As intense jostling begins for the 2015 general election, it is crucial to draw the attention of the National Assembly to some critical bills, including the Petroleum Industry Bill and the Railways Amendment Bill that may signpost its failure if not passed into law. Though the Senate Majority Leader, Victor Ndoma-Egba, has dramatically given the assurance that all critical bills pending at the National Assembly will be passed before the next legislative year, nothing shows that this legislative session will not end in failure like the previous ones since 1999.
Since May 29, 1999 when the country returned to civil rule, our legislative sessions have been anything but productive. The National Assembly has largely betrayed our struggle to build a vibrant economy and a tolerant, free, liberal, democratic and pluralistic society by abandoning political and economic reforms solely to the executive arm of government. The effect has been a succession of economically decadent administrations at the centre. Between 1999 and 2009, according to a report, a total of 556 bills (220 Senate and 336 House of Representatives) were passed by the National Assembly. Between 1999 and 2011, 206 bills were forwarded for presidential assent with 176 signed into law and 32 withheld. So far in 2014, the parliament has passed only four bills, while it was a return of double that figure in 2013. But most of these had no fundamental impact on either the economy or the welfare of the people.
As of 2012, there were 189 bills pending at the federal parliament, some of which were adjudged to be crucial to the economy. They include the Railways Amendment Bill that seeks to repeal the colonial Railway Act of 1955 and open the way for private sector and states’ investment in railways, thereby ending the federal monopoly over this strategic sub-sector. Others are the PIB, whose inexplicable delay has held up investments in the critical oil and gas sector and the Minerals bill that will also open the floodgates to private exploitation of solid minerals, and several others.
Indolence and carelessness over those issues that can lift the 70 per cent of Nigerians living in poverty are manifest. The railway bill has suffered delays for several years. Legislative rascality killed the minerals bill at the Sixth National Assembly that was dissolved in May 2011, just as some last-minute intrigues involving the Presidency and vested, sectional interests squelched the PIB last year.
We need not remind the lawmakers that they were elected to make laws that would uplift the country from the morass of ill-governance and decadence. The previous six assemblies fared poorly in this respect; the Seventh is toeing the same inglorious path. At the political level, the parliament’s effort at constitution review has been a journey to nowhere.
In an advertorial by the Senate in 2012, it rightly identified 16 core areas of the constitution that deserved to be amended. The list included the controversial immunity clause, the National Youth Service Corps Act, the Land Use Act, devolution of powers, creation of states, constitutional recognition for the six geopolitical zones and the role of traditional rulers. Other items include the issue of local government administration and fiscal federalism, the removal of ambiguities in the constitutional provisions relating to constitution amendment, boundary adjustment, the status of the Nigeria Police, provisions relating to the judiciary, the executive, zoning arrangement, mayoral status for the Federal Capital Territory administration and the issue of residency and indigeneship.
Yet, 15 years on, with the country facing political implosion, the National Assembly remains at a loss about what to do with the 1999 Constitution, which was solely designed for the late maximum ruler, Sani Abacha. Its 320 sections are nothing but a mockery of federalism.
For both political restructuring and economic reform, our lawmakers have been a real letdown. But, in spite of their irrelevance to national development, they earn the fattest, most bogus pay and allowances in the world, according to independent accounts. Last year, The Economist of London reported that the basic salary of a Nigerian lawmaker is $189,500 (N30 million) per annum. This amount, which excludes allowances and votes for constituency projects, is 52 times more than what a lawmaker in Kenya earns, and is 116 times the country’s Gross Domestic Product per person of $1,600.
There is no justification for such luxury at public expense in a country that boasts a poverty figure of 58 million (World Bank statistics) out of its estimated 170 million population. Ours is a ruling class tied to rent-seeking rather than the pursuit of an open economy and public good.
Among the three arms of a democratic government, however, the legislature is seen as the most important because it is supposed to make the laws for the other two arms, and rein in their excesses. Nigeria cannot develop as a nation when its legislature permanently serves its own narrow, egoistic interests at the expense of the majority.
Once again, time is running out. The National Assembly should stop sitting on its hands. There is an urgent need for deep-seated political and economic reforms to free the economy from the smothering influence of the state before 2015. The report of the National Conference also demands urgent attention to release the society from the deadening hand of central planning.
