NIGERIA: National Assembly Must Change First Before Changing The Constitution.

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There is no way serving legislators and the highest paid lawmakers in the world can amend the Constitution without amending themselves into it.

Can they now see how they have turned the National Assembly to the theatre of the absurd?

Do we still have a Constitution now? Has that instrument not been amended beyond recognition? As a prelude to the 2011 general elections, they amended some 400 clauses in that Constitution and preparatory to the 2015 elections, they are in the process of amending some 87 clauses. Who still knows what is where in that patch-patch Constitution? Yet, since 1791 the US whose Constitution we lifted almost wholesale has altered only 14 clauses in its Constitution!

Suddenly, the Senate President and his Deputy as well as the Speaker of the House of Representatives and his Deputy have been awarded life pensions and these must be pushed into the Constitution.

This does immense violence to the dictionary definition of pension as an amount of money paid regularly as retirement benefit by government or company to somebody who is considered too old or too ill to work.

Let the the National assembly stop themselves from awarding contracts for jobs to be executed within and outside the Assembly. These fat salaries must be trimmed to be in-line with the economic situation of the country. The constitution amendment must incorporate the removal of the power of the National assembly to allocate themselves unauthorised allowances, which in most cases are far bigger than their approved basic pay.