode is $900 per night.
Although these findings prove that political office holders in Nigeria are among the highest paid government officials in the world, the major concern of the masses is the monies accruing to lawmakers via self-appropriation, embezzlement and corruption.
From time immemorial, the budget accrued to the National Assembly has never been broken into components and efforts to do such have yielded no required results even after the invocation of the Freedom of Information Act.
Shockingly still, the constituency allowance is distinguished from the constituency project fund.
Constituency allowances are paid for the maintenance of constituency offices and contacts, while constituency project fund is allocated to enable the lawmakers to execute projects in their constituencies.
