PEOPLE AND POLITICS

The dangers of imperial president (II)

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com 

also read The dangers of imperial president (I)

Last week I wrote about the dangers that President Obasanjo’s imperial propensity poses for Nigeria’s nascent democracy. The most glaring evidence of this danger, I said, was his record in the past four years of doing everything to square or squash both the National Assembly and his own party, the PDP.

What I did not mention in that article was the heroic battles of the House of Representatives, led by its out-going Speaker, Alhaji Umar Ghali Na’abba, to put the president in check. In fighting those battles, the House of Representatives stood in sharp contrast to its more senior chamber, the Senate, which literary became the president’s plaything as, he, for example, manipulated the hiring and firing of its leadership at will.

The other thing I did not mention was the commendable role of the judiciary – at least the higher bench – in curtailing the executive’s imperial propensity. This role was exemplified by the Supreme Court decision that shot down the infamous Section 80(1) that the executive, of course, with the connivance of some key legislators, tried to smuggle into the happily deceased Electoral Law 2001. The role was also exemplified by the Supreme Court’s decision to free Mohammed, General Sani Abacha’s son, from what it saw as executive persecution of the former First Son disguised as a trial over his alleged implication in the murder of Alhaja Kudiriat, wife of Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the presumed winner of the aborted 1993 presidential elections.

In this watchdog role, the judiciary stood in sharp contrast to the mass media, which, as the fourth estate of the realm, was supposed to watch over and serve as an independent arbiter among all the other three arms. Instead, the mass media actively joined the executive in its persistent vilification of the National Assembly for crimes which the executive arm was even more guilty of. One of the most well publicized cases in this respect, was the attempt by the National Assembly to change the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission act. The change was necessary, the legislators said, in order to check what many people saw as the presidential use of the commission to witchhunt opposition elements.

In joining the executive to condemn the legislators for trying to change the law, there was little or no examination by the mass media of the glaring selective use of the commission by the presidency, neither was there much dispassionate analysis of the merit or otherwise of the contemplated changes themselves. Instead, what we heard were arguments that almost entirely focussed on the legislators’ motive as a so-called self-serving and self-protective lot.

However, commendable as the brave attempts of the House of Representatives and the higher bench were in checking President Obasanjo’s imperial propensity, it must be admitted that they had only limited success. For, inspite of those brave attempts, the president, for example, implemented the country’s annual budgets for four years according to his wishes rather than according to legislative appropriations. And long after the courts said he should stop first charge deductions from the federation accounts, he carried on with the charges regardless. The list of such presidential infractions is, indeed, a long one.

This makes the near-total overhaul of the membership of National Assembly along with the contemplated changes in its leadership following the just concluded general “elections”, a most scary prospect for the country’s democratic development. It is doubly scary that the Court of Appeal in Abuja, sitting under Justice Oguntade, recently passed a judgement nullifying the National Assembly’s override of the president’s veto of the Electoral Law 2002. What these two developments mean is that the president can now chi karen shi ba babbaka,(eat his dog without grilling it), which is a Hausa metaphor for handing someone an absolutely blank cheque.

Why do I think the president now has a blank cheque to do as he wishes with our democracy? Let us first take the National Assembly. In the 1999 elections, the PDP won 59% of the seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Following the April/May “elections”, the party now has a very comfortable two third majorities in at least the Senate. Not only does the party have a comfortable majority in both chambers, both old and new members are very unlikely to have missed the lesson of the “defeat” of most of the old members who refused to be the executives’ lapdogs, particularly the outgoing Speaker, Na’abba. In any case both old and new members have since been lectured by theparty Chairman, Chief Audu Ogbe on th unacceptability of any confrontational posture vis-à-vis the presidency.

As if to underscore the significance of never ever messing with an imperial president, the man who is most likely to succeed Na’abba, Alhaji Aminu Bello Masari, from Katsina, has been telling anyone who cares to listen that he will not lead a “confrontational” – that nasty word again – House of Representatives. In an interview with The Comet (May 21) for example, he said, in an apparent dig at Na’abba’s style of leadership, that “I am not interested in being an executive Speaker. I am going to be a Speaker who will lead and guide in debates and proceedings of the House. We will not be confrontational”.

And just to leave no one in doubt that he disapproved of Na’abba’s style, he made an uncharitable comparison between the movements of the Speaker to and from office and that of the Chief Justice of the Federation, Justice Mohammed Uwais, whose Supreme Court is in the same vicinity with the National Assembly. “We work along the same road near the Chief Justice of the Federation”, Masari said, “(but) he uses a car and  another security car.” In sharp contrast, he said, without naming names, the Speaker moves around with “over 10 or 20 vehicles”.

Masari’s dig at Na’abba’s extravagant style is a valid one. The same cannot, however, be said of the executive Speaker’s thinly veiled accusation that Na’abba has been “confrontational”. If fighting against executive interference in the internal affairs of the House, as Na’abba did during his tenure, is what it means to be confrontational, then, obviously that word has truly lost its meaning.

Masari may have an impressive agenda for his tenure from what he has been saying about doing away with legislative extravagance but, first, it is only reasonable for one to reserve one’s judgement about the credibility of his commitment until he gets there, and, two, it is also only reasonable to conclude that he was picked by the PDP Establishment over apparently more intellectually capable and more independent-minded rivals like Dr. Usman Bugaje and Alhaji Farouk Lawal, because he has proved himself to be the good-boy type during his first term and promises to stay that course in the next.

As if the prospects of a robust democracy for the country in the near future has not been dimmed enough by what promises to be a pliable National Assembly, the judiciary comes along in the shape of the Court of Appeal and sets an impossible standard for the override of the presidential veto by the legislature. For, this is what Justice Oguntade’s re-interpretation of Section 58(5) of the Constitution, a section which deals with the issue of legislative quorum, amounts to.

For some perhaps not-so-inexplicable reason, The Comet which has been as anti-National Assembly as any paper, takes a positive view of this judgement. “The Court of Appeal judgement”, it said on May 21, “has eased the already tensed and frightening mood of the country due to the uncompromising stance of the National Assembly.” In The Comet’s eye, the National Assembly’s crimes included its override of the president’s veto of the new ICPC act – another court, on rather shaky grounds and in a rather unmagisterial language, has since dismissed the over-ride – and the Assembly’s threat to do the same to the 2003 Appropriation Bill which the president has refused to sign. The Appeal court’s judgement, the paper said, “proffered the necessary restraint on the worrisome legislature escaped of the outgoing National Assembly”.

Really? How The Comet, and anyone else for that matter, can reach such a conclusion can only beggar belief. After all, as the paper itself admits in the same editorial, Justice Oguntade’s judgement has only succeeded in creating “a fundamental legal puzzle”, to use the paper’s own words.

“The conventional logic”, the paper points out quite correctly, “has always been that a quorum constitutes a house with full powers to transact business. Since the primary business of the legislature is law-making, its authoritative root must be grounded on quorum. This reason has been the tradition except where the constitution specifically states otherwise like in the impeachment procedure. Apart from the quorum argument the eventual import of this verdict is that all laws made by the National Assembly since 1999 without the required two-thirds of all the members can be declared null and void at the instance of any court action”.

I may be wrong, not being a lawyer, never mind a constitutional expert, but it seems to me from my reading of the constitution that apart from impeachment, the only other subject the two-thirds-of-all-members rule applies to are money bills. Everything else, it seems to me, comes under the two-thirds-of-quorum rule.

How anyone can then jump from the fact that a judgement has a potential for destabilizing our new democracy to the conclusion that it is at the same, a sound argument is simply standing logic on its head. It would therefore not be unfair to say that The Comet’s position has more to do with where the president comes from, as the main beneficiary of the court’s decision, than with the merit of the decision.

With a probably tame National Assembly in place from next month, plus a judiciary which is attempting to circumscribe legislative independence, plus a press which sees things almost entirely from sectional lenses, it will be miracle if our democracy survives the next four years of the Fourth Republic.