As long as imposition of candidates, godfatherism and pursuit of power without vision continue to play a leading role in the election of candidates into the state Houses of Assembly, and as long as Nigerians fail to hold the legislators in these Houses of Assembly accountable, so long will the crises in many state legislatures across the nation continue, analysts have said.
The analysts, who reacted against the backdrop of the recent crisis in the Edo State House of Assembly, where 16 out of the 24 members of the assembly impeached the speaker, Victor Edoro, for alleged high-handedness, dictatorial tendencies and financial recklessness, say what is playing out in most of the state assemblies is a contravention of the principle of separation of powers as conceptualised by French Enlightenment political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu.
Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), described the separation of political power among a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary, separate and distinct, so as to avoid excessive centralization of powers in a single monarch or similar ruler because of the corrupting nature of power. In this model, each branch of government works to checkmate the other to prevent one branch from becoming supreme, protect the “opulent minority” from the majority, and to induce the branches to cooperate.
But the situation in most of the states is that the governors have become supreme, emasculated and pocketed the legislators, usurped their powers and hold them to ransom to do the biddings of the governors and the party leadership, the analysts say, adding that what Nigeria has today are state legislators that do not even know what their roles and responsibilities are in a democracy, but just kowtow to the governors and pander to their whims and caprices.
Citing the current financial crisis debt burden rocking virtually every state of the federation today, the analysts say the state assemblies share a large chunk of the blame since no state government can go borrowing without first getting clearance from the legislature. They also point to the haste with which the legislators often make approvals or pass Appropriation Bills from governors, wondering if any form of due diligence goes into the process.
Jide Ojo, a public affairs analyst, says that the whole episode casts a dark shadow on the state legislatures and tells the story of an institution that is very weak, that is lacking in independence.
“You will recall that towards the tail end of the administration of former Enugu State governor, Sullivan Chime, he actually wanted to borrow some money and sent the request to the state House of Assembly, but they refused to accede to that request and that brought some tension to the state House of Assembly. But that’s an isolated case as 99.9 percent of times, when a governor wants to borrow or want the Appropriation Bill passed, you find out that it is an Indomie Noodle passage,” Ojo said during NTA’s ‘Good Morning Nigeria’ programme on Thursday.
“As we witnessed in Ekiti State, the 2016 Appropriation Bill was passed in about a week or 10 days. You wonder whether there was any thorough scrutiny of what the executive arm brought before them. So whether you are talking of appropriation or supplementary appropriation or you are talking of approval for borrowing, you find out that because most of the legislators in the state Houses of Assembly are stooges of the governor and the ruling party, it is very easy for the governors to have their way. That is the leadership crisis we have because people get into these legislative houses without understanding what is at stake, what their roles and responsibilities are,” he added.
Ojo further said that many of the state legislators do not even know what their constitutional powers are but only go by what is dictated to them by the governors.
“The nocturnal meetings they have with the governors is where they seal up every deal. So what you see on the floor of the state Houses of Assembly is just an orchestrated approval that had already been signed, sealed and delivered overnight,” he said.
“So until we have an institutional independence and strengthening of the state Houses of Assembly and recruitment of people who understand what their roles and responsibilities are, not only in terms of training but in terms of monitoring and evaluation to track their performance in terms of resolutions and bills passed and the quality of the resolutions and bills, things may not get any better,” he said, adding that Nigerians cannot continue to leave the legislature to do as they wish.
Sam Egwu, a professor of political science at the University of Jos, said the quality of the legislators at the subnational level is very important, stressing that he had actually identified it as one of the key drivers of the challenges that governance is facing at the state level.
“If you take your mind back to 1999 to the present day, you realise that what you may call some element of oversight, some element of checkmating the executive, some element of making very important policy input into the governance process, these are happening only at the national level. At the state level, many of those who are elected into the legislature do not even understand the responsibilities that they carry, and I think this is our problem in this country,” Egwu said.
“My sense of the matter is that, yes, political parties can raise the bar in terms of the quality of people they are nominating and selecting, but I think the best answer to this will come from the communities. I think we need to be careful at the community level in terms of the type of people we elect. And it really baffles all of that you have a situation where in many states there is no evidence of the House of Assembly even debating issues of internally generated revenue, proposing alternatives or even oversighting that process for us to know what is collected outside of the statutory allocation from Abuja. And therefore you face a situation in which many of them have abandoned governance and they are looking for immediate things that will address their material needs,” he said.
Egwu harped on the need to constantly put the state legislators in the public domain, chastise them seriously and begin to engage in naming and shaming at the local level in terms of those who do not even understand what it means to be a legislator.
“People do not even understand the power that the House of Assembly has in engaging important issues of governance, and so until we are able to do that and subject them to accountability, we are not going to in any way change the momentum as it is,” he said.
On the role of the Nigeria Police in these crises, Egwu said they have been implicated in many of the crises that have rocked state Houses of Assembly, often choosing to look the other side and pretend not to know what to do.
“It is possible that the police is acting to promote or to do the bidding of the governor. The police must therefore understand the civic duty that it owes the Nigerian people in terms of providing security for the environment of the legislature and being neutral in intervening. What we see on camera is a police force that is biased and is not interested in doing its work. We need to deal with that and it is part and parcel of the narrative of institutional failure,” he said.
Recall that almost all the Houses of Assembly in the country have experienced severe crisis over the past few years, often degenerating into fisticuffs, desecration of the mace as a fighting tool, gunshots and bloodshed in extreme cases.
The cases of Rivers and Ekiti are still fresh in the memory. As we write, the impasse in the Kogi and Taraba Houses of Assembly is yet to be resolved.
In the latest Edo case, the assembly slipped into chaos when suspected thugs invaded the chamber, a situation that made security operatives to immediately take over control of the assembly’s premises as staff scampered for safety.
Meanwhile, in Imo State, observers say the governor, Rochas Okorocha, has reduced the members of the state legislature to local government administrators and even leaders of different task forces in the state, including those in charge of collection of levies in local markets.
CHUKS OLUIGBO
