Senate panel’s Baga report

Because the episode brings into question the entire issue of the quality of the Senate committees and the tasks they are expected to perform. Whatever happened at Baga was the subject of intense national and international interests because of the potential grave human rights issues involved. Many lives were lost and property destroyed in the […]

Because the episode brings into question the entire issue of the quality of the Senate committees and the tasks they are expected to perform.
Whatever happened at Baga was the subject of intense national and international interests because of the potential grave human rights issues involved. Many lives were lost and property destroyed in the town; the details are murky. It was part of the efforts to clarify this issue that the Senate set up the committee to investigate the matter and report back its findings within fourteen days.  At the end of the day, despite the huge costs the committee incurred, its members could not come up with any meaningful contribution towards clarifying what exactly happened.  One thing that is clear from all of this is that the Senate lost an opportunity to demonstrate that it had the will, competence or national fervour to be trusted to carry a out serious investigations and come up with meaningful findings. Thus the controversy over the casualty figures, the number of houses destroyed and property damaged as well as the cost of sustaining the government’s Joint Task Force (JTF) remains unresolved. The committee visited only one graveyard, and only one out of the thirteen southern senators on the committee actually made the trip to Baga. Senator Maina Lawan of Borno State who was a member of the committee disputed both the number of the dead and the number of houses burnt down. Yet regardless of these defects, and the discrepancies in comparison with satellite images of the episode, the Senate in what has become characteristic if its haphazard manner, adopted their report.
The business of Senate committees is in danger of becoming a huge joke. At the last count, there were eighty-four standing committees in the senate.  Each Senator is chairman of a least one committee and deputy of another, while at the same time being chairman of several sub-committees and a member of several others. This has nothing to do with ad-hoc committees. The practice is to lobby to be on “juicy committees”. If members of the Baga Committee had, for example, been on the Petroleum Committee and a visit was arranged to Brazil to inspect a refinery doubtless, the tendency is that all members would have been present.
It is also pertinent to question why, with each senator having a staff of at least five aides, absentee members could not have sent their aides, even if to take notes and be abreast with what was going on. In terms of their ability to effectively research information, the National Assembly Library is anything but.  The end result is that after expending valuable time and enormous public resources, the quality of most Senate Committees fails to stand up to rigorous challenge and does not address the fundamental issues that necessitated the creation of committees.   
 The Baga Committee episode reveals the need for an end to the ineffective Senate ad-hoc committees and replacing them with more purpose-driven ones that can address the problems of the country that the citizens expect them to.