With new leaders, will the old habit subsist at the National Assembly?

The more things change in Nigeria, the more they remain the same. Tuesday, the country’s legislators chose new leaders for themselves.
Godswill Akpabio, a senator from Akwa Ibom State was elected President of the 10th Senate following a rowdy session at the red chamber, while Tajudeen Abbas, the lawmaker representing Zaria Federal Constituency, emerged as the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Their victory means that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) retains control of the legislature.

Akpabio and Abbas openly advertised themselves as candidates for the president. Both also ran perhaps, the most expensive campaigns in recent times for the presidency of the Senate and the speakership of the House.

Millions of dollars were alleged to have been doled out by both candidates as well as the other contenders for the leadership of the 10th National Assembly to colleagues.

Abbas was elected through an “openly declare” ballot system.

Sources at the National Assembly said the open ballot system was “manufactured” by the previous speaker of the house who is the current chief of staff to President Bola Tinubu, Femi Gbajabiamila.

Gbajabiamila had in the past been accused of bizarrely tweaking the standard rules of the legislature to favour Abbas, who is seen as the candidate of President Bola Tinubu.

Last month, several lawmakers alleged that Gbajabiamila falsified the clause on the procedure for electing the speaker and his deputy in the Standing Orders of the House of Representatives (10th edition). They alleged that the doctored document provided that the house presiding officers would be elected through a voice vote as against the existing rule of secret ballot.

“The goal is to create fear in members and open them up for victimisation by the new government and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which is believed to have been zoned to the North-West geopolitical zone ostensibly to pave the way for the emergence of Tajuddeen Abbas,” a lawmaker told a national daily.

“That was why you saw members voting against their preferred candidates and the conscience even after collecting money from them. They were being watched by their governors and the president’s office,” a source in the House of Representatives told BusinessDay.

According to the source, “The initial standing order for the election of the leadership of the legislature allowed the Clerk of the National Assembly to preside over the election of and inauguration of the Senate first, and then the Clerk moves to the House to inaugurate the House.

“The amendment that was made allowed both Houses to be inaugurated at the same time by the Clerk and the Deputy Clerk. What they wanted was to remove any influencing element from the elections, especially if the vote in the Senate did not go their way,” the source told BusinessDay.

In 2016, Ike Ekweremadu, a former deputy Senate President, was charged by the police for allegedly forging Senate rules to manipulate the election of Bukola Saraki as president of the 8th Assembly. Ekweremadu denied the allegations and a federal judge later dismissed the case.

Tajudeen Abbas, the new speaker of the House of Representatives is described as “very rich” having been a member of the lower house since 2011 and served in more than seven committees in the House since then.

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Akpabio, a former governor of his home state, is facing accusations of corruption, including theft of public funds while he was governor.
In April, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) asked Akpabio, to report at its headquarters in Abuja for interrogation over a corruption investigation against him. The EFCC asked Akpabio to “personally report” to the anti-graft agency on May 9.

The EFCC had detained Akpabio over the alleged fraud but later freed him.

That same month, a civil society organisation, Network Against Corruption and Human Trafficking, asked the anti-corruption agencies to commence an investigation of a former governor of Akwa Ibom State, Senator Godswill Akpabio, over alleged corruption during his tenure as governor.

In 2015, a few weeks after the new Senate president ended his term as governor of the oil-rich state Akwa Ibom State, the EFCC began an investigation into the alleged theft of N108.1 billion of Akwa Ibom State funds under the former governor. The investigation was triggered by a petition to the commission by an Abuja-based lawyer and activist, Leo Ekpenyong.

The organisation alleged that the fortunes of Akwa-Ibom people were allegedly mortgaged for personal aggrandisement under Akpabio and so the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission should step in and probe the former governor.

Akpabio’s main opponent in the Senate leadership race, Abdulaziz Yari, a former governor of Zamfara State is alleged to have his hands dripping with stolen funds from his unheralded time as governor and later senator

A panel that probed the mismanagement of public funds under Yari’s administration between 2011-2019 said he stole N107 billion from the state’s treasury.

“Yesterday, I received the final report of Alhaji Ahmad Zabarma led committee on mismanagement of public finances and procurement processes,” Yari’s successor as governor Bello Matawalle said on Twitter.

“A whopping sum of N107 billion was stolen from public” coffers “by the previous administration,” he revealed, promising to ensure recovery of the funds.

In May 2022, the EFCC arrested Yari in connection with the agency’s investigation of the suspended Accountant-General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris. The EFCC said the former Zamfara State Governor, and others pilfered about N84.7 billion of $2.2 billion meant for the states.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has consistently branded the country’s national assembly as corrupt. In November 2016, he described the legislature as a “den of corruption”, which is occupied by “unarmed robbers”.

According to the former president, the corruption in Nigeria’s parliament “stinks to high heavens”.

Yari put up stiff resistance to Akpabio’s win. He lost to the Akwa Ibom-born senator by 16 votes despite the former’s massive backing by the president.

“It shows that there is a large number of senators unhappy with the executive’s interference in the election of the senate leadership,” a former senator told BusinessDay.

The election of Akpabio and Abbas as the leaders of one of the most expensive legislatures in the world means that scarce taxpayers’ funds would continually be expended on funding legislators whose value for money is highly suspect.

“Nigeria spends one of the highest amounts of money on the legislators in the world and the National Assembly consumes more money than any other parliament in the world,” Professor Mahfouz Adedimeji, Vice-Chancellor of Ahman Pategi University, Patigi, Kwara state, posited in 2021.

The previous 9th National Assembly headed by Senator Ahmed Lawan and Femi Gbajabiamila was described as the most expensive rubber-stamp legislature in the world. It was a legislature that was in bed with former president Muhammadu Buhari.

Nigeria’s National Assembly has long been disparaged by Nigerians for not serving as a check on the Executive branch, a trend that is likely to continue under the parliament’s new leaders.

The National Assembly in the 2023 Appropriations Act signed into law by the immediate past President, Muhammadu Buhari, got the highest budgetary allocation of N328.1 billion in the last 23 years of uninterrupted democracy in Nigeria.

A breakdown of the fund showed that the sum of N228.1 billion was captured under the Statutory Transfer while the sum of N100 billion was approved for Zonal Intervention Programmes (ZIPs) otherwise called Constituency Projects for the 469 federal lawmakers.

President Tinubu is obviously pleased with the election of his candidates into the leadership of the legislature. Mr Akpabio and Mr Abbas marketed themselves as attendants to the president. He backed them to the hilt and so would expect his bills and policies to be rubber-stamped by a legislature weakened by its incestuous relationship with the leadership of the executive.

For Nigerians, the last rubber-stamped legislature failed them. If the 10th national assembly decides to promote Mr Tinubu’s interests over the interests of Nigerians by sanctioning all of his policies, programmes and requests, it would be déjà vu again; an unsettling lived experience of the grand failings of a calamitous legislature impervious to the sentiments and needs of the constituents who elected them into office.