October 20, 2025
Greetings!
This is Harry Agina. If I said it once, I said it a gazillion times that Nigeria’s rulers under President Bola Tinubu suffer from a high level of MISPLACED PRIORITIES SYNDROME.
For non-Nigerians, it behooves me to translate part of my title above, which has a peculiar Nigerian lingo that says, “Monkey dey work and baboon dey chop.” This means that, whereas MONKEYS are the ones doing all the hard work in the animal kingdom species known as PAPIONIDAE, their lazy kin, the BABOONS are the ones enjoying all the benefits of the work.
The above analogy is exactly the case with Nigerian UNIVERSITY LECTURERS (or the hard-working monkeys) and our so-called LAWMAKERS (or the lazy and corrupt baboons). The lecturers, or generally our educators, work all year round to build the nation by building our young students. And, as shown in the caption of today’s (October 20, 2025) newspaper headline below, those educators are the lowest paid in Africa, perhaps even in the entire world. On the other hand, Nigeria’s national lootmakers who are called lawmakers (the lazy baboons), spend less than one third of a year in office. The rest of the time, they are on vacation around the world with their mistresses, squandering public funds in the name of allowances. And even when they are in session at the National Assembly, they are busy plotting how to PAD BUDGETS to steal funds, how to extort bribes as they perform their OVERSIGHT FUNCTIONS, and how to steal funds in the fraudulent name of CONSTITUENCY PROJECTS.
And yet, those loot-making Nigerian lawmakers are THE HIGHEST PAID IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. Each of the loot-makers in the Senate grabs about one hundred and ninety thousand US dollars ($190,000 every year, while each of the so-called Representatives grabs about one hundred and sixty seven thousand US dollars ($167,000) every year. In comparison, every federal lawmaker of America is paid $174,000, which is $16,000 less than what a Nigerian Senator makes. Of course, American Speaker of the House of Reps and President Pro Tempore of the Senate earn slightly higher than the rest, just like their Nigerian Senate President and the Speaker of the House of Reps counterparts.
Oh, by the way, I know that many non-Americans do not know that the American Vice President also occupies the role of the President of the Senate. Hence, his active deputy in the daily running of the Senate is titled, “President Pro Tempore of the Senate.”
Anyway, the fact here is that the federal lawmakers of Nigeria earn more than the lawmakers of America and all other countries of the world. Here is the point that makes this fact a serious ANOMALY: Nigeria’s general citizens can hardly eat once a day. According to a recent global authority information release, MORE THAN HALF OF THE POPULATION (139 million) ARE UNDER ABJECT POVERTY. On the other hand, America is far better than Nigeria. Putting it differently, POVERTY RATE of Nigeria is over 50 percent of the population, while the poverty rate of America is under 13 percent. Yet, Nigerian lawmakers and other RULERS are OPPRESSIVELY AND INSENSITIVELY earning much more than their American counterparts, who are LEADERS instead of RULERS. Remember, this is just about the known salaries. When we consider the ATROCIOUSLY EVIL ALLOWANCES that Nigerian rulers grab from the treasury every day, their greed and insensitivity are nothing short of atrociously satanical, meeeeeeeen!!!
Meanwhile, let’s not lose sight of the title and main focus of this treatise, thus: “Monkey dey work, and baboon dey chop.” University lecturers, or educators in general, who are working hard in Nigeria are not getting paid, while the crooks in our National Assembly who are relatively doing nothing useful are grabbing all the money, meeeeeeeen!!!
