How Obasanjo cowed National Assembly as president —Olaitan, ex-AD House Leader

CHIEF Oladipo Olaitan, a lawyer, was the House Leader for the Alliance for Democracy (AD) in the House of Representatives between 1999 and 2003. In this interview with KUNLE ODEREMI, he recalls the relationship between NASS and the Executive under former President Olusegun Obasanjo, root causes of such frosty relationship now, obstacles to restructuring, among other issues.

Excerpts:

MORE than 17 years into civil rule in the country, frictions between the Executive and the Legislature are becoming more frequent and disturbing, especially at a time that all hands ought to be on deck to rescue the nation from a slippery turf. With the benefit of hindsight, are you not worried and surprised having served as AD leader in the House of Representatives?

I’m not surprised. That is us. You Daboh me; I Tarka you; I am sure you remember that theatrics between Godwin Daboh and T.S. Tarka, those two politicians from Benue State of blessed memory. The Executive thought they had their day as they tried all could to humiliate the Legislature. But, the legislative arm is now saying, well, it is our time; that it is a balance of power. Unfortunately, the Nigerian populace is the victim.

The National Assembly during your time also had a running battle with the executive under former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Could you recall the kind of relationship between the two arms of government, especially between 1999 and 2003?

To some extent, yes there were frictions between the Executive and the National Assembly that time.  But Obasanjo had a way to go about it. Give that to him! He used his military experience to cow us; he gave us virtually no voice. Today, you watch the television and see the legislative arm of government in action every time. Various channels now give the Legislature space and time to air their views; you see the members in session inside the chambers. In our own time, it wasn’t like that. Obasanjo muzzled all the print and electronic media. So, nobody heard too much of us. Whatever noise we were making in the chambers, it more or less ended there. It was only a few print media then that had the audacity and courage to print whatever we said. I recall that in a few occasions that they helped us to get one or two media houses to talk about us, it became a problem for the media houses. Even as we consistently tried to assert our independence, it was discovered that we were just making a noise and not heard. So, everybody had to leave the situation as it was. It was not that we were happy with the Executive that we had been completely muzzled.

We are talking about a democratic process that has been ongoing for almost two decades, yet the frequency of the frosty Executive/Legislature relationship subsists. What do you think are the inherent fundamental issues? Do they bother on undue rivalry or ego?     

The root cause is our electoral system. Most of the members in the National Assembly: Senate and the House of Representatives got there through the fiat, wisdom, benefit and support of their governors. So, it is he who pays the piper that dictates the tune. So, when the governor bankrolls you, nominates you and makes sure that you get to the National Assembly, will it be easy for you to start to say anything against him? However, if he continues to push and push, you could get to a point when you could say, ‘no, you can’t push me beyond this point,’ and then, they revolt. That is what is happening now. Most of the governors put those people there, hoping to teleguide them all through in the National Assembly.

You recall that the problem started when the lawmakers were going to elect their principal officers. Some members felt that the exercise was an in-house thing and that they should be allowed to do it the way they wanted. The Executive, using the power of the supremacy of the party, that’s how they cast it, said it should decide for them who should be the president of the Senate and the Speaker of the House. That was the genesis of the problem, and the situation now is ‘let’s see who is going to win.’ We say we are independent and the law says we are independent, and there are three arms of government and they co-exist but they are separate, distinct and by the way, you can’t influence the other; you can’t put your will on the other. That’s what the law says. But the Executive won’t like to see it that way. They want to run over the Legislature which, in turn, tries to resist and assert its independence. That is what is happening now. But the root cause is the electoral system; the way members get to the National Assembly in the first place.

Then, are you suggesting a holistic overhaul of the electoral system since you believe it is the root cause of the protracted frictions?

The electoral law, as it is, is okay, but it is the way that it is being put to use. It starts with the money involved in contesting elections, coupled with the lack of internal democracy in the political parties, where the governor is the overall lord of the party at the state level; he decides who can be a candidate and who cannot be. When he gets you in, he expects you to do his bidding. Now, if we are able to remove money from politics and decide to make merit as the major basis for the choice of candidates, we would have substantially tackle the issue. At present, a lot of the members are not there on merit and therefore, they cannot act on merit. The populace too needs to be educated. You get what you pay for. If the voters are happy with taking money from candidates and other categories of politicians to elect them, they shouldn’t complain about what they get at the end of the day. You cannot expect anything different from a politician that compromises the electorate to get to power. Now, I think it has come to a point that like political parties, candidates wishing to contest elections, should be able to come to the electorate and say this is what I am going to do if I get there. Just as the party will say this is our manifesto, candidates should also be able to come up with their own programmes of action, if elected. I am a legislator. I found the law on kidnapping inadequate and I want to go there and make sure we amend it. I see the law setting up the Nigerian Ports Authority as being lopsided; it is not good; it is against our interest in the North; I am going to make sure that the law is repealed or amended. So, you already know what you expect of an aspiring lawmaker. But in a situation where you don’t ask questions and answers are not given, you will get what you do not deserve. Tell me any of the National Assembly member who ever told the people what he was going to do to add value to their lives when he gets there?  None, I said so with all emphasis.

But, that presupposes you had a similar experience before you got to the National Assembly in 1999? So, I guess you are speaking from the hindsight of history.

No, our own situation was a little bit different. We started with the presidential system of government; we were like a testing ground. We were the first crop of lawmakers to operate the presidential system in 1999, and so people didn’t really understand the system that much and therefore, questions couldn’t be asked that much. But nobody can say that anymore now; nobody can say he does not understand how the presidential system works now.  So, there is no hiding place for anybody.

How was your experience before you got elected to the National Assembly under the platform of the AD, especially during the campaign, did you have to grease the palms of the electorate and party elders as is prevalent today?

No, I speak for myself and indeed the majority of members of the AD then. My coming to the National Assembly wasn’t just coming into politics. I wasn’t a complete stranger to the system. I was known; the people knew me; I had an antecedent; and the people saw that antecedent in me. The party saw it and the electorate saw it in me. So, I believe that based on that, I was voted in and in my own time, I had the largest federal constituency in the whole country, that is, Alimosho Federal Constituency, in Lagos State. And my conscience tells me that I did not let my constituency down, and they (constituents) didn’t tell me that I disappointed them.

By now, many think the two arms of government should be able to rise above their differences and begin to consolidate the gains of two years of the current administration. What are the implications of the unending face-off with less than two years to another round of elections?

I think there are fundamental changes begging for answers now. If only we will have the courage to face and address those fundamental agitations, we might be getting somewhere. Otherwise, we are not being honest with ourselves. It starts with equity and justice. He who goes to equity must come with clean hands. If you have an unjust society, you cannot have a just result; you cannot have a just and fine citizenry; if the system is unjust, the citizenry will be unjust as well. Unfortunately, the system in Nigeria today is patently unjust. What are those fundamental issues? I will give one or two examples. Talking about revenue allocation, that is where the problem starts. Look at the parametres used for sharing revenue in the country, it is inherently faulty. And once you start with a faulty system, you can’t get a right answer. One of the criteria used for sharing revenue is the number of Local Government Areas per state and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja. There are 774 local government areas in the country; I’m talking about those listed in the 1999 Constitution as amended. Now, the number of the local government areas in Kano State more than double that of Lagos, as the latter has just 20. Kano has 44.  So, how do you justify that? And that is one of the criteria for the sharing of federal allocation! Isn’t it funny? The population of Kano cannot be as much as that of Lagos. That is impossible! Even if it is, it cannot be double of Lagos’ by any stretch of imagination; it can never be. Ditto other northern states. It is deliberately put that way by some powerful interests, knowing fully well that it is going to be used as one of the criteria for sharing revenue.

In the United States, for example, the governor in each state depends on the resources/revenue it is able to generate to survive. But in Nigeria, the governor of Anambra State gets virtually the same thing as the governor of Lagos.  Ditto Kano, Taraba, even states that cannot pay workers’ salaries, their governors get similar allocations like that of Lagos. The internally generated revenue of Lagos State in a month alone is more than the entire budgets of some states in a year. What Osun State cannot generate in two or three years, Lagos would get in a couple of months. Yet, Osun is a state; Lagos is a state.

Another inbuilt faulty mechanism in the Nigerian federation is the use land mass as a criteria for sharing revenue. How on earth can that be justified?  You have an arid land in thousands of kilometres away; no development, just an arid land, and you get huge allocation based on the existing unjust sharing formula. And you have a whole area completely clustered with human activities, where provisions have to be made for sanitation, power and other critical infrastructure; and you do not use that as a criterion for sharing revenue, it doesn’t make sense. It is where human beings are located that the revenue should go to and not an arid land. And going by the well-informed position of experts who know about human and population movements, the nearer you are to the sea, the more the population. The farther away from the sea, the more sparse and thinner the population will become. If you travel through the whole of Africa, it is only in Nigeria that you find that the farther you move from the sea, the more population you get. Demographers will tell you it doesn’t sound right or make sense, or even add up in any way.  These are part of what constitute the inbuilt injustice that we have weathered and carried on with business as usual. But, there is always a limit to human endurance. It is preposterous for anyone to say this thing is unchangeable.  There is nothing that cannot be changed in life. In fact, the only thing that is constant in life is change. So for anybody to say the system is indissoluble, to me, it doesn’t make sense.  Now, we have a choice. It is to sit down like reasonable human beings and determine to be just; determine to be fair and determine to live together in happiness and unity. Call a spade a spade and let everybody be happy.

Is the choice you have just described achievable through the NASS?

No, because they don’t have the mandate to do it. It is unfortunate. Referendum was in our earlier constitution; somehow, it was smuggled out. In fact, the first paper presented by the northern people at the time of the amalgamation of Nigeria, they fought that referendum should be put in that constitution question. But it has since been smuggled out of our constitutional framework. I want to submit that the only way that restructuring can happen peacefully and legally is by way of referendum. Call everybody to sit down and say what they want us to do; let’s talk. Unfortunately, referendum is not in the current constitution. But let me tell you how it can happen. If those who hold the levers of power today, will want to make a change, it will happen in less than four or five weeks. How?  All that they have to do is to amend the existing constitution and insert referendum.  That’s all and it will become possible if those who hold on the levers of power want it because they have the largest number of representatives in the NASS. What they need to do is just to go by the due process of amending the constitution.

Even with the crisis tearing the governing All Progressives Congress (APC)?

Yes, those who decide these things are far less than 50 people who will say this is how we want it and it will be done. Like I said, most of the people in the NASS are there at the behest of other people and governors. I can mention names like Gen Ibrahim Babangida. He says we want restructuring; if Gen T Y Danjuma stands up and says today, we want restructuring; of course, maybe Maitama Sule is gone, if he were around and he says, it’s time for restructuring; Atiku has said it and by the time it goes round like that and you have 50 people saying it the North, the second day, it will be passed in the NASS.

What would say about the future of the country, given the spate of threats to national unity?

I started by saying that if we decide to say enough is enough; let’s stop this charade; let’s live by justice, all agitations will stop. That is a choice. And of course, we have another choice to say no, it is not going to happen; then Sudan may come our way; USSR may come our way,