By Tonnie Iredia

Since 1999 when democracy was restored in Nigeria, one sector which has failed to function in line with democratic ethos is the legislative arm of government. The way the law makers have positioned themselves to manipulate every other sector of the country has no doubt given many people cause for concern.

At state level, many of them developed around themselves, an in-explicable aura of belligerence, fighting over too many things during plenary and quite often serving as willing toolsfor dealing with their governors’ enemies real or perceived.

At federal level, Nigerian legislators worked assiduously from inception to become the most visible set of Nigerians using their oversight functions and power to summon and bully public officials for the purpose of enriching themselves.

While many critics have tended to discountenance state legislators, it has not been similarly easy to ignore the emergence of legislators at the federal level who are now the undisputed occupants of the corridors of political power. This is why columns such as this see them as ready materials for weekly analysis.

Members of Nigeria’s National Assembly must themselves take credit for the ample attention they attracted to themselves by always striving to be the most important office holders.

This manifested in their early enactment of the Order of Precedence Act which made their leaders numbers 3 and 4 citizens of the country.In addition, they ranked themselves above state governors notwithstanding that each of them can only represent a fraction of a governor’s state constituency.

As if to turn themselves to ‘untouchables’, they sought in 2003, to amend the Act setting up the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) simply because the Commission under Justice Mustapha Akanbi was investigating charges of corruption against their leadership.

The law was not only amended in haste; the legislature did not have the prescribed quorum to so act. It was also observed that the law makers at every opportunity would hurriedly clear their members accused of corruption as they did when Ministerial nominee Nasir el Rufai publicly named some senators who demanded bribe from him to facilitate his clearance.

After almost a decade of bullying public officials, the House of Representatives met a brick wall when its Committee on Capital Market sought to publicly chastise Aruma Oteh the then Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who refused to be blackmailed to offer bribe.

The House resolved that the lady must be removed from office, which the then President Jonathan declined to do. One month later, anxious to apply pressure on the executive, theSenate through its Chairman of the Committee on Capital Market, Senator Ayoade Adeseun announced the resolution that it would also have nothing to do with the SEC if Oteh remained in office.

Indeed, the Senate itself as part of efforts to project its strength,commandeered the serious constitutional mandate of confirming certain Presidential appointments into ‘a bow and go’ policy thereby failing to ensure that only fit and proper persons were appointed into specified sensitive offices 

The power of our legislature became overblown when it began to hold court where it would compel public officials to abandon every other business to appear before them to answer all types of charges.

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Even the Attorney general of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, was summoned to brief the Senate on the $9.6 billion P&ID judgment debt against Nigeria. This was supposedly to prevent Nigeria’s asset around the worldfrom being taken over by the Irish firm.

Generally, the invitations usually took the form of threats. For example, several threats were made to arrest heads of agencies that failed to appear to defend the queries raised against them by the Auditor General for the Federation in its 2016, 2017 and 2018 reports.

In fact, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, was threatened over his failure to honour invitations extended to him to defend how N596 billion ecological fund was spent from 1999 to 2015.

The Chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Gen. Muhammad Buba Marwa (Rtd.) was similarly threatened for failure to explain 11 queries that had been issued on his predecessor bothering on mismanagement of funds amounting to N467million.

Whereas the threat by the House of Representatives Committee on Insurance to issue a warrant of arrest on Col, Hammed Ali, the Customs boss was reportedly based on the failure of Ali to explain why his agency allegedly paid N250 million to the Fortis Insurance Brokers Ltd for no job done, many believed that the feud between the National Assembly and the Customs Service may have been prompted by the refusal of the latter to grantundue concessions to the legislature.

Following a threat extended to the then Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris, for failing to appear before its ad-hoc committee investigating allegations of abuse of office against him, the law makers established that they could arrest anyone.With such boldness, the legislature placed on record that their mission was to sanitize Nigeria. However, many disputed this considering the fanfare with which the threats were made and how at the end, the cases merely fizzle away.

Many analysts have thus had cause to comment on the frivolous threats by the legislature. A renowned University Don, Ejikeme Nwagwu of the University of Nigeria Nsukka had in a 2014 article in the Journal of Law, Policy and Globalization opined that the all-important function of legislative Oversight in Nigeria has been reduced”to mere alarm mechanism being used to blackmail or witch-hunt political opponents, extortion of money from the parastatals and ministries under its supervision for selfish or personal aggrandizement.

”Some other analysts imagined that most of the powers which the legislature in Nigeria lays claim to are unfounded. Justice Oluwadare Aguda (Rtd)is for instance convinced that “Democratic government in Nigeria is now seriously undermined by the Legislature’s usurpation of both executive and judicial functions.” To make matters worse, the legislators hardly give those they are investigating ample opportunity for fair hearing.

But perhaps what calls for greater concern and which informed today’s piece is the growing evidence that the ‘reformist-legislators’ are now the ones more accused of what they claim to be eradicating.

Only 3 days ago,the office of Auditor-General of the Federation, revealed that the House of Representatives made payments from a salary account, in billions, without payment vouchers, as required by extant regulations.

The amount involved was put at over N5.2 billion with details of the discrepancies contained in the recently released 2019 annual Audit report. This therefore, puts our holy legislature among the many Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the federal government indicted and queried by the Auditor-General for incessant violation of extant rules, some of which include non-retirement of personal advances within a financial year and grant of cash advances above the approved limit and payments without vouchers.

.Barely one day after the report,some Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) called on Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, to sack the chairman Senate committee on appropriation, Senator Barau Jibrin.

The premise of the grievances of the CSOs is that the 2020 Appropriation Act is reportedly filled up with padded expenditures. This has been confirmed by Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) as failing in all the integrity tests of accepted procedures in procurement and an aberration to the provisions of the Procurement Act.

While any or some or all or none of the allegations currently in the news are yet to be proved or disproved, it is disheartening that those who have been issuing threats of warrants of arrests on accused persons for years are now being painted with same brush of indictment.

Our legislature, must at this point endeavour to undertake a sober introspection rather than defending bogus running costs while comparing unequal items. It is time to remind them that like Caesar’s wife, they are expected to be above board all the time.

Vanguard News Nigeria