NASS and the shape of things to come in 2017

The 2017 expectations

THE National Assembly had ended the 2016 on a high so to say. The lawmakers, who entered the outgone year amid controversies, ended on a note of camaraderie with the executive, which hitherto treated the

legislature with undue rivalry. The budget passage process was the sore point. Incidentally, the 2017 sessions will open with eyes on the same budget process.

President Muhammadu Buhari had presented the 2017 budget estimates a day to the Christmas and New Year recess of the lawmakers, thus giving them no time to begin the consideration process.

As the Senate and the House of Representatives resume sittings on January 10, the first item on the agenda would be the debate on the general principles of the 2017 budget estimates presented to the National Assembly on December 14. But there was likely to be a snag to that process.

The Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and the Fiscal Strategy Paper (FSP), which are prerequisites to the passage of the new budget, were still under consideration as the lawmakers embarked on the end of year recess on December 15.

The National Assembly cannot resume the consideration of the budget until it passes the MTEF into law. Thus, while it can receive the budget for the New Year, the budget cannot be considered until the passage of the MTEF/FSP in the two chambers of the National Assembly.

Thus, rather than kick-start work on the budget at resumption on January 10,  the National Assembly will have to concentrate efforts on the passage of the MTEF, following which the budget passage process would resume.

Once the budget consideration process resumes, the lawmakers will focus attention on the debate on the general principles of the 2017 budget, a process that could take some legislative days, as almost all lawmakers would want their voices heard on the matter. Usually, all lawmakers like to make comments on such an important debate so as to showcase their understanding is and also highlight what they consider the missing links in the budget.

Once the debate on the general principles is  done with, the budget document would be deemed to have scaled the Second Reading hurdle and attention is then shifted to the Standing Committees, which would take over the passage process. The committees would host the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) in budget defence sessions. It is after the committees have wrapped up their legislative assignments that the document can revert to the Committee on Appropriations which will in turn present the budget for the Third Reading and final passage.

 

Constitution amendment process

The Constitution Amendment Committees of the two chambers will also resume in earnest in the New Year. While the two committees are aimed at achieving the same purpose at the end of the day, the two chambers have decided to go their separate ways at this stage. The House Committee under Deputy Speaker Lasun Yusuf is adopting a slightly different approach to that of the Senate Committee headed by Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu.

While the House is seeking to produce each amendment as a separate bill, so as to guard against wholesale rejection of the bill as it happened in 2006 and 2015, the Senate is going ahead with the procedure that has been in place years ago. The two committees have prepared interim reports and they look good to actualise the promise of ensuring a new constitution before the end of the year.

 

INEC and Electoral Act amendment

The Senate Committee on Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has battled to see through an amendment to Electoral Act 2010 since November 2016. It’s been an unwinding process so far. Twice, the final passage of the bill had been terminated halfway due to a number of controversies. Before the year ended, however, the red chamber was able to resolve some of the knotty issues such as the use of card readers and what to do if a candidate dies midway into an election. Once the amendment is done with, the red chamber is expected to pass it to the House of Representatives for concurrence.

 

Probes

The two chambers of the National Assembly will certainly engage in some eye-catching probes during the New Year. The foundations for some upcoming probes were already laid in 2016 with the Senate already coming up with interim reports on the fate of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the North-East, leading to the allegations on the possible involvement of the Secretary to the Government of the

Federation (SGF), David Babachir Lawal, the probe into alleged N13 billion money laundering by telecommunications giant, MTN and some four banks as well as a probe of Customs and Excise  and an impending probe of the power sector.

 

Ministerial screening

Shortly before the lawmakers embarked on the end of year recess, indications emerged that the Presidency was tapping the top echelon of the assembly ahead a major cabinet shake-up expected early in the year. The exit of the Minister of Environment, Amina Mohammed and the death of the Minister of State for Labour and Productivity, James Ocholi, in March had created two vacancies in the Federal Executive Council (FEC). But it was gathered mid-December that the president was ready to juggle his cabinet to ensure more efficiency. If the names of new nominees landed in the Senate, another season of frenzy might overtake the National Assembly once again as a result of the uncertainty that usually prevails on the screening process.

 

2016: NASS’s year of endless controversies

Like the two other arms of government, the legislature had its ups and downs in 2016. The story of the parliament can, however, be easily captured as one which started with controversy, swam deeply into crisis and then landed in another quagmire. Each passing quarter of 2016 brought one controversy or the other in the way of the lawmakers. Even as the year ended in December, the National Assembly was unable to extricate itself from controversies and testy moments.

 

The missing budget

On resumption from the Christmas and New Year break on January 12, the Senate hit the unbelievable side of the bull’s eye by alerting Nigerians that the 2016 Budget, presented to the joint session of the National Assembly on December 22, 2015 was “missing.” It was an unprecedented development and one no one could contemplate. The president had presented two volumes of the budget estimates in a widely televised event held within the chambers of the House of Representatives.  Though the lawmakers had proceeded on break immediately the budget was presented, no one expected to hear that the document was missing.

A prolonged executive session held by the Senate came out with one clear message, the nation’s budget was missing. The lawmakers asked Senate President Bukola Saraki to liaise with President Muhammadu Buhari to locate the authentic document. Saraki was within the period sighted at the Presidential Villa and the visit further fueled the uncertainty over the document.  While the Senate came out strongly to give the indication that the budget was missing, the House of Representatives chose to be conservative on that front. The House came up with messages a day after the Senate debacle that the budget was not missing and that once submitted, it became a property of the National Assembly.

Senate Leader, Ali Ndume, was to further add to the controversy when he told newsmen that the budget could not be missing. Ndume had told newsmen:   “Budget cannot be missing. One copy can be laid, it is a symbolic copy, the budget will be in custody of both chambers, it cannot be stolen, it cannot be missing. Once the budget is laid in the National Assembly, it has become the property of National Assembly.”

On Saraki’s visit to the Villa, Ndume said: “Saraki’s visit to the Villa was to know the president’s priority. We want to see how we can fast track the passage of the budget before the end of February. What is before the Senate is proposal, once the president signed it, it cannot be amended. We can turn the budget upside down, it cannot be missing. If it is online, you can produce the budget, how can it be missing?”

While the lawmakers were dilly-dallying on the technicalities of a missing or misplaced budget document, the Senate further opened another can of worms when it accused the Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters (Senate), Senator Ita Enang, of being the brains behind the missing budget saga. The lawmakers insisted that Enang was the one who surreptitiously retrieved the budget document from the bureaucrats in the assembly and replaced the same with a preferred document. The Senate said that the differences were clear from what was submitted to the joint session by the president.

Two days after the budget was declared missing, the Senate again hit at the executive by frontally accusing Enang of “doctoring” the budget. Both Saraki and the chairman, Senate Committee on Media and Publicity, Senator Sabi Abdullahi, confirmed at different settings that the budget copy in the Senate had been doctored and they blamed the development on Enang.

Saraki said at the plenary in January: “We have received the report of the Committee on Ethics, Privileges and Public Petitions on investigations surrounding 2016 Appropriation Bill.

“Our finding is that Senator Ita Enang, the SSA to the President on NASS Matters, printed copies on the 2016 Appropriation Bill and brought it to the Senate. We have discovered that what he brought is different from the version presented by the president.

“We have resolved to consider only the version presented by the president as soon as we receive soft copy of the original document from the executive.”

Senate Spokesperson, Abdullahi, who also addressed journalists, said that the Senate was awaiting the original version of the budget from the Presidency before work could commence.

He said: “The report about a missing budget is not true. We don’t have a budget that is missing. But you recalled that the Senate President did inform Nigerians that there is an issue that a committee was asked to investigate.

“The report of the investigation by the committee on Ethics, Privileges and Public Petitions, has been submitted in the executive session. It was a decision we took at the last executive session.

Our findings are these: That the president did lay the budget before the joint session of the National Assembly and thereafter, the Senate went on recess and upon resumption, copies of the document were produced by Senator Ita Enang, who is the SSA to the President on National Assembly Matters (Senate) and the copies were submitted to Senate and House of Representatives.

“What we found out is that the document submitted by Senator Ita Enang, upon our resumption, has some differences, discrepancies with what was originally laid by the president in the joint sitting of the National Assembly.

“However, the Senate in defence of its own integrity, honour, will not work with what has not been laid on the floor of the National Assembly. We are constitutionally mandated and duty bound to consider only that budget that had been so laid by the president.

“Right now, for reproduction, we are awaiting the soft copy of the originally submitted budget so that the National Assembly can reproduce the copy itself. That is the only time we can have confidence in the document we want to work with.

“The budget submitted by the president is not missing, we already have copies of it but what we are saying is that for us to reproduce for our members, it is easier, based on the quantum of documents that has to be produced, that we get the soft copy of that original version so that we can reproduce it.

“By next week, we want to go down to business; senators had picked dates to speak during the three days set aside for debate on the 2016 budget.

“The Senate leadership was mandated to speak with all those concerned with the document, that was why the Senate president was in touch with the president.”

Notwithstanding the claims, Enang refused to join issues with the Senate. And notwithstanding the initial grandstanding by the House of Representatives which claimed its version of the budget document was intact, the president later owned up to tampering with the submissions in the budget when President Buhari submitted a letter to the two chambers asking them to work with the revised version of the budget.

That notwithstanding, the budget document was dogged by the hiccups which trailed it till passage and eventual assent. Following its passage in March, the president rejected the document but rather than return the same for the parliament to try and upturn the veto, the executive opted for political solution. The adopted option ensured that a committee of the executive and the legislature worked out the said “grey” areas and recommended the same for presidential assent.

 

Budget padding controversy

Shortly after the 2016 budget was passed into law and assented to using political solution, another controversy reared its head. The House of Representatives was the theatre this time. The House had sacked its Chairman, Committee on Appropriations, Honourable Abdulmumin Jibrin, who was seen as overbearing in the budget process. Indeed, the House Committee Chairman was the most influential in the budget process, a reversal of the situation in the past where the chairman of the Senate Committee took the centre stage.

Speaker Yakubu Dogara, who removed Honourable Jibrin at the end of the second quarter and just as the lawmakers were proceeding on annual recess, said that the House uncovered some untoward acts in the committee’s works.

But Jibrin was to further escalate the crisis when he took his agitations to the media and turned himself to a whistle-blower of some sorts. He bombarded the public with a series of allegations bordering on budget padding and accused the leadership of the House of cornering undue allocations in the budget.

Jibrin also accused House leaders including Dogara, Lasun Yusuf, House Minority Leader, Leo Ogor and the Chief Whip, Alhassan Doguwa, of allegedly diverting projects to their constituencies and alleged that the budget was padded to the tune of N481 billion..

The lawmaker said in a statement: “Those who keep saying why now should realise that for every situation like this to occur, there must be a trigger, however, it looks. I woke up at midnight yesterday (Wednesday) to pray and suddenly realised I have become an accidental activist. This is noble and there is no going back.

“When a new speaker emerges and the other principal officers are replaced, I will write to the presiding officers of both chambers to commence a radical internal reform in the entire NASS beyond budget to cover performance assessment, running cost and allowances, investigations, etc.

“If the reform so done in NASS is not made public latest by December, I shall take it up and lay before the general public even if I am alone. The idea is to do a cleanup, flush out corruption and corrupt members so that in 2019 only corrupt-free people who want to serve will come in.”

Though the budget padding allegations were largely domiciled in the House of Representatives, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) at a stage began a probe following the series of petitions by Jibrin.

 

NASS and Saraki, Ekweremadu’s trials

The trial of Saraki at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) commenced in September 2015 but it went into full gear in 2016.  Though the proponents of the trial were said to have expected a quick capitulation on the part of Saraki that the man refused to back down just like that, while securing the backing of many more senators was becoming a threat to executive-legislature relations.

That notwithstanding, the executive arm of government intensified its trial of Saraki over the asset declaration forms and the alleged forgery of Senate Rule Book 2015. His deputy, Ekweremadu, was soon joined in the dock as the prosecutors intensified efforts aimed at getting to the roots of the rule book saga and the CCT trial.

Rather than weaken the resolve of the lawmakers to back Saraki, however, the trial at the CCT and the high court over alleged rule book forgery only earned the Senate President and his deputy the sympathy of the Senate, if not the entire National Assembly. More and more senators and members of the House of Representatives turned up at the CCT as well as at the high court each time Saraki and Ekweremadu were undergoing trial. In fact, for Saraki, the Senate had to close down its sittings in March and April anytime it coincided with the sitting of the tribunal or the court.

Prosecutors of Saraki and Ekweremadu were, however, challenged by the widespread feelings within the parliament to the effect that many of their colleagues viewed the trials as politically motivated. The belief among the lawmakers was that Saraki was being prosecuted because he emerged Senate President against the grains of opinion within the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

The backlash caused by that belief ensured that the senators of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stood behind Saraki and Ekweremadu. The fears that the crisis might extend to the House of Representatives as the Speaker Dogara emerged the same way as Saraki were enough to force a bond among the lawmakers.

It was not surprising that many Senators easily abandoned the sittings to join Saraki in court. Senate Leader, Ndume said that much at one of the trial venues when he told newsmen that the CCT was “politically-motivated.”

He had said:  “I have been at the court since 9:00 a.m. They are pushing my case too; to make sure they can only have people that they can control in the National Assembly leadership.”

The senator representing Sokoto East, Senator Ibrahim Gobir, also said at one of the court sittings that the choice of the senators remained Saraki and no one else.

Gobir said: “Our first option is Saraki. Our second option is Saraki, and our third option is Saraki,” adding that “However, if it is a question of those who support Bukola Saraki, you will see about 83 to 85 senators here.”

 

NASS and the recession

As the National Assembly resumed from its annual recess in September, the country had slipped into recession, prompting moves on the economic front by the legislature. The House of Representatives devoted two days to debate the recession and eventually resolved to invite Buhari to address a joint session of the Assembly on his exit plans from recession. The Senate also debated the matter for three days and passed some 22 resolutions. The senators had to appoint another committee to further collate the submissions of the senators as almost all of the lawmakers made contributions during the deliberations.  The 22 resolutions were distilled from the three-day debate. The Senate also concurred with the House that President Buhari should address a joint session of the National Assembly to enumerate his exit plans from recession.

 

Another budget controversy

From October, another budget controversy reared its head in the legislature. The theatre again was the Senate. It’s just as if the Senate was ending the year the way it started it. The president had on October 4 sent a copy of the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and the Fiscal Strategy Paper (FSP) to the lawmakers for consideration. But the Senate raised the alarm and described the document as unrealistic and “empty.” The lawmakers asked that the document be returned to the executive.

Afterwards, the Senators wrote the Minister of Budget and National Planning through the Senate Leader, Ali Ndume and asked that MTEF/FSP be updated and aligned with reality. Rather than reply the senators in like manner, the executive kept mum for a long time and by the end of November when it replied the lawmakers, insisting on the veracity of the figures contained in the MTEF, a whole lot of time had been wasted in the budget process. That time wasted now accounts for the drag the nation is witnessing in the budget 2017 process as the National Assembly went on recess a day after the budget presentation. What that means is that the final consideration of the budget will only commence from January 10, when the budget was meant to come into operation from January 1.

 

Magu’s screening blues

Acting Chairman of the EFCC, Ibrahim Magu, stole the show in the National Assembly as the sitting days in 2016 drew to a close.  The anti-graft agent had been nominated for confirmation in July 2016 and was meant to either be confirmed or rejected by the Senate. The lawmakers, however, kept silent on the process for a long while.

After a series of protest marches at the entrance of the National Assembly, the Senate rose two weeks ago and announced its intention to screen Magu on December 8. The police officer spent almost the whole day in the assembly but returned with empty hand. His screening was put forward because as the Senate said, as many lawmakers would have missed the event as they were engaged in national assignments outside Abuja. He was due to return on December 14 a day after the budget presentation.

When he returned for screening, he got a definite answer from the red chamber; he would not be confirmed as a result of adverse security report in possession of the Senate. The senators spent nearly the whole legislative day at executive session where they considered the report on Magu. When they stepped out, the No verdict was categorical. Senate spokesman, Sabi Abdullahi, who briefed newsmen after the session, said that the Senate was in possession of adverse security reports against Magu. Details of the said report were later published in the media. That rejection has been viewed from varied angles in the polity.  It thus meant that the assembly could not wash itself off the controversial posture with which it started 2016.