ALL IN THE FOURTH REPUBLIC

It is a republic where anything goes, writes Josef Omorotionmwan

Justice Chukwudifu Oputa (1916-2014) came vividly alive, “We are final, not because we are infallible, but we are infallible because we are final.” Indeed, when it comes to investment sense, these APC men are super smart. 

Before we woke up, about 50 of them had purchased their Party’s nomination forms for the presidential race. It is a worthy investment, knowing what they knew. 

As we speak, these men are still in the race. For one thing, until the finalists pronounce, you never can tell if the “fourth shall be the first”. Again, after purchasing the form, even without lifting a finger in furtherance of their aspiration, and depending on which side of the bed the finalists wake up, any of those aspirants could, by the beginning of May 2023, have victory delivered to him in the comfort of his home! It is all happening in the Fourth Republic!

Hear in lies a bold agenda for legislative action: there must be an end to the obnoxious idea of nine odd fellows continuously vetoing the collective decisions of more than 50 million Nigerian voters.

Too soon, the name “Mr. Go Slow” came into our political lexicon and so slowly has he walked democracy on its head. He fired the first salvo when it took him more than six months to appoint his ministers. Thus, he ran the country as a Sole Administrator in utter contravention of the very Constitution which he swore to uphold. 

Mr. Go Slow has changed the course of legislation. Just when a bill has gone through the rigorous process of passage in the National Assembly and processed to the President for his assent, the President must now dispatch his men to go and shop for reasons why he should withhold assent.

In some extreme cases, he was asked to sign the bill into law and in printing the final “Act,” the Attorney General would leave out some sections of the passed bill. That’s the Go-Slow way of repassing a bill already passed by the legislature. What an innovation in the process of law-making! 

Each time the president signs any of the bills passed by the National Assembly into law, there is a wide celebration in both chambers of the Assembly. In a normal climb, it should be the exact opposite – where the National Assembly has graciously passed a measure introduced by the president – the president and his men should be the ones to celebrate. 

It is the very height of absurdity when an administration suddenly refuses to implement its measures. We have said elsewhere that when the executive introduces any measure to the National Assembly from the time of its introduction to the time it is processed in the Committees, the executive could amend or even withdraw that measure but once it is reported out of committee, the president can no longer do anything about it.

Here, the case of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) comes to mind. This is a case where the president presented to the Senate a list of nominees of members of the board of the commission. The Senate worked day and night and properly screened the nominees and they were confirmed. At this point, the list of confirmed members of the board was forwarded to the president and the next step should have been to inaugurate the board. The stand of the law is that the president must inaugurate the board. He could decide to dissolve that board a day after inauguration if he musters enough justification to do so, but inaugurate the board he must!

Contrary to expectation, the president has been running the NDDC as a Sole Administrator through his minister of the Niger Delta Ministry. This is an aberration which can only take place in this Fourth Republic. 

These evils are gradually creeping into other tiers of government. For instance, in the Eighth Assembly of Edo State, eight members have been constituted into the majority in a 24-member house, no thanks to Governor Godwin Obaseki who has refused to swear in the other members.

These eight members have been making laws and giving Obaseki the annual appropriations on which he has been running the state, all be it illegally – a case of an empty sack standing erect!

Like in a con-game, where those who would have reported a crime are part of it, the federal authorities are totally immersed in illegalities so their moral authority to intervene has been totally eroded.

We have attempted to outline some of the ingredients that went into the blend that has brought Nigeria to this sorry state. Nigeria is now kaput. And suddenly, our legislators are beginning to talk of impeaching the president. What a copout, the time for scapegoatism is over! We wonder if these legislators are aware of the process of impeachment. Where do they have the time and the extraordinary majorities required for that exercise? Where have they been all these years? Apparently they were simply satisfied with going to Aso Rock to collect their sallahrams. Now that the bubble has burst, the legislators, too, are guilty as charged! The prison gates should be left wide open for everybody to freely walk in. It is a pseudo democracy at best, where as in our Fourth Republic, at the end of tenure the governor herds for prison while the legislators who gave him his annual appropriations walk our streets in unfettered freedom. Where then, is the much-touted oversight function? In a good oversight system, where this year’s budget approval is predicated on how well last year’s appropriations were spent, those legislators who collected their own booty and looked the other way are as guilty as the governor, if not more so.

Again, why do we keep promoting our presidents above the law? There is something wrong with the system which says that anybody who becomes president becomes untouchable. Our present practice will make the likes of Sergeant Doe, Idi Amin and Jacob Zuma, to name just a few, begin to wish they were Nigerians.

Omorotionmwan writes from Canada