Wanted – a people’s legislature
The selfish amendments so far made to the 1999 constitution ensures that we are stuck with the same crop of rulers when the nation is in dire need of leaders. These crop of rulers have a constitutional licence to chop off the nation to extinction. The piecemeal amendment so far carried out is with the […]
The selfish amendments so far made to the 1999 constitution ensures that we are stuck with the same crop of rulers when the nation is in dire need of leaders. These crop of rulers have a constitutional licence to chop off the nation to extinction. The piecemeal amendment so far carried out is with the propensity to turn logic on its head by pushing the people backward and turning servants into masters. In a democracy, the amendment of the constitution is the only legal way by which the enslaved can regain their liberty, but that is far from possible under the current system.
The fight against despotism and dictatorship for which scores of Nigerians died was not to replace a group of uniformed kleptocrats with others in starched babanriga, but that is what is evident today. In a democratic system, the government is free to be a nest of looters. The reason there is a legislator insulated from executive interference is to whip a looting executive back in line and empower the judiciary to put the deviants within that group to jail where they are reformed. When an assembly is off tangent, both in act and indeed from the yearnings of the people, it is evidence that the very foundation of such a democracy is weak and would eventually cave in.
The Fourth National Assembly in 1999 divorced itself from its masters (the electorate) when in their very first act, they fixed for themselves jumbo salaries while majority of the electorate remained unemployed and in want; then they followed it up by amending the protocol list which made them second only to the highest offices in the executive, even above the judiciary. Then, of course, they followed it up with unprecedented looting, albeit within their own constituency, acts that led to the so-called banana peels and the game of musical chairs. But then, the Fourth National Assembly is a life-lie. Its members were largely a product of the distrust of the military to deliver on its promise especially after Babangida’s eight-year road to nowhere. This was the reason why, those who staked their necks out as candidates virtually got elected unopposed irrespective of their undemocratic credentials. That was why the subsequent election (?) saw the paperweights among them fluttered into oblivion.
For prematurely severing their umbilical cords from the people, the electorate failed to exercise its power of discipline, that is; the system of recall as a warning to upcoming legislators who might be tempted to tow their paths and it would seem that that was what has given their successors the audacity they now exhibit in trampling on the people, their rights and their intelligence. Today, the legislature has formed an unholy alliance with the executive to work against the majority of the people and every day, they are lengthening the gap between service and looting while insulating themselves from prosecution.
While that was happening, it would appear, prospective legislators were perfecting the means of revving up the engine of corruption and taking its notches higher than their quondam colleagues. Today, corruption is no longer limited to money allocated to the Dome; the mendicants of corruption have extended their plates to the ministries, departments and agencies. With their power to approbate and reprobate, they have positioned themselves and their agents to extract their tolls in percentages of ten or fifty. Added to their obnoxious salaries and outrageous allowances paid any legislature across the globe, these long throats can afford to take people’s power for granted, for they have never seen it exercised. They leave people-oriented bills to gather dust but rush through anyone with the potential to fill the gargoyle of sleaze.
They are the allocators of constituency projects and the supervisors of its sloppy or non-execution. They argue and haggle over trifles and are totally insulated from the endemic poverty that breeds brigandage in the society. What more, they are not accountable to anyone anywhere. They want automatic tickets and when it looked like they are not getting it, they have returned to the trenches where they perfect their tactics. They make it impossible for the people to get rid of them even by electoral means now that they want to give to themselves what they have denied Goodluck Jonathan – automatic voters at party conventions as national executive council members.
If these people have anything in their physiology that generates shame, they would have covered themselves in sackcloths and ashes. But here they are twirling in white garments starched with corruption. They have skins comparable to the hides of the elephant, totally impervious to reason and unfazed to issues of morality. The marriage of convenience with a looting executive with no plans for the nation is one that will destroy the fabrics of our nationhood. Except Nigerians troop out at the next elections and truly elect a people they can trust to truly serve and subsequently exercise their right to recall, this nation as we know, it would remain a joke where reality may meet us marooned on splinter islands in the tributaries of disintegration. To prevent that, we need to move beyond the dogma of – it’s not our portion.