Privileges Nigerian Representatives Must Never forgo

The time was the beginning of the year 2003 and the place is somewhere inside the city of Abuja. It was a secret location but the mystery was even more about the meeting, because of the time of the day, on which the event is taking place, the personalities involved in the negotiation process, the issue being discussed and the last but not the least, it was the year of the general elections or specifically, it was on the eve of the first election to be conducted by politicians, after the one heralding the Fourth Republic, which was guided by the military.

The issues in disagreement were so clear and the parties have taken a dogged position, the legislature or more appropriately, the House of Representatives was threatening to impeach President Olusegun Obasanjo, in fact, the impeachment charges have already been compiled and ready to be sent to the Presidential Villa, while the presidency is seeing the action of the parliamentarians, as an unpatriotic action akin to a treasonable attempt to truncate our nascent democracy, which has started to evolve and blossom into a manageable enterprise that produces dividends of democracy.

When the parties met, the officials from the executive branch of government, requested for the impeachment attempt to be dropped, while the party from the legislature as represented by the speaker of the house Ghali Na’abba, insisted that although negotiations in the dead of the night are permissible under a democracy but workings of a democratic system are an open process, which is the resolution of all disagreement conflicts, only at the instance of the collective resolve of the whole of the Green Chamber of the National Assembly, as such, the impeachment process could only be terminated, when it is introduced to the house, where the president has to publicly agree to start adhering to the fundamental ethos of the democratic norms. Having failed to sway the legislators, the representatives of the president which included close confidents and top political party officials, immediately headed to Kano at the instance of their principal, with the sole aim and purpose of meeting the emir Alhaji Ado Bayero, to urge him to prevail on the house leadership to stop the impeachment nuisance. It is worth noting, that the speaker happened to be a subject of the King.

Unfortunately for the delegation, before they had reached Kano City, Speaker Na’abba had related to the emir, a conversation he has had with President Olusegun Obasanjo, where the Owu High Chief was threatening to report him to his local chief. Thus, when the visitors were ushered into the palace and granted an audience to the royal father, even before they had opened their mouth to state their mission, the emir gave them a brief history of the Kano emirate, which has had a history of over a thousand years in existence and that an emir, anglicized from the word Amir, was not a local chief or Warrant Chief as was created by the colonialist during their reign in the governance of the Nigerian nation. There and then, he also told them that it is not the place of traditional rulers, to involve themselves in politics, especially as he has asked of the speaker, whether what he was doing was within the purview of his constitutional function, which themselves the delegation had conceded that what is happening was a legally legislative undertaking.

Before the departure of the delegation, the emir gently but firmly refused to intercede on a matter that does not concern him, while sending with them, his most warmest regards for the highly troubled Nigerian president. One of the cardinal principles of democracy is that apart from it being premised on the concept of the rule of law, so also is the fact that it is most effectively operated within the context of procedural laws and vows but most significantly, the legislature is a prisoner to conventions, precedents and practicing historical norms, which ensures that certain established assumptions must be taken as given, thus are regarded as sacred. These are the facts that an occupant to the Office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is merely a first amongst equals, the occupant being simply and singly, a representative of the whole or to put it more succinctly, he is purely an agent of a principal that is in multitude of hundreds, composing of the total numerical quorum of the House of Representatives.

It is from this basis that I peruse the premeditated slight on the office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives early this week, which happened at the International Conference on Security and Development Challenges of Pastoralism in West and Central Africa in Kaduna, organized by the Office of the National Security adviser. What happened rather than being an accidental mistake or unintentional misunderstanding seemed like a scripted act, obviously out of the deep reverie and euphoria of what had happened in Ekiti state last weekend, where membership of the security forces were massively deployed to openly aid a particular political party, however, were this to be ever true, the ministerial duo who had orchestrated what happened in the South West, could not have escaped suspicion. It is instructive that it is the legislature which had cleared them. It is plausible they might had acted without the knowledge of the president, as the organizer who is the conduit of all detailed security instructions and the National Security Adviser had feigned ignorance of what had happened and felt so embarrassed as to institute an internal investigation.