Thursday 18 October 2012

When a legislature becomes irrelevant


The Pendulum (Column)
By O’Ray Osawe
The Navigator Newspaper

Governance, everywhere, is instituted, in the first place, to ensure that proper administration of the people of the country, state or community is achieved.  This, to a large extent, is true, especially of governance in Europe, the United States of America and other advanced countries of the world.  But in the African continent, and in some other parts of the Third World, governance is more or less mainly at the whims and caprices of despots, who see power as their private property, to be used for their own interest alone.
Those who fine-tune the art of governance insist that there must be the Rule of Law and Separation of Powers amongst the different arms of government for equity and balance to be achieved.  While the Rule of Law brings all and sundry, the high and the low, under the moderating influence of the laws of the land, the Separation of Powers gives fillip to the existence of a shared control of state powers, so that no arm of government is unnecessarily granted such absolute powers as to hold others to ransom.  The existence of a strict and unambiguous separation of powers creates and facilitates an endearing atmosphere of checks and balances that invigorates the health of governance for the general well-being of the people.
The Rule of Law and the Separation of Powers are so sacrosanct in the art of governance that governments, the world over, whether autocratic, monarchical, military or democratic, often create the impression, genuinely or otherwise, that they value such arrangements by creating bodies in the semblance of power-sharing, to win the support of the people.  In Nigeria, for instance, the military regimes that have ruled had the semblance of governments that respected the rule of law and the separation of powers.  But they all ended up not upholding any of such valued qualities of effective, people-oriented government.
In a democratic setting, like what obtains now in Nigeria, power is shared between the three arms of government, namely: the Executive, Legislature and the Judiciary.  While it is often said that the legislative arm formulates laws, the judiciary interprets such laws while the executive applies those laws to the effective governance of the larger society.  To ensure that those who make laws are representatives of the people in the larger society, democratic arrangement approves the election of quality persons into the National Assembly at the federal level, State Houses of Assembly at the state level, and the local legislative arms at the local government level.  
There is no doubt that the quality of legislation plays a major role in the successful governance of the people.  This is because the executive is supposed to be regularly called to attention and to question, if it begins to act in ways contrary to the laid down laws of the land, or against the dictates of the legislature or the judiciary.  
In a democratic setting, the executive should not be left to make reckless or selfish decisions.  All the hue and cry now coming from the mass of our people with particular regard to the actions or inactions of the executive should have been championed by those in the legislative arm who are truly the representatives of the people.
But, that they have all along remained silent is a threat to democratic norm.  Some have accused the legislature of being bought over by the executive, that that is why they have literarily transformed themselves into the rubber stamps of the executive.  If this is what obtains at the federal level, then what we see at the state and local government levels is a slavish attachment of the legislative houses to the apron string of the executive.  
In some states, the Honourable members of the State Houses of Assembly, not only go cap in hand to solicit for funds from the governors, some see the governors as the determinants of their political aspirations and future, and so the attitude becomes that of a puppet who catches cold each time the master sneezes.  It has become that bad.
The legislature is supposed to be the bulwark, the mouthpiece, and the chief campaigner for the masses, outside of the Press, which is the Fourth Estate of the Realm.  But over the years, at least since 1979, we have continuously witnessed a crying negligence or an arrant show of incompetence on the part of our elected representatives in the legislature, which is supposed to churn out people-friendly laws that would straighten the standard of living of the people and create a salutary impact on their well-being.
Critics have argued that it is not as if the legislative arms at all levels do not know that they are constitutionally assigned to be checks on the excesses of the executive, but that they impress it on the executive arms that they needed to be lobbied, settled or bribed for them to turn blind eyes and deaf eyes to the frivolities and the recklessness of the executive.  This, they say, has been the bane of the legislature; like the biblical Esau, who had to sell his birthright to his younger brother, Jacob, for a mesh of porridge.
Because of this obvious ineptitude of the legislature, there now exists a void in the governance of the people; a situation that has created the impression that when we talk about government, we only can have the executive in mind.  Sadly, the legislature has almost become non-existent because it has almost, without knowing it, fused, on its own accord, into the executive arm as an appendage.  Do we, therefore, need any explanation as to why the people now feel they have been alienated from government?
In fact, a situation in which the legislature enjoys a pleasant romance with the executive is anathema to effective democracy.  The void created by the non-performance of the legislature has become too wide and too deep for the people themselves to traverse before reaching the executive with a catalogue of their complaints and needs.
Do we, therefore, need any telling as to why a majority of Nigerians has seemingly decided to take their destinies in their own hands?  Do we need any telling why the Niger-Delta youths have become so restive about their plight, when they have representatives in the state and national Assemblies, who should have pleaded their case?
It is high time the legislature looked inwards with a view to sanitizing itself and repositioning itself to take up the enormous responsibilities bestowed on it by the constitution to, so to speak, police the executive into implementing policy programmes and projects that would transform the lives of the people for the better.
If the legislature fails in this regard, then it would become imperative for the people to chase their inept representatives out of the Assembly, or a fresh constitutional conference should be held to fashion out another system of governance that would create a better and more acceptable picture of the appropriateness and sanctity of the separation of powers.  Only then would we have a true Assembly of the people’s representatives, which would talk and do things that would ease the burden of existence for the people.

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