PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Between the Senate and the House Leadership

The contrast between the transition from the 6th Senate to the 7th and that of the 6th House of Representative to the 7th couldn't have been sharper; one was patently as smooth as could be, the other as turbulent as the roughest sea.

The secret seemed to lie partly in the cunning and experience of the Senate President, Brigadier-General David Mark, RTD, as a veteran of the military's cloak and dagger politics and partly in the more manageable size of the Senate itself - 109 senators as against 360 members of the lower House.

Obviously the greater of the two secrets is the man's cunning and experience. Clearly these two had helped him overcome the controversies that had surrounded his election as senator in 2003 and his re-election this year, to begin with. The secrets had also helped him see the back of colleagues who had challenged his the leadership of 6th Senate early in its life.

Then there was his masterstroke of the so-called "Doctrine of Necessity" which helped clear all opposition to then Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan succeeding his ailing bedridden boss, Umaru Musa Yar'adua. That move was probably the president's biggest i.o.u. to the man.

Last but by no means the least, these secrets lay behind his pre-emption of any challenges to retaining his leadership of the upper house by the sleigh-of-hand of getting an outgoing senate to set the rules of proceedings and precedence for an incoming one - and get his party, which still holds a comfortable majority in the National Assembly in spite of its terrible record since 1999, to endorse such a patently dubious method lock, stock and barrel.

In sharp contrast to the tranquility of the Senate, things could hardly have been more turbulent than they have been in the lower house. To begin with, the erstwhile Speaker, Dimeji Bankole, failed to get re-elected in spite of eating crow and going to genuflect before PDP's and, by extension the country's, No. 1 political Godfather - no price for guessing right - whom he had earlier badmouthed.

As if this was not bad enough, the man is now in the EFCC net charged with sundry offences including fraud and money laundering. To kick even more sand into the man's eyes, questions are being raised about how his old man, by no means the best of friends with THE Godfather, came about buying NECOM House along Marina, Lagos, one of the country's tallest buildings and a prime property of the more or less dead Nigerian Telecommunication company, NITEL.

The man may be the author of his own predicament but there is a good chance that if he had been as good a boy of the PDP Establishment as his more cunning compatriot of the upper chamber and returned as Speaker, all the terrible stories we are being told about him may not have surfaced just yet. Or if they did they might have been dismissed as heresies.

As it is now even if he is eventually acquitted by the courts, he has suffered enough embarrassment and damage to last a lifetime.

The lesson of his predicament could hardly have been lost on the new leadership of the House which had his support. This obviously explains why his successor, Ahmed Waziri Tambuwal, with his deputy in tow, quickly went to Wadata House, Headquarters of PDP, last week, to repent for his “sin” of defying the party’s injunction on zoning. His visit followed the incredible statement by the party that his election as Speaker was unacceptable.

Whether his repentance is sufficient to secure for him his four-year tenure, only time will tell.

Meantime, the queries being raised about the purchase of NECOM House by Bankole’s father underscores the incredible political cynicism only Nigerian political leaders, as a rule, seem capable of.

In his acceptance speech as the President of the 7^th Senate, Mark promised to put an end to the steep cost of governance in the country.

“Nigerians,” he said, “complain that our democracy is too expensive. We, as representatives of the people, must initiate legislation that will reduce the cost of governance at all levels, thereby freeing resources to attend to the basic needs of the people.”

One of the sources of the excessive price Nigerians have been paying for their democracy is the abuse of office by government officials, elected or otherwise. Bankole Snr’s purchase of NECOM House, in so far as it may not have followed due process, and certainly because the property was grossly undervalued at 4 billion Naira, was an abuse of office.

But last year there was an even more egregious abuse of office not only by the Speaker. In what was clearly a cynical move by President Jonathan to secure the support of the leadership of the National Assembly for the renewal of his presidency, the residences of the four top officials of the National Assembly –the Senate President and his deputy, the Speaker and his deputy - were sold to them and a provision of 800 million Naira made in the 2011 budget to build new ones.

Except the Senate President is being cynical in his speech about the cost of our democracy, he should not go ahead with the purchase. If he stops the purchase others too would have no choice but to follow suit.

Still on the Kaduna Polytechnic strike

Since my piece on May 25 on the six month long lecturers’ strike that has paralyzed Kaduna Polytechnic, probably Africa’s largest, there have been renewed interventions by the authorities to end the strike. Among these was a meeting the Governor of Niger State, Dr. Muazu Babagida Aliyu, presumably as Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum, held with a team of the institution’s academic union led by Comrade Yahaya Mustapha.

The Emir of Zazzau, Alhaji Shehu Idris, as the host emir of the institution, also met with the unionists to renew his old appeal to them to go back to the classroom.

I think those interventions are somewhat misdirected. Instead of putting pressure on the lecturers, anyone sincerely wishing to end the strike should be asking the authorities in Abuja to do the right thing. As I said the last time I wrote on this matter, this is as simple as implementing the government’s White Paper on the report of the panel that investigated the lecturers’ accusations against the institution’s management.

The report confirmed those accusations of corruption, waste and incompetence, etc, against the management and recommended its wholesale sack. Government agreed.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to understand why government is finding it difficult to implement its own decision.