Reactions to the recent invitation by the House of Representatives to President Muhamadu Buhari asking him to appear before it – ostensibly at his convenience, provide a framework for gauging the depth to which the country has progressed or degenerated with respect to constitutional rectitude. As the climax to the debate on the deepening state of insecurity across the country and especially in the North East, the House of Representatives had resolved last week to invite the President to appear before it on a yet to be determined date, for a face to face parley on the disturbing trend. In one vein, some observers have hailed the development and even commended the President for accepting to appear before the legislature. This is as if he had a choice to do otherwise, and is just doing the country a favour with honouring the summons.
Others have also responded by dismissing the forthcoming meeting as offering scant hope of any meaningful dividend except for providing the President with another round of hollow back-slapping and his noisy endorsement by fawning supporters in the National Assembly, given the posture of the institution in the public domain as more or less a rubber stamp facility for the executive arm. At least both presiding officers of the institution namely the President of the Senate Lawan Ahmed and Speaker House of Representatives Femi Gbajabiamila have on several instances indicated publicly that they are not disposed to be ‘antagonistic’ to the President and the executive arm of government. Even with this current summons on the President, the legislature is cautioning that its intent is not to ridicule him. Meanwhile, perhaps unknown to the disturbingly passive and complacent Ninth National Assembly, this discomfiting disposition of visceral acquiesance to whatever the Presidency offers the country, constitutes what Nigerians see as rubber stamp syndrome in the conduct of business by them.
With Buhari’s acceptance to honour the summons, questions shift to when he will, what new stuff he will tell them and the country which is not yet in the public domain, as well as what fresh responses Nigerians will expect from the National Assembly. A backdrop of the foregoing dictates that the National Assembly should put its house in order to ensure that the expectations of Nigerians are met in the outcome of their parley with the President. Given that insecurity in the country is billed to dominate proceedings between Buhari and the legislators, the National Assembly should appreciate that the issue has bludgeoned out of proportion and parades as an unresolved crisis which the Presidency is yet to oblige the nation on. In as much as the process of governance in much of the mainstream public administration in the country has been degraded to the level of no man’s business, the issue of spreading insecurity should be handled differently, with a fresh premium on it starting with the National Assembly at the parley with the President.
For the purpose of underscoring the acuity of the problem of insecurity, the country is suffering from an unending spate of daily bloodletting, featuring several theatres of active insurgency as well as daylight criminality by bare-faced armed vagrants: a situation that has led as venerable a person as the Sultan of Sokoto Alhaji Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar to lament that “nowhere is safe in the country today”. Also speaking in the same vein, the Emir of Katsina (Buhari’s home state), Alhaji Abdulmumini Kabir Usman, was recently reported to have observed that armed criminals now parade parts of his emirate brandishing guns as well as openly scheduling and notifying would be victims when the latter would be attacked. The criminals even shop openly and demand for change in their transactions. Not to be forgotten was the recent literal slaughter of over a hundred Nigerian rice farmers in Borno State by the Boko Haram sect, in a development which the sect’s factional leader Abubakar Shekau justified with the argument that the victims were spying against his sect for the Nigerian military. The country’ pain from that development was not assuaged by the rather insensitive comment by Presidential spokesman Garba Shehu that the farmers did not obtain clearance from the military authorities, before accessing their own farms. Bereft of any iota of pathos as Shehu’s statement was, it also betrayed that there are at least two governments controlling the statutory territorial expanse of Nigeria – namely Buhari’s which operates from Abuja and Boko Haram which rules from Borno State. This is the Nigeria of today, under President Muhamadu Buhari.
In a related development there have also been calls from various parts of the country including surprisingly, interests close to the President for him resign from office, given the abysmally compromised capacity of the administration to govern effectively, and which has placed the country in an unprecedented state of emasculation. Unfortunately, this expectation is not likely to materialize without drama, for at least two reasons. Firstly, is that the administration remains rabidly fixated on self-perpetuation and has demonstrated its willingness to brow-beat every voice of dissent into submission or pacify same with mouth-watering perquisites of personal comfort and luxury, depending on which option serves most efficaciously in any particular instance. This situation is accentuated by the frequent utterances which are deployed by agents of the administration to demonise and ridicule voices that criticize and challenge its missteps, as well as the routine ascription by them to any robust call for the President’s ouster, as an attempt at treasonable, regime change.
In this respect, it is already a bludgeoning rumour that a number of legislators in the National Assembly are beneficiaries of the latter dispensation of settlement syndrome. Even the swirling reports of humongous remunerations for the legislators have not helped their case as not being disposed to shake tables for the President. Secondly is the widespread state of political mis-education and ignorance in the wider Nigerian society which makes it difficult to mobilise the active segments of the populace into assertive actions against unwanted tendencies in governance.
This is why the National Assembly which constitutes the most disposed facility provided for by the Constitution for calling the President to order- including removing him from office through an impeachment process, needs to do the needful especially in a time as this. As the country’s only agency for peaceful change of leadership at the Presidential level if such becomes necessary, the onus lies on them to read the riot act to the President during the forthcoming parley. That is what is needful for them to do now!
However if in the circumstance, all they can be disposed to do is resort to mere moral suasion and hollow appeals to Muhamadu Buhari to resign from office even as a failed President, instead of initiating impeachment procedures against him, Nigerians should simply resign themselves to the play-out of the circus show which run now as governance under the present administration, perhaps until 2023; or the intervention of an act of nature. After all was it not 17th century English scientist Sir Isaac Newton who propounded as one of his several laws on motion that a system remains at rest until an external force compels it to change location and even form. Was Newton also talking of Nigeria’s present, stalemated political space? This is food for thought.
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