EDITORIAL: The 10th National Assembly and challenges ahead

A June date is most likely for the inauguration of the 10th National Assembly, after the newly inaugurated president issues a proclamation to that effect in line with the provisions of the 1999 Constitution.

Despite being in its inchoate stage, the frenetic jockeying for leadership positions in the two chambers already going on, its complexities and the seven political parties that produced the legislators, instead of the usual dominant two, rivet observers.

But the bigger picture is the challenges that lie ahead of the 469 lawmakers, comprising 109 senators and 360 members of the House of Representatives. Their legislative agenda is being awaited.

The magnitude of challenges does not call for the usual feeble declaration of intentions by the leadership on the day of inauguration. With a raft of crises in national security, the economy, education, service delivery, corruption, and lack of accountability in governance, the 10th National Assembly’s job is well cut out. It requires that its members constantly keep their eyes on the ball.

It also means that the pursuit of selfish interests, headlined by obscene and undeclared self-granted allowances and emoluments, and compromises in the discharge of oversight functions, should give way to patriotism and a sense of duty.

This country, as some would argue, is like a patient in an intensive care unit that needs a lot of care. Public expectation is that this coterie of lawmakers should imbue themselves with the requisite vision and a mission to deliver on the public good.

The journey through this furnace of integrity will start with how transparent the process of choosing their principal officers would be, amid wild allegations that this is already enmeshed in the skein of sleaze. They need to be wary of disappointing Nigerians!

The Senate’s confirmation of ministerial nominees from the president is a ritual repeatedly bungled since 1999. Nominees are usually submitted without portfolios attached to them, and this does not allow for rigorous screening.

The contrary is the case in the US and other Western democracies from where we modelled our system. Over the years, some nominees with legislative antecedents, especially from the National Assembly, are customarily asked to take a bow and go. For the others, they are asked general questions due to the lack of information on their proposed posting.

The practice leads to round pegs being put in square holes. This jaded routine must change. When mediocrities become ministers by the action or inaction of a frigid legislature, the country loses ultimately.

Globally, the parliamentary business demands mental rigour and lawmakers who are abreast of the provisions of the constitution and corpus of their country’s laws, in order to be effective.

How the 9th Assembly fared on these indices is not cheery at all. Quite often, vacant seats, lawmakers chewing on something or the other, or engaging in private discussions while debates are going on, are common sights.

These misdemeanours assault the sensibilities of taxpayers, who view live sessions of some of these sittings on television. That era should go with the outgoing assembly.

It is incompetence and lack of rigour that made the Ahmed Lawan-led 9th National Assembly to serially approve loans for the President Muhammadu Buhari regime, used to pay salaries and defray overheads in flagrant breach of the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007.

The Act, in Section 41, stipulates that borrowing shall only be for capital expenditure and human capital development, just as Section 44 (1) emphasises that the government must specify the purpose for borrowing and a cost-benefit-analysis should be attached to the request.

The failure to comply with these imperatives explains why the country’s debt stock of $10.3 billion in June 2015, two weeks after Buhari assumed office, had spiked to $40.06 billion by June 2022. The recklessness that underpinned this is overwhelming.

The World Bank has warned that this debt profile is “unsustainable” in the long term. It will even be more with the $800 million recently secured for palliatives to the most vulnerable in the face of the imminent increase of hardship that the planned fuel subsidy removal will impose on the citizenry.

With constant fiscal deficits in the budgets and the absurdity of using 96.3% of revenue on debt-servicing in 2022, according to the World Bank, the 10th National Assembly should stop further loan approvals and help the government to look inwards.

There are leakages to be blocked via legislation, while painstaking oversight is critical, and the recovery of public funds in private and corporate portfolios must be pursued.

The country’s total stamp duty revenue, which is curiously a matter for conjecture, is being probed by the House. The money is still with banks that collected it on behalf of the government.

In the oil sector, multinational corporations owe Nigeria royalties, taxes and other fees regularly. Their indebtedness stood at $6.8 billion in 2019, which is an anomaly highlighted in NEITI’s report.

There is a verified case of $17 billion worth of stolen crude between 2011 and 2014 by some firms, which the government vowed to recover. Sixty government agencies failed to remit the N3 trillion they generated in six years, the Senate Finance Committee discovered in 2021. From every direction, the public treasury is being pillaged.

It is a painful manifestation of the National Assembly’s woeful performance as the watchdog of public accounts, expressed in Section 80 of the 1999 Constitution as amended, which deals with powers and control over public funds (remittances and expenditure).

It is a cheerless valediction for Buhari and the 9th Assembly for not implementing the Stephen Oronsanye report on restructuring of 541 federal agencies for service delivery.

To be abolished are 38 of these agencies, while 52 were for merger with others, and 14 of them were to be reverted to departments in ministries.

This would have saved Nigeria a huge cost in governance. Rather than prune the agencies, it has actually created more of them. A former Head of Service, Ebele Okeke, who chaired the last White Paper panel on the report, noted with concern the existence of needless agencies in education and health, which are all creations of personal bills by lawmakers.

To scrap them, she advised a dialogue with the parliament. The report is before the parliament for action. The 10th National Assembly must develop the sense of responsibility necessary to improve public finances.

Insecurity, without question, is Nigeria’s biggest nightmare, with the North-East being hobbled by jihadists, as the North-West is under the spell of kidnapping and banditry.

In the North-Central, killer-herders have made life unbearable for farming communities, forcing residents to live in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, while the South-East is under hostage by unknown gunmen and Biafra irredentists.

In the South-South, Niger Delta militants have continued to undermine the oil industry, leading to telling shortfalls in Nigeria’s 1.8million barrels per day OPEC crude oil production quota.

A scary security scenario like this should have informed a legislative intervention on how best to improve policing in the country. The Fifth Alterations to the 1999 Constitution never addressed the limitations of our one-tier policing system that consistently fails to deliver.

Consequently, a reversal of the above should be treated as a national emergency by the 10th National Assembly. Ironically, many outgoing lawmakers are scared-stiff of going back to their constituencies because of insecurity.

In some cases, not a few of them had been stoned and chased out by angry youths for their non-performance. As embodiments of representative democracy, it is in the enlightened self-interest of the new lawmakers to take the security of lives and property seriously through radical reforms and effective oversight, to avoid being caught in the web of their own negligence.

A sore case with every legislative set is budget racketeering. Budgets are annually padded for the benefits of lawmakers, thus distorting the expenditure framework and making their implementation difficult.

It has led to several face-offs between the legislature and presidents. In the 2022 budget, for instance, President Buhari decried the lawmakers’ insertion of 6,576 projects of their own in the budget, costing N36.5 billion. It is an annual abuse of power. Even in ministries, the story is the same.

The Ministry of Agriculture received 1,500 new projects in its budget, undoubtedly resulting from transactional motivations. President Buhari said, “Most of these projects inserted relate to matters that are basically the responsibilities of states and local governments; and do not appear to have been properly conceptualised, designed and costed.” This is a breach of the Public Procurement Act.

Also Read: Tinubu to meet APC NWC over 10th National Assembly leadership

Banana pills are ever present in both chambers of the National Assembly. A former member of the House, Farouk Lawan’s earlier conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeal in February 2022 and he was sentenced to a five-year jail term for a $500,000 bribe he took during a fuel subsidy scam probe in 2012. And a serving senator recently went to jail over a money laundering conviction. These are lessons for the lawmakers.

For the first time, the Minority Caucus in the House is in the Majority with 182 members, one lawmaker more than those of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). It is hoped that this will help to foster a strong opposition, robust debates and oversight that every democracy needs to thrive.