A referendum on the form and nature of the National Assembly is imperative and urgent if we are to be taken seriously as a country truly ready for CHANGE. And I am ready to join hands with other well-meaning patriots to campaign for such a plebiscite in order to force the constitutional change needed on this needlessly large assembly that constitutes a monstrous drain on the economy.
As it stands presently, there are two chambers in the “house of horrors”; the lower is the House of Representative, the upper is the Senate. Between them we have 469 (360 Rep. and 109 Sen.) or so, men and women of different shades and hues, some bright as day, some others dull as a moonless night. But they are elected to represent us from their various constituencies.
Drunken by our oil into believing we are as good as America, we have modeled our Constitution (and so the Legislature) after the US, forgetting the historical process and the hundreds of years it has taken America to get to its present stage, and forgetting, more importantly, that all of our oilmoney is literally “chicken feed” to any state in America, nay, even to some corporations! But we are Nigeria, why should we crawl if we can run?
It is no longer news that Nigerian lawmakers at both chambers are the highest paid legislators in the world, a situation the renowned law scholar, Professor ItseSagay, once described as a cruel anomaly and a breach of trust. Even more angered by the anomaly was the then CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (now HRH, Emir of Kano) who decried the disproportionate amount of money gulped by the National Assembly vis-à-vis the federal budget, which in percentage terms have variously been put between 17% and 25%! That’s insane.
Professor Sagay put the average salary and allowances per annum of a senator at N240m and about N204m for the House of Rep. counterpart. Not bad for a day’s job if one considers that the last Senate spent a whole year bickering and squabbling, enjoying the humongous perks doing next to nothing about mounting bills that are their primary function to formulate and pass into law, only for them to do it all as “a day’s job” with the scandalous passing into law 46 bills in less than ten minutes! Unbelievable? Well, it did happen on Wednesday, 2 June 2015 under Mr. David Mark as Senate President.
So, perhaps, that’s all there is to it, a day’s job. But we must not let that cruel aberration lead us into thinking we have no use for the National Assembly or a legislative body, far from it. They are an important, vastly important, leg of the governance tripod in a democracy. They are to make the laws by which we are to be governed, and more importantly, they serve as the crucial check and oversight to what could easily become the banditry of the executive.
But the question is, at our stage of democratic governance and economic development what form and structure must this vital arm of democracy take? What makes the most sense for us at this point? Must we end up hanging by the balls on the democracy tree (excuse the pun) while trying to ape America’s monkey? Yet, if we must know, even in America today only 9 out of 50 states have a full-time state legislature.
So, why on earth, other than being unthinking, do all our 36 states have full-time state legislators gulping a big chunk of the states’ meagre revenue? What are they legislating all year-round?
And at the US Federal level (called Congress), America’s “Founding Fathers envisioned that being a member of Congress would be a part-time job. Pennsylvania’s state constitution even had a provision calling for members of the Legislature to ‘have some profession, calling, trade, or farm, whereby he may honestly subsist,’” according to thehill.com. And “for almost200years,beinginCongressmeantholdingdownanotherjob.”
I believe the time has come when well-meaning Nigerians must come together to reinvent the country. And the place to start is reforming and reformulating the Legislature. For sure, it won’t happen if we leave it to the National Assembly. They are full-time and, for many, their livelihoods depend on it. We cannot expect them to vote themselves out of job and be the first to make that giant sacrifice needed if Nigeria is to survive. Necessarily, we Nigerians, as President Buhari has extolled, must ourselves make the move to save the country from this slope to ruin.
Doubtlessly, the other arms of government, the Executive and the Judiciary would equally and urgently need complete overhaul and drastic restructuring. For now, President Buhari appears prepared to take the bull by the horns and trim down the Executive overweight of the past.
But the president cannot do it all alone. A referendum is necessary to force the hand of the present National Assembly to changing the Constitution to make membership of the Legislature part-time, and with it the cascading of a whole lot of money-guzzling structures. The noise around reduction in salary and allowances is meaningless and a red herring meant to assuage our badly offended sensibilities.
And that’s saying it the way it is!
Photo Credit: Premium Times Nigeria