Since OrderPaper Nigeria began the release of its midterm performance appraisals, citizens have been exposed, for the first time, to objective evaluation metrics for the determination of performance of members of the National Assembly.

In this interview, OkeEpia, Executive Director and Publisher of OrderPaper, says Senators and Members of the House of Representatives are scrambling to push bills and motions since the midterm appraisals of the National Assembly were made public.

He also explains the Most Valuable Parliamentarians (MVPs) recognition concept being introduced by his organization alongside a cohort of civil society organizations. Excerpts:

Tell us about the MVP concept. Is your organization (OrderPaper Nigeria) now joining the popular train of conferring awards on politicians?

First of all, let’s get this straight- OrderPaper Nigeria is not organizing awards. We have provided exclusive coverage of the National Assembly of Nigeria as an independent and dedicated niche media for about six years and have deliberately stayed away from conferring awards.

We have been careful not to let the deeply demanding, thoroughly professional and technical work we do to be tainted or viewed from the prisms of being seen to be ingratiating ourselves to members of the National Assembly. So to be clear, the concept of NASS MVP is not an award event.

We are simply setting off a process that will eventually create a class of premium performers and high achieving legislators who are selected and invited thereto by strict objective criteria. So while we may have course to make recognitions and/or awards down the road, our idea of the MVP is to bring before Nigerians and the world, a class of proven, objectively chosen and committed members of the National Assembly who can be trusted to push for citizen-centric legislations and legislative interventions towards the ultimate objective of advancing good governance and democratic gains.

So the MVP idea is more of a process than an event and the process is following up on the extensive midterm reporting that we (OrderPaper Nigeria) have done in the last couple of months.

These reports are essentially a set of performance appraisals of members of the Senate and the House of Representatives in the first two years of the 9th assembly. Those appraisals were focused on the performance of the functions of legislators in terms of lawmaking, representation and oversight.

OrderPaper Nigeria, with all sense of modesty, is the only organization in this country that has embarked on such extensive work anchored on data-driven innovations that makes very clear and incontrovertible set of objective metrics and criteria to determine performance.

Our approach is scientific and systemic. With due respect, we took the road less travelled by most award-giving bodies and organizations.

We were able to access a large trove of data from official records of the Senate and House of Representatives respectively. We then went on to distill the data for weeks before being able to analyze and make patterns and deductions that eventually formed the appraisals we have been publishing since last year. We could then determine who has done what within the first two years of the National Assembly and who has not.

To the best of my knowledge no other organization had done that kind of extensive work and we are grateful to colleagues in the media who lavishly amplified our work. The outcomes give us some satisfaction that citizens, and even members of the National Assembly, appreciate the work we do at the National Assembly and we are grateful for the opportunity to serve.

Knowing that members of the National Assembly hold mandates on behalf of citizens so there’s need for citizens to also have a sense of how the mandates are being utilized and actualized.

If the mandate has not been actualized positively on the lives of citizens they need to know so objectively to be able to ask the right questions.

So we thought on building on that milestone work we did on the performance appraisals by processing high ranking performers into a cluster of valuable parliamentarians who are not only high-achieving in terms of performance but are also able to respond to the critical needs of Nigerians with dedication and sustained commitment.

Lawmakers who can beat their chests and say ‘come what may, the issues that affect Nigerians those are the issues that affect us and would fight to see them addressed.’

What bills are members of the National Assembly pushing? Are they of enough impact on the lives and living conditions of citizens of Nigeria?

What are the motions being raised and resolved in parliament? Do they speak to the needs of constituents and citizens at large? Are legislators pushing petitions on behalf of citizens to have genuine grievances resolved?

In whose interest really is the performance of committee oversight? And so on and so forth? So these are the kind of questions that formed the need to create a distinct class of high performers and position them as champions of the people at all times. Nigerian citizens can see them as allies and say these are touch bearers of popular causes irrespective of the different constituencies they represent or parties they belong.

So that is why we thought of conceiving the MVP (Most Valuable Parliamentarians) Hall of Fame idea which invites them into a process of understanding their roles and responsibilities of being champions of Nigerian citizens.

So MVP framework is not an award event but a process.

Some commentators, including lawmakers, have argued that you cannot base a legislator’s performance on bills alone yet your organization seems to focus more on the bills, especially emanating from your midterm reporting?

Those observations are not incorrect. Our organization started the performance appraisals with focus on bills; that does not mean that the other two legs of measuring performance are less important or left out.

You may also want to measure performance based on projects attracted to various constituencies under the Zonal Intervention scheme that is fraught with controversies.

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You may also want to measure representation based on how well members of the parliament have been able to push petitions that have been brought to them by members of their constituencies. And may be ways of influencing employment for constituents and all that which you may want to cluster together under the leg of representation in performance measurement.

I can tell you that a process around those other legs of performance appraisals is ongoing by OrderPaper and the findings will equally excite the polity.

Mind you, there are constraints we have had to deal with in doing the bills appraisals in even getting data from the National Assembly. And I must say that civil society must raise the advocacy on Open NASS because there is so much that should be in the public domain but deliberately shielded.

So what we have done is to start from the easier part and advance to the difficult ones but that’s not to say working on the bills was easy though. In fact, it is indeed very tasking.

We had to go through troves of data which was not even so easy to get in the first place. If you are familiar with the way National Assembly operates, you cannot just walk in there and get access to data. Sometimes we had to rely on our expertise and privileged network to get the data.

When you get the data, distilling and organizing them into sets and making the kind of reports that we have published laced with beautiful infographics was a lot of work. If I say working on the bills was the easier one that is not to undermine the amount of work that has been put into that effort.

So of course we are aware of the need to extend the appraisals into the other two legs of the Legislator’s functions.

However, what we have done speaks clearly of our vision and determination to put legislators on the spot before citizens.

This is to help citizens demand for accountability from their legislators; to help citizens demand from their legislators answers to questions around the mandate they gave to them at the elections.

Our midterm reporting helps citizens ask the right questions and make the right calls especially as the 2023 general elections draw near.

It is also to help citizens advise their lawmakers that ‘look these are areas that bother us; we appreciate what you have done but these are areas you need to improve on and this is what we want you to focus on.’

Talking about election year, the appraisals are going to be very critical in decision-making as we approach the end of the tenure.

We want to move the interfaces away from the mundane issues and focus on core governance issues of law-making and representation. That is why we are activating the MVP Hall of Fame process now.
 
When is the event likely to come about?

Like I said earlier, there’s no event at this time per say; it is a process. We are unfolding a process that will likely culminate into a grand event at the end of this ninth assembly.

We are onboarding all these top performance – clustering about 40 or so members of the 460 members of the National Assembly and imbue them as champions of civil society and the masses.

Along the way, there will be recognitions based on clear criteria like the quality or impact of bills, progression of bills, and so on.

Let me also inform that we are not doing this work on our own but in collaboration with a cluster of renowned Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and community-based citizen groups who have identified with the work we are doing in putting the feet of the National Assembly to fire.

So this is not an OrderPaper thing per say but a citizen-driven project. We would see members of the National Assembly receiving accolades that is seen to be truly deserved at the end of their tenure and accepted not just by their constituents but across Nigeria and beyond.

So in all how many lawmakers are worthy of this recognition by your assessment?

In the beginning, the process will identify about 40 members both from the Senate and House of Representatives whom we will work with into the third year performance appraisals.

As the tenure winds down it may not be all of these selected NASS members that would be inducted into the MVP Hall of Fame eventually.

We are going to be seeing a challenge from those who have done well in trying to consolidate and do better so that way they try to remain in the MVP Hall of Fame while those not currently recognized will likely improve their performances and get inducted.

Mind you, this is an invitation-only process based solely on objective performance.

At the end of the day, it is about what the data says that gets you into the MVP Hall of Fame. And there’s one final point I like to make that this is not something that is influenced or motivated by anyone or anything pecuniary.

In fact, in our communication to the members of the National Assembly and other stakeholders we have made this very clear.

There is no pecuniary motive driving all of this. All of this is being driven by the interest we have in projecting the institution of the National Assembly into a performance-driven institution that will deliver services to the Nigerian people, services for which members have been elected to perform. So anything else besides this is clearly not our motive.