Restructuring necessary for progress—Akinlaja

Honourable Joseph Akinlaja is the lawmaker representing the Ondo East/ Ondo West Federal constituency at the House of Representatives. He speaks with Hakeem Gbadamosi on some national issues. Excerpts.

P lease comment on the cold war between the National Assembly and the executive over the budget?

What is going on is what we call democracy in action and the difference between perception and reality. The way the executive interacted with the legislators is wrong on this issue of budget making and budget execution. The legislature is one of the three arms of government, which have a specific function under the constitution. Section 81 and 82 of the constitution prescribed the functions of the legislature. The constitution specifically asked the President, who is the head of the executive to submit the budget estimate to the National Assembly for consideration. A bill from the executive arm of government, which is expected to go through the legislative process before returning to Mr President for assent, before it becomes the act of parliament of the government as a whole. Where there is a misunderstanding between the executive and the legislature, the legislature made the law but the judiciary interprets the law. When there is such conflict, the judiciary interprets the law. That is why I said, it is a  matter of perception and reality.

Perception from the executive is that the  action of the legislature outweighs their power. But the reality is that the legislature is acting according to its constitutional power posed to it over appropriation. The constitution does not say once the executive brings a fiscal bill, you just rubber stamp and send back. In the executive, there is only one elected person, which is Mr President that chose his vice to run with him on a single ticket. Every other persons or office exists on the assent of the President. Whether minister, chairman of board, member of board and so on and forth. They all report  to the President but in the Nigerian legislature, 360 of the federal house of representatives were elected by their people and are accountable to their constituencie. The 109 senators elected by the electorate are also accountable to their constituencies.  Now, if you bring a bill to the National Assembly, prepared by people who were not elected and you are saying those who are elected and also has constitutional power to just return it to you that way so that you can clap for them, to me, that is perception. The reality is that we can add, subtract, move around, based on the discussion and the debate by the 306 in the House of Representatives, 109 in the Senate, taking into consideration our constituency needs and aspirations. So that is why I would conclude that, it is a needless war provoked by the executive.

What you are saying is that the legislators have the power to remove any projects presented by the executive which is not in favour of their constituencies?

Not only if it is not in the favour alone, if we consider that it will not be evenly distributed . You know we are representing Nigerians by the virtue of the legislature, and we also know that there is federal character in play, so if a project is lopsided in favour of one particular zone and it could cause discontent and you say we should leave it  without minding where the people that prepared it come from. We are the people representing the 306 federal constituencies, our debate will be more democratic than the one prepared by the minister or technocrat that also has subjective reasoning and nobody to debate to. Who can debate it?. Can the director-general or permanent secretary debate with his minister? No. But here, because we are independent, we can argue with the speaker. So, if we are able to reach consensus , it will be more representative than the one master-servants relationship characterised the preparation. That’s why I said, it is a needless war. Everybody should be allowed to perform their own function under the constitution. Their own function is to bring budget estimate .

But do you know that the President has veto power to either accept or reject it?

He can veto but the legislators can reject it. Read the constitution. If he sends budget estimate as a bill to the National Assembly and the Assembly, in its wisdom, made some changes and sent back to him for assent and within 30 days, the National Assembly has the constitutional power to override his veto on the appropriation. But if he still failed to implement it, he is putting himself in a hot corner with Nigerians and consequentially if Nigerians are angry, we could prepare an impeachment process based on that fact. The country we copied  this presidential system of the government from, once their congress refuses a thing, the president cannot go ahead and implement it in spite of his veto .

But budget ought to be read on the first day of the year. How do you think this budget will be implemented and what do you think is responsible for this ?

Before now, things were done differently but it is not a law that the President must read his budget, he can bring it to us or send a minister to bring it to the House. So, if the President does not read his budget, he has not committed any offence or any constitutional infringement but that this budget is passed late is quite unfortunate and it should not be so from my own point of view. That was why the fiscal responsibility act which is an act of parliament, was so provided that in September of a proceeding year, budget estimate must be sent to the National Assembly. Therefore we would have about four months to work on it so that in January, the implementation would commence but it has never worked that way from the executive because the last one was presented in December, a few weeks before Christmas vacation and work started in January and with all the committee work it takes time.  It was passed on May and the debate of whether Mr  President should sign or not made the budget to drag till June.  But if you ask me, I would have prefer a situation where in three months time the budget estimate of 2018 be submitted to the National Assembly so that we can start working on it earlier. It is abnormal to pass or sign a budget in June. Road constructions are done during the dry season for instant, so I agree with you that passing budget in June is an abnormal thing and it has to be corrected. But I can assure you that the National Assembly is ready to work fast so the budget is presented at the appropriate time.

Some have called for separation of the country while some see restructuring as a way out of our present situation. What’s your view on this?

What I think is that separation at this level of our development in Nigeria may not be necessary but we cannot rule out the urgent need for restructuring the country.  Restructuring means different things to many people but in my own case,  at least I was born when Nigeria was in three regions and that time development was rapid based on healthy competition. That time, fifty pe—cent of the resources was for the development of the region while the other goes to the centre for federal level structures like police, prisons, immigration, and things that we needed at the federal  but after the unfortunate military intervention of 1966, unitarism came into the political structure of Nigeria where the center now holds the ace, the highest percentage of all mineral resources is vested in the federal government and the federal government now decides, through sharing formula what is constitutionally given to states every month. Every state became lazy and its people are not developing, they are not allowed to develop the mineral resources in their domain.  What I am saying about restructuring is to allow what had happened before to happen again which means people retaining fifty percent of the resources that come from their state while parting with some percentage to the federal government. This way people will be able to develop in a healthy competitive way and will certainly lift the country above where we are now where we have to wait for money from the federal government before we develop our states .So the type of restructuring I am agitating for is the one that will give states the power to have access to their mineral resources. We have practiced this before: cocoa was in the west,  groundnut was predominantly in the North and in the East, farm produce was predominant and we were not hungry. People  had enough food to eat but because of oil and the unitary structure, we became poor and people are now hungry,  nobody wants to go back to the farm. We all drifted away from the farms because of oil,  so a progressive and strategic government would have the gap with mechanised agriculture because the children are migrating from the villages and farms to the town legitimately because they have to go to school.