WHILE the Senate suspended its plenary for a week to allow her members reach out to their constituents on the need to participate in the process, a pre-event briefing revealed the challenges of the Constitutional Review Committee. One of them, according to chairman of the committee and deputy President of the Senate, Senator Ovie Omo-Agege is the issue of funding. He said: “In 2021 budget, we have not received an appropriation yet due to some over sight.”
The committee was inaugurated with about 57 members, who are heads of various committees that oversee the budgetary allocations to the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). Yet, they lost sight of funding for such a sensitive national task put on their shoulder. How can a National Assembly that passed over N33 billion and N51 billion for the Senate and the House, respectively claim it is an ‘oversight’ not to include the budget for constitutional review? It is a major riddle.
President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan inaugurated ad-hoc committee headed by Omo-Agege in early February in 2020. This was even months after the presentation of the N10 trillion budget by the President Muhammadu Buhari. The budget was later jerked up by five percent, leading to N13 billion. Lawan had intimated the public in January of 2020 that the committee was coming upstream and would be headed by the extant chairman.
Before the passage of the 2021 budget, there was a stern warning from the president of the Senate to all MDAs’ heads to make themselves available for budget defence. His argument was that their presence would make the legislature meet with the deadline of early passage of the budget, and by extension, provide for the needs of all agencies in the coming year.
From the public hearings conducted across the country on the constitution review, a number of issues resonated among the stakeholders. It is the necessity to empower states more than the Federal government, in consonance with the cardinal principles of federalism. Another one is the need to grant independence to local government, especially with the spate of security challenges confronting the country. There is also a consensus among the people that the law enforcement agencies, including the police and the armed forces seem overwhelmed by the security problems. The state of the insecurity is manifest in terrorism, robbery, kidnapping and other forms of criminality.
Given the position of the President of the Senate, in which, he had at plenary, canvassed views against restructuring, Omo-Agege was asked if he thought this would not affect the process, since Lawan doubles as the chairman of the National Assembly. The fear elicited curiousity over having Senator Abdullahi Adamu, to lead the team of senators to the North-Central geopolitical zone of the country. Adamu is averse to restructuring and had argued his positions on the floor of the Senate on the issue, while Lawan has, over time in and out plenary, maintained that restructuring is a matter of semantics; that it connotes different meanings from one region to the other. Recently, he fired back at the southern governors for demanding restructuring and adoption of state police to arrest what the governors considered to be the downward slide of security situation in the country. “Our task is to collate the views of members of the public with respect to the positions that they have already canvassed,” in the memoranda they submitted,” Omo-Agege said, ostensibly to douse public outrage over the views expressed by Lawan.
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