Peter Ustinov, the late multi talented British literary satirist, used the phrase “parliaments of flies” in “A Place in the Shade”, one of eight stories in his collection “Add A Dash Of Pity”. The story pictures an arena where a bull fight is about to hold. Long forgotten, it is being reworked to look its old self but the stamp of disuse is proving hard to remove: “the odour of animals still permeates it, just as the pungent smell of ancient urine still floats unhealthily around the public entrances, meeting places for parliaments of flies.”
Parliament and flies. What strange collocation! A parliament we know to be an assembly or body of lawmakers, elected or not. They constitute the legislature, one of three arms of government, democratically elected. As a pillar of democracy, it is assumed to speak for and act on behalf of the people the lawmakers say they represent. In other words, they stand for good. Flies, on the other hand, are unpleasant insects that frequent dirty places and feed on rotten, smelly stuff. Nobody wants them around them. So, how can flies be parliamentarians? Ustinov doesn’t mean it in that sense. The phrase is a figure of speech or an image of flies gathered at a single spot, like members of parliament, but they mean something not so good.
But sometimes, our legislators, members of parliament that is, behave like flies. They often do not mean anything good for anybody but themselves. Metaphorically, they touch their tongues to people’s ulcers, making them not heal-able or difficult to heal. They rub dirt into the wound, so it deteriorates instead of improving. We have the 10th National Assembly since 1999. There are 109 senators and 364 House members. They come from different political parties but, in truth, they are”flies” of the same hue. They all “settle” on personal comforts first, things like wages and allowances. These are priorities, it doesn’t matter whether the treasury is full or lean.
Let’s look at what happened after President Bola Tinubu announced an end to petrol subsidy last May because it had become too expensive and wasteful to sustain. The market went mad, prices first shut up and then went through the roof. Petrol that was bought at N200 per litre at filling stations jumped to N700 in a week. Poor Nigerians complained and Tinubu threw “palliatives” of grains at them to keep them quiet. What did their representatives, already earning millions a year, do? They “voted” to have their own palliatives also. [We all go to the same market, don’t we?] They ordered brand new cars worth 55 billion naira and new work conveniences like computers, chairs and writing tables. There was also cash at the ready in their pockets. They are working hard for the people and so the job must be made worth their while, isn’t it so? This means Peter must be robbed to pay Paul. Taxing the voter to the point of asphyxiation in order to keep the parliamentarian functioning. The former “must decrease” but the latter “must increase”.
Like flies, our parliamentarians seek out where there is a flush of funds to swoop down on. There has been, lately, a rush of investigations of funds that have “disappeared” in one government ministry or another. The ongoing inquiry is about billions of naira suspected to have gone missing from the fund set up in 2019 to manage the COVID pandemic. Like flies that fly off when they have lapped up the last morsel, our lawmakers stop beating the cymbal once they have had a conversation with the minister in question. Then there is this new lexicon “budget padding”. This refers to the practice in parliament of adding expenditure items to the government’s annual budget that were not there originally. The aim is to exact something from the final budget when eventually funds are released. Senator Abdul Ningi recently said that was what lawmakers had done to President Tinubu’s first full budget since assuming office last year. Ningi’s colleagues were not happy and promptly suspended him for three months from February. It was padding beneficiaries versus non- beneficiaries. A fly-eat-fly fight!
Earlier, I seemed to give the impression that the lawmaker would readily sacrifice the already burdened down average Nigerian for his personal comfort. Don’t get me wrong. His tendency towards an exaggerated effusion of empathy for the ordinary poor citizen is unmatched. For example, he wants legislation that will punish convicted kidnappers with the death sentence but not same for politicians that steal from the common till. Kidnap victims usually are people who travel by road and live in un-barricaded houses. Senators and House members fly, so they don’t run into kidnappers or vice versa. The death sentence, you see, will amply show their generosity towards the poor but to prescribe same for public office crimes would be suicide. Remember, many parliamentarians today are former state governors that EFCC is going after for using their office to amass illegal wealth. And there are still others who pray to become governors after their stint in parliament. See why they won’t want the death sentence as penalty for stealing public funds! And worse, to them the constitution is no longer the ground norm. They have overridden its power. For instance, the constitution requires that each lawmaker attend parliament for 181 days a year or else they lose their seats. But nobody cares and nothing happens to them.
And the lawmaker’s piety? It is surpassed only by that of the Pope. He is the most pious during religious festivals. The first to go public, he will urge you to keep in step with God’s will, be hardworking, loyal to government and be patriotic. Don’t steal, don’t give or take bribe. When he begins thus to sermonize, you would think angel Gabriel or Michael has come down from the heavenly places. However, he excludes himself because those evil things he easily does! He and his colleagues are the members of “parliaments of flies”.
