the inauguration will emerge a new NASS leadership that is expected to
point the way the new National Assembly will chart especially in
complementing the efforts of the Buhari regime to take Nigeria to a
Next Level. Presently, the front runners of the race for the NASS
leadership are Senator Ahmed Lawan for the Senate presidency and Femi
Gbajabiamilafor the Speakership of the House of Representatives. They
are front runners because they are the nominees of the ruling All
Progressives Congress which has a commanding lead in both chambers of
the National Assembly. What more, President Muhammadu Buhari has
endorsed the candidature of both legislators, which stands them in
very commanding stead to head the next NASS.
But, in the party, there are faint discordant tunes as both Senator
Ali Ndume who conspired with the out-going Senate President, Bukola
Saraki to steal the Senate presidency four years ago and who
eventually fell out with Saraki, as well as senators Danjuma Goje who
chairs the out-going Senate’s powerful appropriations committee, have
indicated interest in leading the Senate despite the party choice of
Lawan. Also, the outgoing Speaker of the House of Representatives,
Yakubu Dogara, who in cahoots with the minority PDP and some members
of theHouse of Representatives, cornered the speakership last four
years is said to nurse a far-flung but surreptitious ambition to
return. What more, Dogara is pursuing his nearly impossible ambition
under his new party, PDP which is an insignificant minority in the
House of Representatives.
Unlike what happened in 2015 however, there is no expectation of any
major upsets from the APC stand on the NASS leadership. Unlike in
2015, the party now has a more regimented and disciplined leadership
to see through the interests of the party and instill coherence among
members. Again, the presidency that maintained a naïve attitude of
non-interest in NASS leadership in 2015 now has full interests and
these are expressed in the public commitment of President Buhari to
support the Lawan and Gbajabiamila aspirations. Today, the party is
more coherent and purposeful in pursuit of its interests unlike in
2015 where therioting ambition of many members allowed the PDP to sow
disharmony among the APC legislators to allow a Saraki and Dogara who,
to all intents and purposes, were favorably disposed to the pursuit of
PDP interests, steal the leadership of NASS. Most importantly, the
experience of the past four years where the NASS leadership stood
solidly in contradistinction to the executive and the party under
which platform they rode to power is enough to steel the APC to make
very good use of its majority status and disallow any efforts to
relive the harrowing experiences with the Saraki-led NASS.
So, the grand expectations of Nigerians on a new NASS and its
leadership are the complementary role they stand to play to drive the
visions of the government, not through constituting mindless
obstructions as happened in the past four years but through a
cooperative nexus that will further the ends of democracy and good
governance for the Nigerian nation. Simply put, Nigerians are not
expecting a replay of the cantankerous squabbles of the past four
years where ambitious efforts to drive the development of the country
and the dividends of democracy were arrested by a NASS that was in
clear pursuit of selfish partisan interests that were contrary to
those of the executive. Nigerians are therefore expecting a NASS that
will readily accede to the requests of the executive to promote bills
that seek the rapid economic growth of the nation.
In the past four years, we experienced how the Saraki NASS
sadistically shrimped ambitious developmental budgets to smithereens
just to pursue the desire to see the government fail. We saw how the
yearly budgets were shredded so badly to have insignificant impacts on
the nation, contrary to their designed impacts. We saw a situation in
the past four years where the NASS became a theater for the promotion
of narrow, corruption-induced constituency projects over and above
ambitious capital projects that stand to drive the economy and impact
on millions of Nigerians. We saw where yearly budgets for critical
road infrastructures, power, rail, health, water, social investment
projects were rubbished to make way for such constituency projects
like provision for grinding machines, solar street lights, and
purchase of motorcycles. We saw where such budgets for the second
Niger Bridge, Lagos-Ibadan Road, Enugu Airport expansion, Mambila
PowerPlant, standard gauge rail lines were torn to pieces while
nondescript projects in remote areas that hardly have an impact on
many people were promoted and stolen into the national budget because
they are constituency projects for members of the National Assembly.
In the past four years, we saw how NASS became an absurd theater where
budgets were padded to reflect the corrupt self-serving desires of
NASS members. We saw how NASSdistorted national budgets to suit their
narrow whims, where NASS rewrote the budget according to their
caprices and made the task of pursuing national growth through the
instrumentality of the budget practically impossible. In the past four
years, we saw how yearly budgets became avenues for muscle-flexing, we
saw how budgets were unnecessarily delayed and made to travel to and
fro between the executive and the legislature. These ego rips were
meant to pursue vain glory while the interests of the people for which
budgets were made, suffered serious harms. Let us recall how Saraki,
during his ill-fated campaign for the presidential ticket of PDP
boasted that he cut down the budgets for the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway
for no just reasons!
So in a new NASS and NASS leadership, the expectation of Nigerians is
that a NASS leadership that is less acrimonious and combative will
serve the general interests of Nigerians where the past NASS and its
leadership bickered and threw wedges. In going for the Lawan and
Gbajabiamila choice, it is obvious that APC is driven by the desire to
avoid the regrettable impediments of the last NASS that blocked rather
than enhanced the government’s drive to improve the lots of the
people. The bitter experience the Buhari government faced with having
a NASS that constituted itself to an obstructive opposition to the
government must have forced the government from its naïve shell of
disinterestedness to take an active interest in who emerges the
leaders of NASS in a few weeks’time. That is right and proper.
Expectations of Nigerians in a new NASS and its leadership is a
national assembly that will assist the executive to deliver on its
electoral promises to the people and that must have informed the
choice APC made on who is best suited to drive the new NASS. Having
any other leadership will translate to fueling the kind of bitter
rivalry and street fight that marked the relationship between the
executive and NASS in the past four years and Nigeria, as a nation,
can ill-afford this bitter experience. We need a NASS and a NASS
leadership that fit into the Next Level commitment of the present
government and compliment it to deliver on the promises embedded in
that campaign. Nigeria will be the better for this and anything less
than this will rather exacerbate the developmental problems we have
been battling to tame as a nation.
Peter ClaverOparah
Ikeja,Lagos.
E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com