The Senate is playing God

Sir: The recent face-off between the Senate and Babatunde Raji Fashola, minister of Power, Works and Housing, provokes this write-up. He said that the Senate had no right to increase the budget as is being done by the National Assembly since the inception of democracy in Nigeria. We just have to settle this issue once and for all. This reminds me of Mr. Gani Fawehinmi, Dr. Tai Solarin and Malam Aminu Kano of blessed memories. The present social critics are bull-dogs who cannot bite.

The Senate is playing god as members see themselves as the Alfa and Omega of the nation, who cannot be questioned by any citizen.

The present Senate is the odd-one out in the whole world where a member of the opposition party is the Deputy Senate President. Even the United State of American which celebrated 244 years of her independence on July 4, 2017, has no such oddity.

Just think of it! How can a member of our House of Representatives proposed in the house that those thieves who stole our money should be pardoned because they invested the stolen money in Nigeria? That shows the level of moral decadence in the nation.

Perhaps these National Assembly members don’t realise that the world is now a small village and that the rest of the world would judge Nigeria by the level of the morals of those in the National Assembly.

It seems the current senators don’t care what happens to the economy of this nation. President Muhammadu Buhari, presented the 2017 budget to the Senate in October, 2016.

The senators went on Christmas holiday without touching the budget. When they came back, they started playing politics with the lives of Nigerians.

It is in the life of this present legislative Assembly that they introduced “padding” into the budget. The question now is: Whose duty is the preparation of the Federal Government’s budget? We just have to get it clear once and for all, as the senators cannot continue to put their
interest over that of the rest of us.

Dr. Sunday O. Ajai.