SPEAKER of the House of Representatives, Honourable Yakubu Dogara on Thursday read the riot act to the Executive arm of government on the 2017 Appropriation Act, saying that failure to implement the budget was an impeachable offence.
The Speaker’s position was as a result of a matter of privilege raised by Honourable Lawal Abubakar who stated that he read in the dailies where the Acting President, Professor Yemi Osibanjo was quoted as saying that the National Assembly had no right to introduce new projects in the budget before passage.
However, the Speaker who expressed doubt over the statement said that, ”I don’t even want to believe that the acting president made that statement; I don’t want to believe that, sincerely speaking. Because when it comes to the issue of the budget, I think we better say this thing and make it very clear, so that our people will have a better understanding. When it comes to the budget, the power of the purse in a presidential system of government rests in the parliament.”
According to him, “The reason why the constitution’s designers made it that way is because the executive is just one man, it is just the president. Every other person in the executive is acting on behalf of the president, so the relationship between the president and every other person there is that of servant and the master.”
To this end, he said that, “It is only in the parliament where we have representatives of the people that there is equality and you can say your mind on any issue, you can bring matters of priority the way you like. The only time you can be cautioned is when you go outside the rules of debate, but in the executive, it is not the case.”
According to him,”In this part of the world, people exercise executive functions on behalf of the president and want to be like experts in emotional intelligence. Even when the president has not said anything, people are trying to understand what the body language says so that they can tailor their arguments to suit the body language of the President, otherwise that might give them a sack.
“So, the entire architecture of presidential democracy is that it should run on the basis of consensus and convention between the parliament and the executive; and when there is disagreement between the executive and the parliament, the framers of the Constitution were smart enough to say look, our hope is in the representatives of the people and not in the executive, so the parliament can even go along.
“In the case of the budget, for instance, if it were the case that parliament disagrees with the executive on the budget, the worst the executive can do is to say they will not sign; and after 30 days, if we can muster two-thirds, and it doesn’t have to be two-thirds of the entire membership, once the quorum is formed, two-thirds of the members sitting and voting, we can override the veto of the President and pass it into law.
“The only other option open to the executive is to say because we didn’t assent to this, this is the budget of the parliament, so we will not implement. But the point is that all of them, including us, are under an oath to faithfully execute the laws of this land. Then the question that will follow is if this is a law of the land, and the answer is yes.
“We are men of honour whether legislators or executive and are bound by the oath of office to faithfully execute that law; and in the case of the executive, if it is not done, all of us know the consequences. I don’t want to call it by its name, we know the consequences. So in his kind of government, the winner is obvious. So I don’t think we should bother ourselves belaboring this issue.
“We all know where these powers are and under our watch, there is no way this House will be a rubber stamp of any executive. Budgets are priorities of the government because we are representatives of the people. We can say even though these are priorities of the government, based on our job of representation, these are not the priorities of the people and we can refuse to fund them.
“In the US where we borrowed our Constitution from, the minute the President steps into this hall with the budget, it is pronounced dead on arrival. It is only what is passed by the parliament that it is alive”, the Speaker stated.
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