The latest episode of the long-running Arunma Oteh versus House of Representatives soap opera ought to be subtitled: Episode 10 – Bad laws and Blackmail.
At this point the lady would be wishing she had devoted more time to studying the fine art of diplomacy and ego massage, before dumping her cushy job as Vice President for Corporate Development at the African Development Bank (AfDB) in order to become an Abuja powerhouse as Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Given that early in her tenure she set out an agenda for cleaning out the capital market and taking on entrenched interests, it was inevitable that she would get into pretty serious fights. Some of those slugfests have been brutal affairs – with little or no provision for civility.
Remember the clash of the amazons? In the red corner brimming with reformist zeal was Oteh; in the blue corner was the hulking presence of the longstanding boss of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke.
Despite the bruising nature of that engagement, it is not the reason that the SEC DG’s tumultuous reign now faces the very real threat of an abrupt and ignominious termination. Credit for that must go to the infamous clash last year at a public hearing on the collapse of the Nigerian capital market called by the House Committee on Capital Markets and other Financial Institutions.
Most readers will recall the heated exchanges between Oteh and committee chairman, Herman Hembe, and the lurid tales of bribes solicited and given on both sides. The grubby exchange led to the fall of the chairman and the dissolution of his committee.
Oteh only fared slightly better. She was asked to proceed on compulsory leave by the SEC board, pending an independent investigation into the management of Project 50, a programme put together by her to commemorate 50 years of the capital market in Nigeria. Although the board-ordered probe by PricewaterhouseCoopers will clear her of any financial impropriety – opening the way for her return to office, the definitive battle of her tenure was just beginning to take shape.
If Oteh’s interaction with the Hembe committee was prickly, it was not much better with the successor committee. Offended legislators bided their time – waiting to exact their pound of flesh.
In short order they came up with a report that was anything but laudatory for the SEC boss. One of the most contentious conclusions reached was that Oteh was not qualified to head the commission because she did not possess the requisite professional qualification prescribed in the Securities and Exchange Commission Act for appointment to the office of Director-General.
Flowing from this, the House issued the non-negotiable decree that President Goodluck Jonathan fired the lady. Aso Rock’s understanding of the position of the legislators was that their resolution was advisory and not binding on the president.
In order to make it clear that this was not friendly advice but an order, the legislators have turned the screws tighter by making no provision whatsoever for SEC in the 2013 budget. They have even gone a step further by warning the president not to think of funding commission – even from private sources.
Let’s explain this by saying that the commission has not been scrapped; but it will only receive funding again after the DG had been kicked out of office.
First, what we have here is a shameful instance of a law being tailor-made to target an individual. Secondly, we are confronted not by the regular saber-rattling of legislators, but an unapologetic attempt to blackmail the president to do their bidding. I wish there was a more elegant way to put it, but blackmail has an unmistakable smell to it.
If the House had stopped by publishing the report of its committee indicting Oteh, and left Jonathan to deal with the moral burden of leaving in office an individual whose reputation had been damaged by the legislators’ findings, most people would have backed them.
Unfortunately, in this case as in many others, we see lawmakers engaging in overreach. The legislators of the Fourth Republic are particularly guilty of this tendency. They are not the sort of lawmakers Nigerians knew in the First, Second or Third Republics, but a hybrid variety that see themselves straddling legislative and executive roles.
This crisis of identity, and confusion over what their true role should be, comes across even in the language of their engagement with agents of the executive branch. And so from day to day we’re regaled with reports of the “summons” issued to one minister, or the latest threat to arrest the head of some government parastatal for tardiness in responding to legislative invitations.
In 1999, the first class of Fourth Republic legislators prepared the foundation for the crisis we see today, by manipulating the budget to introduce what they called “community projects.”
These were not altruistic or well-thought out development projects, but rather showy, populist undertakings to create the impression that the lawmakers had “done something” for their people during their tenure. The injection of these extraneous items altered the shape of the federal budgets designed by the executive, and provided the ground for the earliest fights between then President Olusegun Obasanjo and the lawmakers.
Unfortunately for our democracy, the class of 1999 successfully blackmailed the executive, and every president ever since has had to live with the nightmare of legislators who do not know where their territory begins and ends.
Elsewhere what happens is that legislators lobby the executive branch to site choice projects in their constituencies in exchange for support for the administration’s legislative agenda. The lawmaker then gets credit for attracting such a project to his constituency. It is what the Americans refer to as “pork barrel” bills.
Returning to Oteh, the demands of the House actually put the National Assembly as an institution in an awkward position. Let’s not forget that the Senate cleared her in 2010 and declared she was fit for the role. So if anyone deserves flak for her appointment it is the senators who approved her appointment three years ago.
The lawmakers who are always quick to assert their independence, should accord that same right to the executive. Oteh is an appointee of the president and it is only fair and proper that he be allowed to determine whether she is up to the demands of her office. The sort of bald-faced pressure being put on Jonathan to sack the lady is an unseemly abuse of legislative power.
What they are doing may not be the best for separation of powers in our democracy, yet the legislators may just get their way. The president has displayed over time, a tendency to buckle in the face of the least pressure from ornery lawmakers.
He doesn’t have the bloody-mindedness of an Obasanjo who will sometimes dare his interlocutors to tip the whole democratic project into the ravine, rather than succumb to blatant blackmail. And that is bad news for Oteh.
At a time when she thinks its peace and safety, he will dump her to appease the gods of Apo, just as he did with Dr. Harold Demuren, the erstwhile Director General of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). Following the Dana Air crash last year, the legislators demanded his head on a platter. In due season, Jonathan duly obliged.
