The Chairman, Senate Committee on
Media and Public Affairs, Senator Aliyu Abdullahi has insisted that the senate
would not disclosed salaries of its members.
Abdullahi said this during a live
programme on Channels Television entitled, ‘Politics Today’ and monitored
during the weekend.
Recall that the Chairman,
Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), has
claimed that a Nigerian senator earns N29m per month.
When the presenter asked him how
much he earned, Abdullahi angrily said it was rude of the presenter to ask him
how much each senator earned.
Abdulahi said, “You don’t expect
me to come out on national television to say this is what I earn. It is not
done. I cannot ask you as a journalist how much you earn. It is not done.
“If anybody is interested in how
much we are getting paid, you know where to get the information. The documents
are available. If Nigerians won’t believe that, is it what I will say that they
will believe?”
The Senate spokesman said the
figures released by Sagay were false, adding that the Senate’s budget was not
even as high as what Sagay released.
He said Sagay was only trying to
cause unnecessary tension between the National Assembly and the Presidency.
He added, “This issue has become
a recurring decimal. In the last two years people have been discussing this
matter and I always ask myself, what do people really want to believe? I think
if this subject matter has been discussed for two years and we are still
looking at issues wrongly, then I think there is something wrong with us.
“The institutions that are
responsible for providing this information are there. A law was promulgated on
Top Salary Scale also known as TOPSA and it is based on this scale that
everyone who holds one political office or the other gets paid.
“I want to also submit that I
presume Prof. Sagay would have been paid based on the provision of this scale.
For us in the National Assembly, the question needs to be asked ‘what is the
cost of having democracy and what is the cost of not having democracy?’”