By Emman Ovuakporie & Johnbosco Agbakwuru
REJECTION of executive proposals and inaction by both legislative chambers of the National Assembly have been affecting governance of the country, a member of the House of Representatives,Abiodun Israel Famurewa, has said.

Famurewa attributed the trend to the absence of good working relationship between the executive and legislature, especially at caucus level within the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.

He said: “The President got things wrong from the onset by staying out of the politics of the parliament in deciding who became what in the leadership structure. I think Mr President got it wrong from day one, for him to have not really shown interest in the leadership of the 8th Assembly. That doesn’t mean you want to lord your opinion on them, he was at least supposed to show interest in it. Those are the little problems we had at the formative stage of the party.”

Famurewa: Supports borrowing plan

The lawmaker while tracing the genesis of the problem noted that the ruling APC devoted too much on winning elections without actually sitting as a group to fashion out how to allocate offices to members after the victory.

“We put all our efforts in winning the elections, we refused to sit down as a group to decide what would be, who would be where and all those things. So by the time all those things started, the interests, aspirations, etc, come up definitely there will be clashes here and there.

”And since then apart from the President coming to the National Assembly for the budget presentation, I don’t think we really have a kind of rapport that is supposed to be between the APC members in the National Assembly, both at the House and the Senate, and the executive and even the party.

“The way I know things in-house in the past, the party will have a regular meeting with elected government officials both from the executive and the parliament. For example, this issue of borrowing plan, this was supposed to have come up before now. We are supposed to have discussed it at caucus level.

“The Senate President is a member of the APC, the President who brought the proposal is also a member of the APC.

Standard of  infrastructure

They are supposed to have sat on a table and said, ‘Mr. Senate President, this is what we are bringing, what’s your opinion?’ The Senate President must have one or two inputs into that to say ‘okay, Mr. President, don’t put it that way, put it this way,’ and that would have encouraged the Senate President to go to the parliament and do some underground work, especially  as the party is the majority. But they don’t have such a rapport, that’s one of the problems,” he pointed out.

Famurewa explained that he, as a lawmaker, would support the borrowing plan since it would help in raising the standard of infrastructure in the country. “Personally, I don’t oppose it and I won’t oppose it and I would even encourage our people to support the idea. But the only thing I would have loved the executive to do is to bring the details”, Famurewa stated, but not without some words of criticism for the executive for misleading the National Assembly with regard to details of the borrowing plan.

“If you look at the letter sent to the Senate, at the last paragraph of the letter, they said some documents were attached to those letters but at the end of the day no document was attached. So if I find myself in their shoes I would also turn it down; you said some documents are attached to this letter but those documents I don’t have access to them, let me have the documents and then look at the break down before I can pass it”.

Reacting on the allegation that the said loan plan is skewed toward a particular region of the country, he added that nobody can expect to have such amount of money  approved without understanding the manner in which the projects would be spread, bearing in mind the developmental needs of every region or zone. “This is a nation, you cannot borrow such an amount of money and divert it to a region, it must cut across, otherwise, the proposal will be dead on arrival”, he cautioned.