Steeped in selfish and bizarre indulgence, National Assembly lawmakers have initiated a legislative process of enjoying immunity, to shield themselves from criminal and civil prosecutions while they serve. It is being engineered by the Senate. To get a critical support outside, 36 state assemblies’ lawmakers have also been included as beneficiaries. It is an impunity taken too far. A media report said that it is encapsulated in a bill, which has already been gazetted, as the legislators prepare to steamroll it. They should be stopped in their tracks.
The move will involve tinkering with Section 308 (3) of the 1999 Constitution as amended, which provides for immunity only for the President, Vice-President, Governor and Deputy Governor. “No process of any court requiring or compelling the appearance of a person to whom this section applies, shall be applied for or issued,” Section 308 (c) states.
Why the Senate schemes for immunity should worry us all. The plot is provocative, inane and indefensible. It has been on the cards for a while. However, the masterminds have always retreated to their wily cocoon each time public outrage and denunciation greeted the shenanigan, only for them to resurrect it sooner than later.
Evidently, the perfidy cannot be isolated from the travails of the President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, who has been standing trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal for alleged false declaration of assets when he was Governor of Kwara State for eight years. Appeals from preliminary objections from the case had reached the Supreme Court. But the rulings did not go his way. However, the Senate rules forgery charges against him and his deputy, Ike Ekweremadu, were recently dropped. Besides, there are some former governors in the Senate, who are being tried by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for alleged theft of public funds running into tens of billions of naira.
However, the Senate is not a refuge for fugitives and cannot be one. If the senators should have their way, it means that the corruption cases against some of them will be put in abeyance; and in some cases sine die. It will remain so as such legislators will use all their resources to get re-elected every four years. That some senators have been there since 1999 -a period of 16 years -exemplifies the issue. Therefore, this move is decidedly farcical, an assault on our collective sensibility. Above all, it is a death knell for the anti-graft war.
Right from 1999, the National Assembly has been a dome of abuses, typified in many impeachments of principal officers of both chambers; bribery-taking by lawmakers, which Nasir el-Rufai, a former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, documented in his book: Accidental Public Servant; annual padding of budgets (scandals) and sundry abuses and consequent trials of some legislators. A member of the House, Jibrin Abdulmumini, is at present serving 180 days’ suspension for daring to be a whistle blower. He had released details of how the 2016 budget was allegedly padded; especially how the Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, and others were enmeshed.
Apparently, lawmakers do not enjoy constitutional immunity anywhere in the world, save parliamentary privileges relating to their conduct while in the chamber. Even as enshrined in the constitution, immunity has encouraged recklessness in governance. For evidence, seek no further than in the looting of public treasury for which governors have been notorious since 1999.
Immunity is so toxic to the consolidation of our democracy that the 2014 political conference in Abuja recommended that it be expunged from the constitution. Earlier, the late President Umaru Yar’Adua had surprisingly made a similar pronouncement in 2009 in Davos, Switzerland, while being hosted by the Partnership Against Corruption.
However, the framers of the Nigerian Constitution and the political elite believe that the category of public officers listed in Section 308 of the Constitution need immunity in order not to be distracted from their jobs. Certainly, not for lawmakers whose roles in Nigeria should be reduced to a part-time vocation.
This parliament radiates neither confidence nor trust. Consider this: When 33 states cannot pay salaries to workers as the economic crisis ossifies, Toyota Land-cruiser Sports Utility Vehicles were acquired for senators. Also, the Petroleum Industry Bill, primed to sanitise the downstream oil sector, has not been passed since the beginning of the Sixth National Assembly.
It is for these reasons that an average Nigerian today sees the parliament as a symbol of greed and waste. The lawmakers increasingly make themselves irrelevant and irresponsive with their perennial absenteeism from plenary sessions. This is despite being about the highest paid in the world, according to The Economist of London in 2013. It said a Nigerian lawmaker gets as much as $189,500 per annum, a package his counterpart in the United States and Canada would envy.
As they are unserious with legislation, so are they careless in their oversight functions. This is a failure David Mark acknowledged and reminded his colleagues of, as Senate President, when the report of its Public Accounts Committee, chaired by Ahmed Lawan, on how funds in Special Accounts were either mismanaged or looted.
On the parliament’s watch, the $300 billion, which Tim Okon, a former Executive Director in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, said Nigeria earned from crude oil sales between 2010 and 2014 was raided, including the Foreign Reserves and Excess Crude Account. Thus, its negligence helped to create the present ruinous economic climate.
Regrettably, its infidelity to national interest will continue so long as Nigerians and the civil society remain indolent. Its performance deserves national attention. While the seats in the United Kingdom parliament are fully occupied as they engage in robust debates for better governance, ours here are perennially empty during sessions.
The alibi in the last 16 years is that lawmakers are engrossed with oversight work. If that is really the case, then they have made a complete mess of it. And that is why government agencies are hollow in service-delivery and accountability.
