Once and the repeated time, our legislators are in the news for the wrong reasons. We are back to the kung-fu season once more. On Tuesday, the caucus of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the Senate tried and failed to agree on which of their own should fill which principal office of that legislative chamber. The meeting ended in chaos, with pushing and shoving. Theirs was kids play because their lower level colleagues in the Benue State House of Assembly went the whole hog, entertaining us with outright fighting (fisticuffs, punching, kicking all thrown in). But the icing on the parliamentary inglorious cake came on Thursday in the House of Representatives where proceedings came to halt as members engaged in a brawl that lasted about two hours.
The fighting in the House of Representatives followed the inability of the APC members to agree on the selection of principal officers for the House. When the fighting ended, Speaker Yakubu Dogara admonished members to be honourable and dignifying in their conducts, even when they disagree. He thereafter adjourned the House till Tuesday, July 21, some four long weeks away. When I heard the Speaker announce the long adjournment, I thought he was making a mistake; but I later realised that even the Senate had earlier adjourned till the same date. So it was a mutually-agreed date between the Green and Red chambers.
Across the world, the parliament is often the most combustible of the three arms of government, and this is understandable. Each member of the parliament holds an electoral mandate given by their constituency. This is unlike the executive arm where, apart from the president and vice president, the members are appointed by the president and are therefore at the beck and call of the appointer, holding their tenures at the pleasure of the president. In the parliament, however, each member is therefore a sovereign, in a manner of speaking. So theoretically speaking, each one is on equal footing with every other person there. It is in the assertion of this individual authority that there is always a clash of interests.
Also, members of the executive have their individual spaces (ministries, departments, agencies etc) to operate from as chief executives on a daily basis. In Nigeria, they only meet weekly at the Federal Executive Council (FEC). There is usually little room for friction among them, more so when they meet under the watch of their appointer, the president, who has the power to sack them without reason. Not so with the legislators who are all equals and only select their leader(s) from among themselves and can thus remove the leader(s).
Another reason parliamentary squabbles are notorious is that their meetings are often open to public viewing and through the media. That open access of the public and media to the parliamentary proceedings also provides impetus for members to want to play to the gallery, and that they do a lot. So, all the arguments, shouting, shoving and brawls are laid bare. Some parliaments may not be full of combatants and irascible fellows ready to resort to fisticuffs like ours, but there are always unruly moments like when members keep banging the tables, growl, grunt, and jeer and boo to disrupt others’ speeches.
Unfortunately for us in Nigeria, our parliaments contribute more than our fair share to the global collection of parliamentary rascality. And we are almost accepting it as a norm, even when these members refer to themselves in highfalutin expressions like ‘distinguished senator’, ‘right honourable’ and all that nonsense. The list of our parliamentary shenanigans is too long to mention. But I recall that on one such occasion in 2007, the fight in the House of Representatives led to the collapse and death of one of its members, Dr. Aminu Safana.
It, therefore, seems that the Nigerian legislatures are living theatres of shenanigans. And each time they fight, I struggle to see where the people and interests of the people stand or are protected in the brawl, but I cannot. Truth is, the people hardly ever matter, as far as most of our politicians are concerned. It is always about the politicians and their personal, individual, parochial and selfish interests.
Take the case of the present imbroglio in the legislature. The electorate voted 360 persons into the House of Representatives and 109 into the Senate as members. None of them was voted in as presiding or principal officer. The privilege of being such presiding or principal officer resides in the legislature (being a collection of all the members) to give to some of their own. And so, when the members get into a brawl just to grab a position or deny anyone such position, they do so in their private, personal, selfish capacities. It does not reflect the mandate given them by their constituencies.
No doubt, all the major players in this episode have contributed significantly to the big mess we are in. These include the APC leadership that wants to stay from outside and impose leaders on the legislature; the new National Assembly leaders who carry on as victors in a war and would not allow the vanquished any opportunity to get near the sharing of the spoils of war, as well as those who were previously ‘anointed’ for leadership positions and could not get it and now want to get a pound of flesh from their victorious colleagues.
In all of these, the country is the loser because for nearly two months, we are going to pay the legislators their huge salaries and allowances for work not done, and the president cannot even have his list of ministers and other officials sent for approval to allow the real job of governance commence. Our noisy parliamentarians should shut up, sit down and work!