The Ninth House of Representatives has a beautiful document tagged: “Our contract with Nigerians”. This document has specific timelines on how the House intends to force change in education, electricity, police reform, and so on, but this push will fail if the Senate and the Executive do not key into it, writes TONY AKOWE
The House of Representatives has passed several bills in the current dispensation, with the potential to cause changes in the lives of Nigerians. These bills, however, remain worthless as the Senate is yet to concur—thereby rendering the efforts of the House fruitless.
A number of these bills are integral parts of the House of Representatives’ “Our Contract with Nigerians”. The revised version of the contract was necessitated by the Coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown it caused. The reviewed agenda came with timelines the House intends to achieve the items on the agenda. While presenting the reviewed agenda to the public in July 2020, Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila said: “These last few months have been clear that we have to move faster and farther than we had previously thought or else, we may well be the generation that answers to history for superintending over the final and systematic collapse of this our beloved nation. The kind of fundamental changes we need begins with a wholesale reimaging of the structures and assumptions that we have long underpinned much of our existence as a country. We have too long accepted that certain things cannot be changed or that the process of change is too hard and too disruptive.”
In reviewing the document, the House identified ten key policy areas with legislative interventions separated into immediate, intermediate and long term action. The Chairman of the ad-hoc committee that reviewed the agenda, Prof. Julius Ihonvbare, said: “We do not intend for this to be an academic document, but an easily accessible and much-referenced contract with the Nigerian people. Like every other contract, it imposes an obligation on all the parties, obligations which must be met or else, the purpose of the agreement is defeated.”
The key policy areas are healthcare delivery, education, economy, security, agriculture and food security, sustainable power, environment and climate change, human capital development and social investment, governance and House reform geared towards positioning the House for optimum performance. Each of the key areas was divided into immediate, intermediate and long term, taking into focus, the three years left for the House before the next general elections. A review of these key areas raises several questions among which is, whether the House can bring to accomplish the ideas set in the agenda. For example, one of the major challenges identified by the agenda is the low budgetary allocation to the health sector as the total budget to the sector is less than the 15 per cent contained in the Abuja declaration. They also identified dilapidated health infrastructure, especially at the primary health care level, high rate of maternal mortality and high rate of child mortality as well as high prevalence of malaria among others. It set the goal of ensuring the attainment of the Abuja declaration of 15 per cent budgetary allocation to the health sector within the next three years. However, in setting its specific timelines, the House gave itself the task of reviewing the national health budget, overhaul the healthcare delivery system, amend the National Health Act and ensure the amendment or initiate relevant bills and policy framework to improve healthcare. It is to achieve this between June 2020 and May 2021. However, five months to the end of that timeline, there is nothing concrete to suggest that this target will be achieved by the House.
It also identified inadequate budgetary allocation and strategic investment in the education sector, huge infrastructural decay at all levels, limited access and application of ICT, policy inconsistency, low teacher to student ration among others as the major challenges in the education sector, to create an enabling environment for local educational content development and ensuring access to quality education. The House said between June 2020 and May 2021, it will work for increased budgetary funding of education, ensure a review of existing educational curriculum, improvement in teacher quality, the establishment of special funds to promote research among others. In the area of security, the reviewed House agenda identified as key challenges, low morale of security personnel, low level of education among the rank and file, weak intelligence gathering and counter-insurgency expertise, insufficient number of active duty servicemen and women in the police and other security agencies, poor and dilapidated infrastructure, absence of effective community policing as well as lack of public trust in the security institution. It set out five key deliverables between June 2020 and May 2021. These include increased funding, enactment of appropriate legislation, ensuring legislative approval to fund the provision of modern security equipment and providing structured funding for the armed forces. Even though the House has initiated a bill to create a special fund for the armed forces, the bill sponsored by the leadership of the House Committee on security-related committees is still at the committee stage, while the police trust fund bill is also yet to be passed by the House five months to the expiration of the immediate legislative action. However, to achieve this set target, the House will need the cooperation of the Senate to also pass the bills to give action to their plans. It is on record that several bills passed by the House were yet to be passed by the Senate, thereby rendering the efforts of the House fruitless. It is not clear what the senate legislative agenda is, especially in these thematic areas. But whatever it is, they need to work in synergy to achieve a definite goal.
The nation’s drive for food sufficiency is also part of the goal of the House, to work with the executive arm of government to achieve food sufficiency. It recognises the fact that despite the dominance of oil in the Nigerian economy, the country’s huge agricultural endowment remains the base of the economy as it provides the key source of livelihood for most Nigerians. The House believes that if properly harnessed, Nigeria has the potential of deriving much higher revenue from agricultural produce such as rice, cassava, fisheries and livestock. It identifies poor funding for the development of the agricultural sector, the predominance of smallholder farmers, poor and dilapidated infrastructure such as road and power, over-dependence on rain-fed agriculture and a very low level of irrigation development for farming as well as the high cost of farm inputs and the inability of farming household to invest in farms due to poverty as some of the major challenges of the sector. Between June 2020 and June 2021, the House target is to ensure increased funding of the agricultural sector by advocating for the prioritization of budget support to critical aspects of the sector as well as increased funding of infrastructure, research and development in the sector. It will also advocate for the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Bank of Industry to grant moratoria on debt service to micro, small and medium enterprises, strengthen the agriculture value chain, support special government intervention and also advocate for the creation of an agriculture emergency fund.
In the area of power, the efforts of the House to achieve its set objective are yet to achieve a significant result. While identifying low private sector investment, corruption and mismanagement of resources, high unpaid bills by individuals and corporate bodies, shortage of gas supply, uncooperative and sharp practices and low uptake of renewable energy as the challenges in the sector, the House set a target for the period is to ensure an increase in public sector investment. It also promised a comprehensive review of legislation relating to the sector, ensure electricity subsidy and a mandatory allocation of prepaid meters to consumers. However, this appears to be a tall dream as all efforts made by the House so far have not yielded any result. The bill sponsored by the Speaker of the House to criminalise estimated bill and make it mandatory for distribution companies to provide prepaid meters to consumers is yet to get concurrence from the Senate over one year after it was passed by the House.
However, one area that the House has shown serious commitment is in the area of police reform. After the passage and signing into law of the Police Reform Act 2020, the House has again initiated a Police Service Commission bill which has passed second reading and is at the committee stage. There is also the Police Trust Fund bill, which has also passed second reading and is at the committee stage. The quick passage of these bills and their concurrence by the Senate will go a long way in helping to address the security challenges in the country. Even though the May 2021 target for the immediate action is still five months away, the House must begin to put in place and in public glare concrete measures geared towards achieving the set target.
While presenting the reviewed agenda to the public in July, Gbajabiamila said emphatically that the House cannot afford to fail in its assigned task. He said: “We succeed by the joint effort of diverse individuals and groups, representing different interests and constituencies, yet working together in pursuit of common objectives and service of shared ideals. Therefore, nation-building and the attainment of a society that is peaceful and prosperous, kind and accommodating, healthy and forward-looking, is the responsibility of all citizens irrespective of status, of tribe or religion. It is a joint task. However, those of us who have chosen as our calling, to serve in the arena of politics and public service bear a greater burden because millions of people have chosen us and entrusted their fate in our hands. We cannot fail.”
What Reps should do
Peering Advocacy and Advancement Centre in Africa (PAACA) Executive Director Ezenwa Nwagwu told The Nation that “crafting of legislative agenda has become more of ritual for every House of Representatives leadership. But its job is clear and constitutionally determined, to make laws for the good governance of the country, to keep our national purse and be our foremost anti-corruption institution”.
He added: “What therefore needs to happen is for the House and indeed its leadership to benchmark its performance against the background of how it can deliver on these core responsibilities. So we spend valuable time producing documents that help give the impression we are serious, but the people want to see sunshine laws that impact the quality of life of the citizens, resolutions that address the everyday challenge of the poor and vulnerable.”
For the Civil Society Legislative and Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) Executive Director Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, the Ninth House of Representatives is not the first to develop a legislative agenda. He said previous Houses had taken steps to develop Legislative Agenda to guide and direct their work, but regretted that “In the absence of a mechanism for tracking, refreshing, and re-energising the Legislative Agenda, they have ended up with very low performance.” He said the reviewed Legislative Agenda must adhere to the principles of transparency, accessibility, inclusivity, and clarity to ensure the robust public participation of citizens in legislative activities.
To achieve the set objective of the legislative agenda, Rafsanjani said: “A tracking mechanism is critically important, at this stage to ensure the Legislative Agenda serves its intended purpose as a guide for the operations of the House of Representatives and various standing and any ad-hoc committee and delivers concrete development to the Nigerian people.” He said further that “the Committee would have the responsibility to ensure inclusion of the Nigerian people in governance by bringing on-board the voice of critical non-state actors into the operation of this House, ensure coordination and synergy and reduce wastage as well as promote accountability by ensuring regular review, updates, and corrections to make sure this House delivers on her promise to the Nigerian people”.
A former student leader and political activist, Danjuma Sarki, believes the leadership of the Ninth House of Representatives lacks the political commitment and independence to deliver on the legislative agenda it has set for itself. For him, the agenda is a mere political statement aimed at hoodwinking Nigerians. He said: “The house is known to have surrendered its independence to the executive and has become a rubber stamp and so, Nigerians should not expect any magic in the delivery of its constitutional mandate in terms of quality representation, impactful legislation and effective oversight”.
He argued that “the way the public hearing on the activities of NDDC and NSITF were conducted and push under the carpet by the leadership of the green chamber leaves much to be desired. It shows that the current legislature lacks any intention of providing the requisite check and balances. They cannot legislate on any matter that is not in the interest of the government even if it would be for the progress and development of the people”.
Sarki alleged that the leadership of the House often view very pertinent issues from a partisan perspective which, he said, is a major albatross to the achievement of the house’s legislative agenda. He said: “For them to achieve their set objectives, they need to be more resolute in asserting their independence. They must understand the importance of the separation of powers in a democracy. They must be courageous and bold enough to mete out sanction to any individual or MDA that tends to undermine the powers of the house. They must improve their oversight and public hearing mechanism, in addition to being accountable and transparent in the conduct of their responsibilities. They must also purge the house of corruption and build confidence and image of the house before the eyes of the public.”
But Jonathan Asake, who represented Zango Kataf/Jaba Federal Constituency of Kaduna State between 1999 and 2003, believes that even though the House can deliver on the legislative agenda, but lacked the political will to do so.
Asake said: “What I think they should do is to come up with defined policy plans which they should pursue in collaboration with other arms of government that can impact positively on the Nigerian people. The concept of a legislative agenda involves the unveiling of the Public Policy plan of the House for the whole legislative year which normally must articulate policy priorities and levels of engagement which the House will either lead, collaborate or support.”
He said further: “A typical example of a Legislative Agenda was coined ”The Contract with America” which was an agenda advocated for by the United States Republican Party during the 1994 Congressional election campaign and written by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, and in part using text from former President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union Address, the Contract detailed the actions the Republicans promised to take if they became the majority party in the United States House of Representatives. During our time in the fourth Assembly, former Speaker, Rt. Hon. Ghali Umar Na’abba came up with a similar programme that was coined “Contract with Nigeria”, although one could not define in concrete terms what policy changes the House was set to pursue.”
The way forward
For analysts, how far the House can implement the agenda it set for itself by the end of May 2021 will go a long way to determine whether Nigerians can still trust it to deliver on its promises to them and these promises need the buy-in of the Senate. The Executive, whose duty it is to implement the laws of the National Assembly, is also critical to the realisation of the tall dreams in the agenda.
