Saving the legislature from reputation erosion

The allegations against Farouk Lawan Lawan are another nail that is contributing to the reputational erosion of the character and integrity of Nigerian Legislators. Numerous allegations of bribery and corruption, excessive self-payment of allowances, reports of legislators using their oversight powers to blackmail ministers for pecuniary gain have all impugned on their reputation.

And yet, we all have an interest in sup- porting the legislature to grow, develop and be an important counter weight to the Executive. We must make the separation of powers principle in our Constitution real. Executives the world over, prefer pliable Legislatures that would rubber stamp policy programmes of the regime without question. Executives in democratic systems come to power with a popular man- date and therefore tend to feel constrained by having to argue with, appeal to, convince and cajole Legislatures before they can get their programmes approved. There has therefore always been a tension between the two arms of government based on the assumption of Executives that Legislatures are obstructive of the pursuit of the popular mandate. Not surprising, Legislatures have always had to struggle to carry out their legislative mandate. In much of Africa, the battle for developing the powers and responsibilities of the legislature has intensified in the twenty-first century and in many cases, the battle has not been easy. The protagonist, as expected, has been the executive who had consistently fought to retain vast powers they had accumulated during decades of military and/or civilian authoritarian rule.

Conceptually, legislatures are the most powerful institutions in democratic regimes for a very simple reason. Legislatures are the only institutions with the power to create other powers. First, legislatures have the powers of the representative function in democracies that enable them to the institution that represents the sovereignty of the people. Indeed, the theory of representative democracy is constructed on the election of legislators, elected by the people to represent them at the level of law making for the society. It is this legitimacy derived from the electoral process that gives them the power to map and mould the views and concerns of citizens and constituents into public policy.

Secondly, they have the monopoly of the powers to make laws through which they create other powers through the establishment of new commissions and agencies, the enactment of policy and the control of expenditure through the process of appropriation laws. In democratic theory therefore, the powers of legislatures are at least as important, if not more important that the powers of executives.

Thirdly, they have the oversight function over the executives whose policy implementation work they supervise and review. Fourth, as Joel Barkan argues, legislatures, or more accurately, legislators acting individually, rather than as members of a corporate organization that engages in collective decision-making, perform the function of constituency service. In most African countries, legislators have imposed upon them two forms of constituency service. Making regular visits to their districts to meet constituents and assist some with their individual needs. Involvement in small to medium scale development projects that provide various forms of public goods – roads, water supply systems, schools and scholarship schemes, health clinics, meeting halls, etc to their constituents. It is this constituency

service function that has created a major challenge for the fourth legislature.

There is the tension between legislating and constituency service because the first seeks to arrive at decisions that serve the entire nation while constituency service is, by definition, addressed to a smaller sub-community of society. Oversight may or may not exist in tension with representation, legislating and constituency service depending whose interests are at stake.

In Nigeria, the legislature has responded to its constituency service function at three levels. First is the intro- duction of constituency projects in which legislators propose specific projects for their constituents who are implemented by the executives but the legislators get the credit for the project. The second is the increase of constituency allowances to allow legislators respond to regular appeals from constituents for financial help for weddings, burials, ill-health and so on in addition to other demands for jobs, contracts and every conceivable demand. Thirdly, almost all legislators have developed a set of personal projects which they develop for their constituents. 

Civil society and the media have responded very negatively to these developments and the articulation of their concerns has played a major role in creating the reputational erosion that Parliamentarians have been suffering from. Of course the key element is the determination of many legislators to use their position to amass stupendous wealth, which, they apparently justify to themselves as was chest to win the next elections. In the process, they create conditions in which Nigerians could rise against the whole National Assembly and make it easier for the Presidency to subdue them. This out-come would be bad for our democracy.

It is established in political science literature that there is a clear relationship between the level of legislative power and the level of democratic development. The higher the powers and autonomy of the legislature are, the better the quality of deliberative democracy will be. It has also been established that when powerful legislatures abuse their powers for pecuniary gain, the quality of democracy declines. In this context, it is good that bad eggs within the legislature are being exposed and dealt with. At the same time, we need to ensure our campaign against corrupt members of the legislature is not used as a pretext to undermine the autonomy of the legislature and its ability to do its work.

One of our weaknesses in both civil society and the media is that we have not put sufficient efforts in studying legislators and score carding them. We need to develop an index to regularly review the performance of the National Assembly as an institution as well as the performance of individual legislators. It is my view that the moment has come for Nigerian legislators to clearly define their duties and responsibilities in favour of citizens and constituents as is assumed in democratic theory, rather than in terms of commitments to their personal accumulation or their showing gratification to their godfathers and party barons as is sometimes the case. That is the way for them to build a positive bond with the media and civil society to move the Nigerian agenda forward.