By Emmanuel Aziken,  Political Editor

With the All Progressives Congress, APC set to take control of the National Assembly the imperatives for a smoother relationship between the president and the National Assembly is to be expected.

National Assembly

However, that does not suppose that the rancor that shadowed the relationship between the two arms of government was on account of party differences given that the APC had the majority of the two chambers of the legislature in the period between 2015 and 2019.

Reflective of the rancor that shadowed the relationship between the two arms of government was the derailment of several legislative initiatives from both the National Assembly and the presidency in the last three years.

However, the difference this time is that the incoming set of APC legislators are people who have passed through the processes of the party as led by President Muhammadu Buhari and as such are in tune with his schemes. They are as such believed to have been intoned with the spirit of party discipline.

What will define the relationship between the National Assembly and the presidency will undoubtedly flow from the emergence of the new National Assembly leadership.

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President Buhari at the beginning of his term in 2015 had shown disinterest in the emergence of the National Assembly leadership. However, not all around him were apparently of the same mind and hence the brouhaha that followed the emergence of the Bukola Saraki and Ike Ekweremadu leadership of the Senate and the emergence of Speaker Yakubu Dogara in the House of Representatives.

Given the experience of the president in his dealings with the Eight Senate, it is doubtful that he would in the next dispensation become indifferent as to the emergence of the next leadership of the National Assembly.

Speaking on the development, Mr. Awaal Ibrahim, executive director of the Civil Society Advocacy and Legislative Centre, CISLAC said the two arms of government have to learn from the mistakes of the immediate past.

“There is no alternative for the president and the next National Assembly to learn from their past mistakes. Mistakes were made when each side sought to overreach itself into the duties of the other side. There are boundaries for each side to keep and they would do well to maintain themselves within such bounds,” Ibrahim, popularly known as Rafsanjani in the civil society movement said.

“The executive should know that the legislative is an independent arm of government and it should not use its power to undermine the legislature,” the civil society activist said.

“It is based on the lessons of the past that I will call for good relationship between the two arms for each arm to carry out its duties with respect to its constitutional mandate. This is because we have suffered a lot of setbacks in terms of legislative reforms, so many areas we expected the legislative to have carried out reforms but these were not done because of the problems and suspicions that shadowed the relationship between the two arms of government,” Ibrahim added.