ESSENCE OF SENATE CONFIRMATIONS

It helps when nominees  are properly screened, argues Josef Omorotionmwan

There is every reason to believe that when the time came for the Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar junta to beat a retreat to the barracks it simply pinned together relevant parts of the Reports of past Constitutional Conferences, and came up with a document which it called THE CONSTITUTION OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, 1999.

Some of us also came to the understanding that those Constitutional Conferences were self-succession bids of the military leaders who impaneled them.

This became rather glaring in the case of the President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida Conference of 1988/89 when we were considering Senate confirmation of the President’s nominations. The Draft Constitution placed before us consistently maintained that the President was to appoint people into those positions “in Consultation with the Senate”.

This sounded rather strange. I led the fight to change the idea of consultation with the Senate to the confirmation of the Senate.

The fight for this seemingly innocuous change was fierce, to the extent that at some point, I got some anonymous midnight calls, warning me to soft-pedal on such issues.

This is one way of explaining my personal attachment to the confirmation clause, particularly after seeing how it works in other parts of the world. 

This also explains how nauseating it gets today when we see our senators working the noble idea of Senate Confirmation of the President’s nominees on its head.

They are constructively engaged in destroying the President in the name of helping him. Unknown to the Senators, they actually exist to save the President from himself.

The president cannot be ubiquitous. He is just one man who can only be in only one place at a time. But the 109 Senators are from 109 Senatorial Districts scattered across the nooks and crannies of the entire country. They are placed in such a way that they readily see around the country, things that the President can never see in the single spot where he stands.

People are referred to the President for appointment from all over the 109 Senatorial Districts of the country.

By the arrangement in our Constitution, the Senate is central in the recruitment process.

The President forwards the names of the nominees to the Senate for screening and confirmation. This is where the Senators should bring their superior knowledge of the people so nominated to bear on the selection process. A good Senate would use the advantage of its nearness to the people to dig deep and help him to pick the best people to help in carrying out the enormous responsibilities before him. A thief that has been recommended to the President is fished out in the process and removed from the pack. You destroy him by just rubber stamping every list that he forwards to the Senate.

When the Senate does a shoddy job, it soon shows in the output of the appointees. Such an administration soon gets consumed by corruption and ineptitude everywhere. You will soon find that the “Take-A-Bow” procedure adopted during the confirmation process was not really what the President wanted. Instead, he really wanted strong men and women who would help him weather the storm.

Apparently, many Senators do not know the real essence of the Senate Confirmation Process. Some see it as mere comic relief as obtains in the Literary World. Such would be fixated on the “Take-A-Bow” level where they just clap and get entertained.

Yet, others see it as a way of helping the President by rapidly rubber-stamping whatever names he submits for appointment.

In all, they fail to see the process as a potent agent of change in society. In their docility, they would rather let the spoilt world spoil!

Everyone today is complaining that our electoral system is the bane of our society. In the abstraction, everyone asserts that Nigerians will remain problematic for as long as we refuse to get our electoral system right.

Still, when there was an opportunity to begin the process of getting it right by appointing upright State Resident Electoral Commissioners, we opted to go the wrong path. People who should have gone through the due process of appointment were taken through the “Take-A-Bow” mill and quickly appointed. Dubious cronies must be appointed through dubious methods even if the heavens fall!

When an administration is confused and does not know what to do, it begins to do everything. That is where the loss of one genuine purpose leads to the pursuit of a dozen pseudo purposes.

We once believed in this country that the Judiciary was the last hope of the common man.

All that is now history. Sadly, eleven Justices have just passed through the “Take-A-Bow” mill to the Supreme Court in what looks like doing in 11 minutes what ought reasonably to be done in more than 11 days! The list of nominees got to the Senate in the evening of December 20, 2023 and by the morning of December 21, the Senate was done with them. That’s rapid result, isn’t it? It is also a world record of progressing in error.

When it suits us, we are quick to point to the examples of other countries. For all we know, the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice in America would take one to two full days of rigorous interrogations – thorough in its entirety!

By the time the Senate Judiciary Committee is through with the Confirmation Process, every American knows the ideological stand-point of that nominee on every important issue.

The grand merit here is that the Senate Judiciary Committee laboriously and painstakingly x-rays all the cases that the nominee has decided since coming into the Bench. Incidentally, this is the type of process that we are busy bastardizing in Nigeria and in the end, we expect to have an upright Judiciary!

In all things, one bad turn deserves another. Which country in the world would in peace time, allow 50 per cent of the Justices of its apex court to fall vacant? Nigeria is alone in this category!

And, where the Senate Leadership owes its existence to a warped Judiciary, should that Judiciary not have pay-back-time when the upliftment bell rings? That’s what we are experiencing here. Unfortunately, Nigeria is the worst for it all! Who can stop this dangerous descent on a slippery slope? 

Essentially the President’s appointee is only as good as the Senate that confirms him. This 10th Senate is uncaring and it is beginning to show. At just seven months in the life of the administration, everywhere already stinks with filthy lucre, no thanks to an unaccountable Senate that would rather ask nominees to take a bow instead of digging deep.

For instance, during the screening of the ministerial nominees, the Senate only needed to dig slightly beyond the surface on the Minister of Interior, Olubumni Tungi-Ojo, to find that he had been immersed in the web of Conflict of Interest in the past as exemplified by the “off microphone” episode when he was the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on the NDDC.

Apparently, it is yet morning in the life of this Administration and the future looks bleak and dismal. But who can tell the senate to wake up to its responsibilities?

Omorotionmwan writes from Canada