In other climes, the alarm bells would have started clanging, the moment a re-elected senator announced President Muhammadu Buhari would be active in choosing the leaders for the 9th National Assembly, to be inaugurated in June. By the strict dictates of the presidential system of government, that would be a misnomer, baiting conceptual chaos — conceptual chaos, because a presidential legislature, in the pocket of the executive, is violent contradiction in terms.
Yet, only those who live in Mars, and didn’t experience the sundry abuses of the 8th National Assembly, under the leadership of Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and House Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, would feign not knowing where the senator was coming from.
Indeed, it is no hyperbole to state that the current National Assembly is nothing but a plague: skewing laws for anticipated personal benefits (as it was in the Electoral Act that the president vetoed); subverting genuine voter aspiration (by dissipating votes meant for critical arteries like the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the 2nd Niger Bridge, into constituency projects of boreholes and the like); erratic proroguing (as the Saraki Senate became notorious for, many times to forestall feared parliamentary regime change); and becoming a terror onto itself (witness the often arbitrary suspension of dissenting members. Also remember that this didn’t stop until Delta Senator Ovie Omo-Agege virtually called the bluff and attended plenary despite the odds. In the ensuing hubbub, the mace got dramatically stolen, and no less dramatically recovered, at the roadside, somewhere in the federal capital).
To summarise, perhaps to underscore the illicit manner Saraki got his Senate presidency and also pawned, to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the deputy senate presidency for personal gains, it won’t be unfair to say the 8th National Assembly was always shopping for problems, many times when there were none.
But contrary voices have also charged the Buhari Presidency with lethargy in its communications with the National Assembly, so much so that its own tardiness emboldened the National Assembly’s mischief. It would then appear a classic case of the cynical (National Assembly), meet the careless (the Presidency). The ultimate victim was the voter that elected both cadres, but had to suffer for their actions and inactions.
Still, where the balance of blame shifted was clear from the results of the 2019 general elections. Even with some seven seats not yet declared, no less than 64 senators won’t return (almost six out of 10). Contrast this clear-out to President Buhari’s emphatic re-election margin, over his 2015 tally, and it is clear who, between the president and the National Assembly, the voters were angrier with. To boot, Saraki, having lost re-election, won’t be returning to the Senate, though Speaker Dogara beat the drop. But with the huge minority status of his PDP in the House, he certainly would not be Speaker again.
Still, these defeats and triumphs only clear the way for a new beginning. But that doesn’t automatically translate to a parliamentary self-subjugation to the executive. It rather provides fresh opportunities to explore and exploit the creative but healthy parliament-executive tension, to give the voter the best deal possible – a legislative agenda that would further bond an appreciative people with a caring and responsible government. This can be achieved, not by mindless antagonism on the part of parliament, not by a sense of pride, arrogance and conquest by the executive but by clear-headed focus, compromise and absolute service to the people, on the part of both.
So, might the president have a role to play in this new rapprochement for the good of the people? Why not? But not as Leviathan wanting to throw his weight around, but as chief of state desiring a cooperative and functional partner-legislature, to execute the electoral charter of his party, on which basis the people handed it a thumping parliamentary majority.
Learning from the fiasco of the 8th National Assembly, the president has a duty to ensure the Saraki-like rogue presidency of the Senate does not emerge again. Inasmuch as the president has always said it isn’t his business to determine how the Senate or the House of Representatives run its affairs, he should sit with other top party hierarchs to agree on a binding zoning formula for all the legislative principal offices. That way, the party would have agreed, ab initio, on who gets what; and members would just go into sessions to implement the agreed choices.
That done, the stage would have been prepared for a Legislative Agenda. That agenda should serve as legislative compass, to guide the Presidency from 2019 to 2023. Needless to say, there is the imperative for strong and robust legislative agenda on education, infrastructure, the environment, the economy, and even road construction and maintenance, as a sub-sector of infrastructure. For instance, Executive Orders, issued to fast-track some parts of the economy, should be made more permanent with the requisite legislative backing. Also, key laws ought to be passed to further strengthen the war against corruption, without winning of which, Nigeria goes nowhere.
For the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), 2015 to 2019 was a season of bad faith and naivety, and it wasn’t pretty. Now, 2019 to 2023 offers a fresh opportunity to justify Nigerians’ mandate, by putting in place seamless legislative-executive cohabitation, for the good of all Nigerians.