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The Senate President is right that the chamber is crucial to federalism. But he is wrong on the National Assembly’s drain on common resources

 

ON the centrality of the Senate to the federal doctrine, Dr. Ahmad Lawan, president of Nigeria’s 9th Senate, is spot on: scrapping the upper legislative chamber will make a conceptual hash of Nigeria’s federalism. This is at a critical juncture when dissenting lobbies, nation-wide, insist Nigeria must be federal, both in form and in deed.

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Reacting to not unfair complaints that the National Assembly is an unfair drain on the Nigerian common wealth, Senator Lawan used a retreat for top management staff of  the National Assembly and the National Assembly Service Commission in Abuja, which he declared open, to address the matter.

Indeed, calling for the scrapping of the Senate is at best emotive, and at worst, conceptually illiterate. Scrapping the Senate would indeed result in a conceptual anarchy, which could well consume Nigerian federalism — or any federalism for that matter. This reality check should warn Nigerians against pushing emotive and panicking suggestions to any national malaise. No matter how big a problem, there are always well-thought-out solutions.

As Senator Lawan rightly pointed out, the Senate is a federal equalizer. A federation is a majority and minority union. The Senate, as upper legislative chamber in which every state is equally represented, gives everyone a sense of equality and belonging.

That the upper chamber is assumed more restrained and more seasoned, than the population-driven House of Representatives where the majorities have their advantage, is extra impetus for everyone, from the strongest to the weakest, to commit to the federal union.

So, the Senate President cannot be more right by insisting that abolishing the Senate would not only hobble the federal arrangement, it would also cripple the very base of democracy — the legislature, which is the first estate of the realm, and the only chamber that guarantees democracy.

Besides, Nigeria teems with fashionable “marginalization” all round — many times, an elite ploy to game the system, and corral more for selves and cronies, from a centre flush with cash. So, whatever money is gained from abolishing the Senate would be lost in unquantifiable fracas, and brand new impassioned “marginalization”! You really don’t want that avoidable “anarchy”!

However, to reduce costs, a case could be made to reduce Senate membership per state — and on that, Nigeria has made progress over the years. In the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), it was five senators per state. Now (with effect from the aborted 3rd Republic, which should have fully taken off from 1993), it is three senators per state. It can still be further reduced to two senators per state — that is the practice in the United States, that provided Nigeria with both the federal and presidential models.

What can’t be done, however, is reduce senators to one per state.  Such would duplicate the gubernatorial mandate, one in Abuja, the other in state capitals. That would be the ultimate power “anarchy”!

But as the Senate President got it right on the conceptual plane, he got it spectacularly wrong on all the other indices, particularly the statistical bluster that the National Assembly, of which the Senate is part, only consumed less than one per cent of the national budget.

A clearly defensive Senator Lawan told people to focus on the functions of the National Assembly, not only on its jumbo pay — wrong call! That jumbo pay riles and roils; and telling folks not to discuss it is shooting breeze, pure and simple!

Neither was the Senate President so wise by offering a statistical apologia to defend the National Assembly. That clearly didn’t wash.  He said out of 2021 budget estimates of N13 trillion, the National Assembly got N128 billion — ingenious! But does that fatted cow even give any perceived value, to the tune of one per cent of the budget?  Perceived, because many would swear it does not. That might be wrong, to be sure. But it is the perception many fly with.

For starters, Senator Lawan got it all wrong by conflating the general negative view of the National Assembly with the perception of individual senators, telling electors to junk senators they don’t like in the next election. Let it be clear: the Senate teems with good and bad individuals, some of the good the very finest in our clime. But good or bad, both classes have subscribed to the Senate as a systemic parasite on the scarce common wealth.

That charge, fair and square, started when that chamber, in a fit of rotten self-settlement, subverted the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), the organ constitutionally charged to determine public officers’ pay and perks.

By that single act of institutional greed — and fiscal incest to boot: since the National Assembly allocated unfair resources to itself because it could — it sealed its fate in the minds of many Nigerians.  To redeem itself, maybe the good senators, with still living conscience, should start speaking out to draw the collective from its wide and merry ways; and return to the straight and narrow path that would endear it to Nigerians, as the people’s chamber.

But the Senate President did little on this score, with his sophistry that the National Assembly gulped only less than one per cent of yearly budgets. Even that is a gulp already too bad and too costly — in any case, in terms of impunity, and the subversion of institutional checks and balances, which strengthen and deepen a democracy.

To be seen as serious, credible and reasonable, the Senate must yield the advantages it has corralled and let the RMAFC do its job by law — allocating state resources to the legislative chamber, as it does to other government arms. Any other step is impunity and corruption, pure and simple.

So, instead of defending the clearly indefensible, the Senate President should lead the good-minded senators back to the path of sanity, from that of institutional parasites. That would take some courage to do, but the historical redemption would be more than richly rewarding.

A federal system cannot do without a Senate. But beyond the correct federal structure, the Senate (and indeed, the entire National Assembly) should be a bastion of high people’s confidence in our democracy. That is not happening now. But it should, for our long-term democratic health.