At a time like this, what matters most my fellow Nigerians?

This is not a time many Nigerian workers are happy about because things have become tough and critical. Most of them go months on end without pay while bills continue to mount. At the other end of the spectrum they see politicians glowing and moving about in new convoys of cars, their wives and children shop and school abroad while they at home can hardly pay their wards' school fees or feed them. In the midst of this gloom confronting the Nigerian worker is the news that members of the National Assembly are seeking to inflate their allowances.

According to reports, the members of the National Assembly numbering 360 currently go home every quarter with a whopping sum of N27.2 million. That has proved inadequate for the honourable members. They now want to up it to N42 million each. This is preposterous in a country where the national minimum wage is N7,500 and the request by the Nigeria Labour Congress for N50,000 is still pending.

What justifies this raise that the assembly members are demanding? Perhaps it is to oil the machine for the coming elections. This much is denoted from the text messages which senators are said to be passing each other. The text reads:

"My Distinguished, each member in the House of Representatives has improved earnings from N25m to N43m. This is an improvement of 40 per cent. Reps members are also getting one Prado 4by4. This is election year; we should rise up and demand from leadership what is due us. Our entitlement in the budget is nothing less than N100m per Senator." The tone of the text is a demonstration of the fact that politics in this part of the world is all about bread and butter.

When last did the members of the National Assembly discuss or table any motion that has to do with the well being of citizens? This is a dangerous trend. The economy has been in a tailspin and things are getting tougher for the populace who have continued to wonder whether this democracy or the variety we have now is what they bargained for.

The concern of the populace is shared by the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), which in a recent report said state governments might not be able to pay workers' salaries in the next few months if the $3.2 billion left in the Excess Crude Account is shared. The report states only Lagos State out of the 36 states of the federation can generate enough to pay its workers. This is frightening and does not show any cause for cheer at a time when the world economy is down and many countries are thinking of shifting attention from oil due to its environmental problems.

We must begin to think creatively about how to fund our democracy; we have depended too much on short-term measures, which do not offer long-term solutions.

Several times arguments have been made about the need to make political office less attractive than it is at the moment. It is because of the out-of-the-world benefits that politics in this part of the world confers and the attendant path to stupendous wealth it offers that people approach it with a do-or-die attitude.

In the light of what the National Assembly members are proposing for themselves and the reality on the ground as made public by RMAFC, the time to drum some sense into the political arena is now.

We cannot afford this profligate politics.