The findings also showed that the state legislatures have failed to ensure full implementation of budgets passed by them by the governors. After reviewing the performance of state houses of assembly in the current dispensation, human rights activists, eminent lawyers and leaders of some political parties, have declared them “dead”.
The doctrine of separation of powers enshrined in the amended 1999 Constitution only exists on paper as the state legislatures have become mere extensions of the executive arm of government, they said.
In separate interviews with LEADERSHIP Weekend, the human rights champions and party leaders warned that unless urgent steps were taken through constitution amendment to grant autonomy to the state legislatures, they would soon be subsumed by state governors.
But some speakers of the state legislatures and other lawmakers have insisted that they are not rubber-stamps to the governors. They said that their non-confrontational approach to state matters should not be mistaken for compromise.
For instance, critics of the Adamawa State House of Assembly said the lawmakers have failed to call Governor Murtala Nyako to order over his shoddy implementation of the state’s budgets, which has led to the abandonment of capital projects.
A constitutional lawyer and human rights activist in the state, Barrister Joshua Sunday Wugira, said the basic function of the legislature is to articulate the yearnings of the people in the form of laws for the executive arm to implement. They are also saddled with the scrutiny and passage of budget bills as well as to undertake oversight functions to promote good governance in the state.
He however lamented that because of the ineptitude of the lawmakers, budget execution has become a mirage leading to decay in infrastructure.
Wugira said the reasons for the poor performance of the legislature might not be unconnected with the way they emerged members of the Assembly. According to him, the victory of most of the lawmakers was influenced by some political godfathers. The situation, he said, has led to the lawmakers serving their benefactors rather than the people.
Another factor that inhibits productivity in the legislature, Wugira said, is the poor grooming of the legislators for legislative functions.
“Some of the members of the House of Assembly are failing in their responsibilities because they are representing certain interests and not the people. The situation is made worse by the dearth of expertise in lawmaking on the part of the legislators.”
Wugira submitted that the overbearing influence of most governors also militates against the performance of the legislature, citing the case of the Adamawa Assembly which was closed for 52 days when the legislature changed its leadership to be amenable to the executive.
The state chairman of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) now fused into the All Progressives Congress (APC), Alhaji Ibrahim Bappa Waziri, re-echoed the position of Wugira as he said the poor state of the link between Yola and Jimeta shows that “the lawmakers have gone to sleep. When you pass that road that leads to the palace of the Lamido Adamawa and the Eid praying ground, you will agree with me that the legislature is unserious”.
The speaker of the Adamawa Assembly, Ahmadu Umar Fintiri, faulted the critics of the legislature under his leadership, asserting that it has passed twice the number of bills and resolutions than its predecessors.
The acting national publicity secretary of the PDP, Mr Tony Caesar Okeke, said: “In PDP states, the assemblies are not appendages but collaborate with their governors in bringing development to the people. They have done their work diligently and have displayed enormous dexterity in promoting the spirit and letter of the doctrine of separation of powers”.
But the state chairman of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) now in the APC, in Kaduna, Mr Mohammed Musa Soba, disagrees, saying that “the state legislatures are under the firm grip of the state executives”.
“The legislators would remain a rubber-stamp as long as the state governors continue to retain enormous powers under an electoral arrangement that is both questionable and an abuse of the principles of democracy,” Soba stated.
But the majority leader of the Kaduna State House of Assembly, David Umar Gurara, said: “I don’t know from where this accusation is coming from. I want to say that when you don’t know the functions of the legislature, then you are bound to say whatever you want to say. I have never heard even in developed democracies that there is a rift between the executive and the legislature if budgetary provisions are adhered to.
“Every week, members of Kaduna House of Assembly are in the ministries for oversight functions and, where there are observations, we alert the governor and where his response is satisfactory there will nothing to worry about,” he said.
To Chief Emeka Ngige, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), the Anambra State House of Assembly is populated by toothless bulldogs: “All the lawmakers in the House don’t have the mind of their own. They are under the control of their political godfathers and the state governor, Mr Peter Obi.”
He observed that the level of docility in the Assembly, unlike what obtains in the House of Representatives, makes most people in the state feel that there is no legislature in Anambra.
Ngige stated that most of the lawmakers only do the bidding of the governor, declaring that the situation is not peculiar to Anambra. The financial autonomy sought for state assemblies in past constitution amendment processes failed because the proposal did not get two-thirds support from members of the state legislatures across the country due to the influence of the governors on the lawmakers, Ngige said.
According to him, “The state assemblies across the country have not been independent; the vibrancy we are witnessing in the House of Representatives is missing in most of the 36 states of the federation. For instance, the Anambra State House of Assembly has been in the pocket of Governor Peter Obi since 2007. Even when the House was dominated by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) lawmakers, the governor still controlled the Assembly. And now that his political party (APGA) has some measure of strength, all of them, including lawmakers elected under the PDP, Accord Party and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), are still controlled by the governor,” Ngige said.
He called for an electoral reform to provide a level-playing field to guarantee the emergence of candidates of political parties for state Assembly elections without the influence of godfathers. He noted that most of the lawmakers in the state assemblies were anointed by godfathers whom they were serving as personal assistants.
An activist and chairman, Board of Trustees of the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, Mr Emeka Umeagbalasi, stated that the ineffectiveness of most state assemblies in Nigeria is not solely because they are muzzled by the governors. “Rather, it is about parliamentary quackery, unofficial and official profligacy as well as the tendency to see lawmaking as a business enterprise,” he said. “In developed countries, law-making is professionalised and revered. Parliamentary rascality, which routinely occurs in Nigeria, must not be mixed with the doctrine of parliamentary independence. Impeaching the president or the governor or issuance of threats of impeachment is too far from parliamentary independence. In Nigeria, legislative parochialism and quackery have remained the stock-in-trade of law-making.
“In standard law-making chambers, there is competition among lawmakers to try to outshine one another in legislative intellectualism. Unfortunately, what we have in Nigeria is competition over legislative materialism. An average internationally rated lawmaker operates a world-class legislative library and laboratory, which serve not only as a rich resource for private and public-oriented civil and criminal inquiries, but also national interest, public security, safety and foreign policy formulation resource centre. The art of modern law-making requires being a thinker and virile agent of social change. The floor of a universal legislative chamber is composed of ‘Amicus Curiae’ or a team of experts vast in natural and social science disciplines, egg-heads in the Bench, Bar, criminology, security, medicine, pharmacy, sociology, theology, politics, diplomacy, environmental safety, and human rights.
“But in Nigeria, through consistently unchecked executive-legislative conspiracy, the country is steadily put in huge indebtedness and higher costs of public governance with shocking and crude allocation of over 70 per cent of our annual fiscal accruals for the servicing of minute public officeholders numbering 17,500 and their daily office attendants.”
In his reaction, the chairman, Anambra State House of Assembly Committee on Justice and Judiciary, Chugbo Enwezo, disagreed that the current legislature under Princess Chinwe Nwaebili as speaker is controlled by Obi. He however said that unless the state assemblies are granted “financial autonomy”, it will be difficult for them to be independent of the executive.
Some of his counterparts in Sokoto State told LEADERSHIP Weekend that the state Assembly is not a rubber-stamp of the governor.
A lawmaker who did not want his name in print, said, “Representing human beings is the most difficult task, hence you would never satisfy them…Having a blissful relationship with the governor does not make them working tools of the executive”.
But, a human rights activist and leader of APC, Adamu Tudun Doki, declared that most state legislators “are working tools in the hands of the executive. Yes, it is not disputable. They are simply rubber stamps”.
Doki said, “Speakers of our Houses of Assembly can be asked by their governors to dance in the market square naked and they will gladly do so to show the level of their loyalty to the executive.”
He claimed that one of the governors in the north-west geopolitical zone “travels on chartered flight every week to the United Kingdom (UK) to attend lectures and yet the Assembly can’t do anything”.
Mr Bako Umar, a lawyer, said that he is not surprised that most of the state assemblies are rubber-stamps of the executive because they were helped to win elections by the governors and other political godfathers.
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