Tag: NASS

Yes, it is indisputable that the legislature is a major pillar of democratic governance in all liberal democracies. Nigeria cannot be an exception. It is, at least in the technical sense, made up of the individuals that have been elected by the majority of the electorate to represent, speak for, defend and advance the interests of the mass of the people of a country. At least that is what we think our own bicameral National Assembly in this Fourth Republic is, although we may not be entirely correct to think so. That’s a poser for another occasion.
To be honest, what has the National Assembly really done since the advent of this Fourth Republic to promote democracy, good governance, advance human rights, and the welfare and wellbeing of Nigerians? When they are not busy allocating fat salaries and humongous unearned allowances and other juicy perks to themselves, or engaging in other mindless sybaritic excesses, they are preoccupied brazenly and shamelessly padding the annual budget to enable them cream off fat chunks of the national appropriations through the backdoor of contract inflation and plunder. Rather than face the arduous task of legislating for order, peace and good governance as the constitution prescribes, they engage in needless legislative oversight visits for the sheer purpose of shaking down government officials and collecting Egunje from MDAs, and threatening those that won’t play ball with zero-allocation in the next budget! And when that is not their preoccupation, they proceed to organize pointless, unproductive and wasteful public hearings over non-issues.
But that is not all! What about the daily and endless summoning of ministers, heads of MDAs and sundry others, with such magisterial hubris, for the sole purpose of embarrassing them, rather than for getting to the bottom of issues? Thank goodness for the no-nonsense Ms. Aruma Oteh, former Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who refused to be intimidated or subjected to unwarranted assaults upon her well-earned reputation or held to public opprobrium by shameless legislators whose sole objective was not how to make her SEC perform better, but merely public grandstanding and flexing puny legislative muscles. Mercifully, she so eloquently and competently gave it back to them in good measure, taking no prisoners neither conceding any inch, and Honourable Herman Hembe, the chairman of that inquisitorial committee, must certainly rue the day he chose to exercise such reckless effrontery. To borrow from US General Omar Bradley’s famous take on the Korean War, Herman Hembe on that occasion had picked the wrong fight, with the wrong enemy, in the wrong place, and at the wrong time in the full glare of live television cameras!
Could the Senate have now found more than its match in the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service, Hameed Ali, a retired military officer with a huge ego who has bluntly refused the imperious directive from the Senators to wear the Customs Service uniform? To compound the matter, the Senators have also demanded that President Muhammadu Buhari sack both CGC Ali and the Acting EFCC Chair, Ibrahim Magu, before they will screen and confirm the nominees for INEC Resident Electoral Commissioners. Hubris meets hubris! Would this be the end of legislative over-reach if the President refuses to sack both Ali and Magu? We wait and see.
I am not here to defend officials and operatives of the executive branch of government, nor encourage their snubbing of legislative oversight. Far from it. I think both the law of the land and proper procedures should always be observed by all the branches of the government in inter-governmental relations in a liberal democracy such as ours. The 1999 Constitution is specific in its definition of the powers of each branch of government, and this must not be trifled with. My grouse however is only with the conduct of the National Assembly as a pivotal institution, and the comical behaviour of its members who have trivialized the legislative business and turned it into a mere circus show, treating the whole world to their absurdities and holding Nigeria up to global ridicule. It is bad enough that Nigeria is globally regarded as a “fantastically corrupt” country, an epithet which our legislators also did so much to earn for us, but that we are being held up to international public ridicule by the comical, shameful, scandalous and infantile behaviour of occupants of the supposedly hallowed chambers of the Nigerian Senate who are addressed, wrongly I might add, as distinguished senators. Pray, whatever happened to the notion of noblesse oblige in the Nigerian Senate? Or shouldn’t the mere appellation, “Distinguished Senators” to refer to members of the upper legislative chamber at least confer some responsibility of nobility or aristocracy and good behaviour on them, even if only remotely?
Why then do they still behave as if they are merely a hideous assortment of political scoundrels, vagabonds, carpetbaggers, fortune-hunters, looters, common thieves and certifiable felons, political roughnecks, area boys, and sundry crooks and criminal elements? Are these what they really are? I sincerely want to hope not. But then, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…. Well, you know the rest of the story. The point here is that the perception they deliberately encourage is a bigger part of the reality itself.
Without any intention to be uncharitable to these legislators, I am emphatic that the conduct of the current 8th Senate is not only absurd but verging on the comical and the despicable! Why is such trivia as the wearing or not wearing of a uniform a big issue for a supposedly ‘distinguished’ chamber that should ordinarily be more concerned and preoccupied with passing the national budget, making laws that would ensure good governance, enhance the security, safety, and wellbeing of Nigerians, and guarantee overall national development? Are these guys so idle and so under-employed that all they can do is engage is shadow-boxing with the executive branch and its operatives? And what is the business of the Senate, whose own presiding officers and leaders are mired in sundry corruption trials before several courts, to cheekily demand that the President must sack his own appointees as a precondition for senators to do the job they are elected and paid to do? If that is not legislative overreach, I don’t know what else it is!
The way I see it, the National Assembly, the Senate in particular, is taking this legislative rascality too far. I am all for the protection of the principle of separation of powers and defence of legislative independence, but certainly not the undue belligerence currently on display. It is sad and absolutely regrettable that our legislators are yet to rise to the stature and responsibility of national leadership, but are instead engaged in plainly ludicrous and utterly detestable conduct that trivializes the fragile democratic dispensation that Nigerians had made near-superhuman sacrifices to enthrone. And if this democracy is to survive and thrive for the ultimate benefit of Nigerians, the National Assembly definitely has a pivotal role to play. But it cannot play this serious role until its members overcome their infantile clownishness. The behaviour of some of them is, to say the least, absolutely disgraceful. Let us pray that our legislators do not, in the exhibition of their intellectual and moral vacuities, allow their ignominious conduct to endanger and derail our fragile democracy, for the alternative to democracy, as most of us adults who had lived through military dictatorships can testify, is rather too gruesome and unpleasant to contemplate. I seriously think the National Assembly is in dire need of a retreat and re-training to equip its members in the fundamentals of liberal democracy, inter-governmental relations in a democracy, proper legislative practice and conduct, ethics and etiquettes, so that sanity can be restored to protect our hard-earned democracy.

•Prof Fawole writes from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State.