In The Burden of Legislators in Nigeria, Senator brings together lived parliamentary experiences across the country in a free-flowing nonfiction which delivers a revealing, myths-busting hands-on guide to the politics and practice of law-making, and promises to fire up the political discourse on many fronts.
By Iboro Otongaran
AFTER reading The Burden of Legislators in Nigeria, Senator Effiong Bob’s latest book, I came away just about as informed on the politics and mechanics of law-making as though I have just had a stint in parliament myself. The Burden of Legislators is an emphatic restatement of the inestimable value of experiential literature; it puts the reader right there in the flux of things, making him to live the intrigues and tensions, as well as the thrills and frills of politics of the legislative genre. The happy outcome for the reader is a floating feeling from the levitating power of the personal story.
The key strength of this book is that it delivers up to the reader a kaleidoscope of perspectives, insights, judgements and even entertainment from across the country and around the entire circumference of the political spectrum, making it, arguably, a tour de force of a composite architecture.
When Senator Bob set out to write about experience of the lawmaker, the expectation was that the Senator who represented Akwa Ibom Northeast Senatorial District in the Second and Third Senate was going to serve up just what he himself had done and seen during his sojourn in parliament. But as his book shows, he made an interesting detour and went up and down the country and across the political divide to interview 48 other senators and honourable members. With his hands chock-full of data, he sat down and knitted a mosaic that not only validates his personal story but lends depth, perspectives and variety to his book.
The 11-chapter, 532-page memoir, published by Premium Times Books, appropriately begins from the beginning by first defining who a legislator is, and then settles in on his functions, election and recall politics, godfatherism and leadership in the legislative chamber. The book also pays ample attention to representation or service delivery in the legislature, which the lawmakers would have us see as something of a high-pressure stove, contrary to the optics of pomp and panoply in everyday banter.
Many thematic issues are given full address in the book. One of them, and perhaps the most concerning, is godfatherism. Godfatherism is seen in the context of the power grab by state governors who have turned out to be the most powerful politicians in Nigeria since constitutional government was restored in 1999. By the evidence that is available to watchers of the nation’s politics, the governor is a political potentate who wields untrammelled power, and answers to no one. He has pocketed his house of assembly and made the party upon which he rode to power just but a unit in the office of the governor.
The governor operates with impunity because nobody asks him questions. The ever-vocal civil society groups forever breathing down the neck of government at the centre do not look in the direction of the state governor. There is just nobody to lift a finger at the state governor. In this context, the governor overreaches himself in an unprecedented power grab by whimsically and solely—occasionally with a coterie of cronies—deciding who will succeed him, who goes to the Senate or House of Representatives or the state of house assembly or who becomes the local councillor.
In summary, the governor simply neutralises the people, parliament and party—principally because of the power of the purse, which he wields exclusively. The book leads the evidence to suggest that the governor represents a threat to the nation’s democracy.
Another noteworthy issue addressed in the book is the much-vaunted subject of empowerment by which the legislator is expected to provide livelihood and infrastructure for members of his constituency. By the constitution, the function of the lawmaker is none of these, but he becomes the government in the eyes of his constituents as the executive falters and fails in service delivery to the people. The ancillary context is that the people go to the legislator more readily because he is more accessible compared to the state executive who is surrounded by a spiked fence of a security cordon.
It is not all dread and dismay, though. The book has some interesting things to say about the health of Nigeria’s democracy. The author, in the preface to his book, pays tribute to “the desire of Nigerians of all political persuasions and creeds to protect and promote the ideals of democracy” as shown in the “commitment by members of the National Assembly to the preservation of our democratic ideals [in] their decision to reject the subterfuge by which a life presidency would have been legislated into being by a sleight of hand, through the stillborn third term project.”
The book also notes that “the Doctrine of Separation of Powers is alive and well in Nigeria’s democracy,” and argues that if “No contrary view,” championed by an imperial Presidency, “could overawe the representatives of the people to yield to its design, it can be said that democracy in Nigeria has its implacable champions and that its future is promising, irrespective of extant challenges.”
The book uses the poignant power play that brought all members of the National Assembly together—irrespective of place and party—to deliver one resounding message to the Presidency on the legislation that established the NDDC, as a further illustration of the robust presence of the Separation of Powers in practice in Nigeria’s democracy.
The author draws more insights from the NDDC episode. He characterises it as evidence of the capacity of the legislature to check the excesses of executive power. He equally argues that the politics behind the creation of the NDDC was proof, if any was needed, “that despite over-stated differences among them, Nigerians are more united on so many issues than they are given credit for, and would come through for one another to right wrongs and correct instances of injustice.” Nigerians came together, the book reveals, through their representatives to set aside a presidential veto that was pernicious in intent and would have been unfair to the people of the Niger Delta.
Evidence in the book delivers a broader picture of the promise of Nigeria’s democracy, just as it suggests that its very heart, which is the legislature, is beating healthily. This appears to put a lie to the picture of gloom and doom in the social media about the direction of governance in the country since 1999; a clear contest between the frenzy of daily journalism, particularly of the new media, and the calm and reflective verdict of history.
Besides big issues of policies and projects, The Burden of Legislators is laced with anecdotes that bust myths and confirm stories in the whisper network about some goings-on in the National Assembly. There are details of a well-funded campaign for Obasanjo’s third term; how bullion vans of cash made the rounds of homes of some legislators at night in a no-expense-spared campaign to recruit supporters for the tenure-elongation project, and of the pushback by the equally implacable opponents of the third term project, who yielded no quarters to the third term champions. Names of those third termists and their nemeses are all spilled out in their eye-popping details.
Among the stories that the book describes as fairy tales is the long-circulating rumour of bags of cash in Ghana-must-go polyester bags that lawmakers are plied with routinely in the National Assembly in a ploy to butter them up to do the biddings of the executive branch. After months of waiting for Godot of this rumoured confetti of cash, some of the new lawmakers were reported to have asked their ranking colleagues when the fabulous cash flow would begin. There is little doubt that this claim about phantom bags of money for lawmakers will bounce against the entrenched legend in the Nigerian folklore of sleaze and wheeling-dealing politics, a legend that has now assumed the life of a sphinx, thanks to unhinged social media journalism.
There seems to be no ending to revelations and behind-the-scene peeks at intrigues and power games that come through in the fireside anecdotes which give colour and a griot-like story-telling feel to the book. For instance, the seminal history of the controversial constituency projects is laid out in the book, complete with the firefight between President Obasanjo and the lawmakers over the provision of the budgetary lever, which has remained mired to this day in a crossfire of dispute as to who the ultimate beneficiary is.
The Burden of Legislators in Nigeria, a personal story which perfectly qualifies as a primer on the politics and practice of law-making in the Fourth Republic, is a treasure trove of hints, tips and winning strategies for aspiring and new politicians. The book, which plumbs many myths and confirms hearsays in the polity, is equally a valuable contribution to our political history that sheds a welcome light on how the legislature weathered the Obasanjo Presidency and keeps up a trajectory that is some moments applauded as in the case of the Third Term project and many times skewered for being a rubber stamp to the executive.
The Burden of Legislators in Nigeria is a praise-worthy work. The best way to appreciate Senator Effiong Bob’s commendable contribution to Nigeria’s political literature—and in a way a call for reforms—is to read his well-researched memoir, all of its mammoth, delectable volume.
- Otongaran is a communication specialist