Executive-senate face-off and a distraught nation

A report in the Monday edition of The PUNCH indicated that leaders of the All Progressives Congress recently met over the festering crisis between the Presidency and the Senate.

The latest disagreement, which has heated up the polity for a couple of months now is about the confirmation of the Acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Mr Ibrahim Magu. I consider the APC’s intervention belated and a disservice to the people.

The APC, a political party configured on the plane of progressivism and a pledge to alleviate the suffering to which successive governments had subjected Nigerians, failed at the most fundamental of its own objectives by allowing the scramble for dominance amongst its various power blocs toll on the well-being of Nigerians.

Those who cannot see the correlation between the inabilities of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led executive and the National Assembly to cohere on many issues and the socio-economic depression that has been the lot of Nigerians should ask themselves questions about the two budgets that the administration has prepared since 2015.

The first budget would compete for the world record as the most traumatised appropriation proposal lately. First, it was presented late and then it got lost. When found, accusations and counteraccusations of  “padding” rented the air such that we were already almost half-term gone before the execution of the document took off.

Let us not bother asking how much of that budget proposal was achieved. But you will recall that before the first release of funds to Ministries, Departments and Agencies was announced on May 23, 2016 by the Minister for Budget and National Planning, Udoma Udo Udoma, the country had nearly grounded to a fiscal halt. Unfortunately, we learnt no lessons from the fiasco that the 2016 budget was as the 2017 appropriation bill also came with its own dramatics before it was finally signed into law by Acting President YemiOsinbajo on June 12. That was about five weeks after the previous budget was scheduled to have expired.

Even then, the drama has not stopped. It is one month after the budget was signed but it is not clear if there has been any disbursement from the N 7.44tn proposal yet.

That is not the only spectacle that has followed the signing of the 2017 Appropriation Act. The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, BabatundeFashola, has engaged members of the National Assembly in a war of words, which in fact, degenerated into name calling before the end of last week.

Fashola, never to be outdone in a public spat, had gone ahead to itemise specific ways in which he thought the legislators overreached in over-sighting the appropriation process. His intervention, which came in spite of indications from Osinbajo that there had been some rapprochement from which the National Assembly had agreed to revisit some of the controversial areas in the budget, hit the wrong nerves at the National Assembly. And there has been no letting off in the reciprocal verbal vituperation that followed.

Had the party that produced members of the executive and a majority at the National Assembly been alive to its responsibility, the country would have been spared the delay and bad blood that the constitutional procedures for budgets has generated in the past two years. Maybe, we can hope for better times next year.

Concerning the Ibrahim Magu situation, there seems to be no other explanation for this sore point other than the desperation of members of both arms of government to romance their individual egos. And the lame party has looked on in abject helplessness.

On the two occasions that President Muhammadu Buhari has presented Magu’s name to the Senate in conformity with Section 2(3) of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (Establishment)Act, 2004, he was rejected on the strength of a Department of Security Services report which allegedly impugned his integrity.

On both occasions, Buhari refused to let Magu go and in the President’s absence, Osinbajo holds the forte as far as the decision to hold on to Magu is concerned.

Osinbajo, being a very senior lawyer, has even taken the argument for the retention  of Magu further by aligning with suggestions by a senior legal practitioner, Mr Femi Falana, that S.171 of the 1999 Constitution precludes the subjection  of presidential appointments like that of the EFCC chair to the Senate. The argument goes further to suggest that the S. (3) of the EFCC Act remains null and void by virtue of its inconsistency with S.171 of the constitution.

Between December 2016 when Magu was first rejected and now, the Senate has, on a number of occasions held back from performing its duties until the executive sends Magu out of the EFCC.

The latest of this was the refusal to screen Mr LanreGbajabiamila, presidential nominee as Director General of the National Lottery. Sometime in March, the Senate stood down the confirmation of 27 Resident Electoral Commissioners for the Independent National Electoral Commission for the same reason. The nation has therefore been serially held to ransom by these two arms of government.

That the APC has been unable to influence its representatives in government is a crying shame. This is more so when we consider the fact that this face-off actually preceded the Magu or budget incident. In actual fact, the altercation between the two arms of government is as old as the inauguration of the National Assembly in June 2015!

Events have shown that the Presidency and some stalwarts of the party were uncomfortable with the emergence of leaders of the National Assembly citing their incompatibility with the anti-corruption stance of the Buhari administration. We must agree that they are entitled to such sentiments, but these people got elected by the majority of members of the National Assembly, and that should have been respected.

Now, this is a democracy and unless you really can establish crimes against people in a court of law, you cannot deny them the rights to aspire and attain office. In any case, these people were chosen by their respective constituents to represent them. The refusal to respect truth is what I consider to be at the root of all the turbulence that we currently see.

Now, instead of Nigerians to demand performance from our leaders, we are falling over ourselves to take sides unmindful of the fact that politicians are all the same.

The point must be made that politics and morality are not analogous. Politicians are all ruled by self-interest and the disparagement of others is sometimes the bridge through which they cross unto the safety of the accomplishment of their own self-interest.  With its failure to invite the spirit of give and take to surpass the selfishness of the executive and legislative arms of government, the APC testifies to the hyperbole of its progressive credentials.

I concede that it is expected that the two arms will fall out every now and then but the perpetual friction between them is unbecoming in a country which has no time to waste in the race to sustainable development. And if there were altruistic motives to these disagreements, it should not take a lifetime to resolve them.

Even if all the structures of the almighty APC have so fallen apart as to be unable to terminally resolve this misunderstandings, what about one of the parties approaching the judiciary, for a permanent solution to the recurring squabble.

The failure or refusal of any of the executive or the legislature to approach the Supreme Court for the interpretation of the extent of the power of the legislature as it concerns the confirmation of appointments by the President and interference with budget proposals, is what I find to be most confounding in this whole drama.

If one of these parties goes to court, they will not just be solving a today’s problem but they will save us a recurrence of these issues in future. Since the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria allows for such steps to be taken, it smacks of disloyalty to the people of the country that our leaders would rather flex muscles and heat up the polity rather than find a legal resolution to the issues at hand.

How then, does a country make progress when its leaders are engaged in a warfare that takes away their ability to come together and address the myriads of problems that face the country? The two arms share the guilt for taking Nigerians for granted. They should sheathe their swords promptly and deliver us from hunger, lack and the violence that has become commonplace.