By Obi Nwakanma

As the law permits, Speaker Aminu Tambuwal remains Speaker of the National House of Representatives, until the House convenes and the Majority Leader in the House musters the whip to get enough votes to elect a new speaker. It is fairly clear that the Job of the Speaker of the House is dependent largely on the privileges of the Majority party in Parliament or a governing coalition.

In the order of state protocol in Nigeria, the Speaker of the National House is fourth in line to the presidency. In other words, were anything to happen to the President, his Vice and the President of the Senate on a given day, the power of the state falls squarely on the shoulders of the Speaker for the continuity of the National government.

That line of succession makes it imperative, therefore, that a ruling party or majority coalition in parliament does not cede the office to the opposition. In the event that the opposition, as it sometimes happens in the Presidential system, has control of the Parliamentary Majority, even though the Executive offices are won and held by another party, the opposition elect the leaders of parliament, and a power-balancing act, and greater, more nuanced forms of negotiations takes place between the Executive and the Legislature.

It takes the parliament to fund the government; to approve spendings by the executive, and through the Ways and Means committees of the bicameral legislature in the case of Nigeria, audit the fiduciary commitments of the Executive branch. I have made this assertion countless times that the failure of government in Nigeria happens, and particularly, the vexed questions of brazen corruption, administrative incompetence, inefficiency, lack of transparency and impunity persist in Nigeria because (a) the Nigerian Legislature has failed, since the transition to this republic, to rise to its constitutional duties to represent the public will and provide the oversight, and the checks and balances necessary to keep the executive authority on the straight and narrow.

Very often, the National Assembly has been complicit in the corruption of successive administrations; and (b) the collapse of the National Civil service – the statutory thinking and executive arm of the state has undermined the integrity of the state.

There could never be corruption at any sector of the nation without the participation and connivance of the Civil servants. The Civil Service Commission as an independent institution of state administration both in its recruitment, training and orientation of the service has made the public service turgid, incapable of innovation, and a willing tool of corrupt and transient politicians.

In the years of my own father’s generation in the civil service, when the General Orders (GO) was the bible of the service, accountability and tenure were central to the actions of the public servant. To divert or bloat accounts, either for public works or procurement or emolument, was rare, but often came to light, and always before the disciplinary tribunal of the Civil Service Commission – the only arm of the state permitted to recruit, discipline, and punish civil servants.

The collapse of the system began very gradually between 1975 and 1985, but by the mid nineties, all institutional capacities to administer the nation in a civil system had been damaged almost irretrievably by the military governments. Today, you have Permanent Secretaries and Directors in the Service who cannot communicate effectively in the English language; who have very little conceptual capacities, and very little backbones to advise, and steer their ministers away from deleterious policies and official actions.

The reporting system between the National Parliament and the Federal Civil service is broken. We have a very broken public system, and a broken civil service is good for politicians. Members of the National Assembly are anything but politicians, and over the years, particularly in this republic, the legislature has seen itself, and often acted mostly, as an appendage to the presidency. Perhaps the point is that Nigerians have failed to elect capable Legislators who are yet to understand that the most powerful force of the land is not the president, but an elected National Assembly, which has the power to audit, fund, and if it finds it necessary, impeach the head of the Executive Branch, the president.

Although the president is endowed with the highest executive power in the land, he is by law subject to the countermand of the National Assembly to whom he goes for the approval of every money to be spent, and to whom he reports all the moneys accruing to the nation by tax and trade, and how each dime is spent by his administration in the interest of the public.

By law, if the president fails to provide these accounts, he may become subject to extensive inquiry, impeachment, and litigation. This fact is principally why I insist that those who call this president corrupt must push the National Assembly to begin an investigation of his presidency, and must do it by organizing and pushing their representatives in the National Assembly to act in the public interest. Fathomless innuendos against the president are simply not enough. But it brings me back to Tambuwal: every incumbent President relies on a powerful alliance with the leaders of Parliament to push through legislative agenda; including financial laws on which the President must operate.

When Aminu Tambuwal resigned his membership of the PDP, the party on whose platform he stood to be Speaker of the HoR, he made forfeit his rights to be Speaker. If Aminu Tambuwal were truly honorable, his resignation from the PDP should have come only after he had officially handed in his resignation as Speaker of the House of Representatives. But Tambuwal in the drama that followed seemed to want to have his Cake and eat it too. He wanted to leave the PDP and keep the Speakership. It cast him in the public mind as damaged goods – a careerist politician whose interests were more complicated than service to the nation.

The police withdrew his personal security detail, and they were right to do. It is a privilege not a right to have security details. Besides, it is already an aberration that the Speaker of the HoR will need more than his police orderly, and was assigned that array of personal security service and number of vehicles all on tax payers account. This is scandalous! But that said, whereas Tambuwal insists on being speaker, he continues to be speaker until his peers, following a muster of votes by the Majority whip removes him by a simple up and down vote. He has not resigned his position. That vote needs to happen. That said, the drama of the police invasion of the National Assembly last week amounts to treasonable conduct. Who ordered the assault of the House of Parliaments? The president has denied issuing the orders. The National Security Adviser equally denied ordering anybody’s arrest. In any case the office of the NSA has no power under the law to order or even conduct the arrest of any citizen.

The power to order the arrest of anyone rests with the Courts in Nigeria, and the power to execute such an arrest rests only with the Police by leave of the president. The Inspector-General must be compelled to resign for this travesty – because the action itself takes a first step towards infamy – which strictly speaking is a coup de’tat. Any attempt to use armed force to close down and occupy the parliament of a nation and arrest her legislators is an attempt to dismantle the constitution, and the foundation of the republic, and rule by fiat. This is a dangerous development.