Before we delve into the ninth national assembly and the scorecard of each and every legislator as it affects those returning and vying to be presiding officers, it is important to refresh our minds on what constitutes the basic role of legislature and what’s the basic role of a legislator.
The legislature is an assembly entrusted with the authority to make laws for a political entity such as a country or city. They are often contrasted with the executive and judicial powers of government. The legislature also exist to oversight the activities of the Executive, and even the Judiciary.
Laws enacted by the legislatures are usually known as primary legislation. In addition, legislatures may observe and steer governing actions, with authority to amend the budget involved. The members of a legislature are called legislators. In a democracy, legislators are most commonly popularly elected by the people of either senatorial districts or constituencies.
While legislatures have nominally the sole power to create laws, the substantive extent of this power depends on details of the political system. In Nigeria, the size and the structure of Bi-Camera legislature has made it a rigorous task to get laws passed concurrently, ie, in both chambers of the parliament and also the critical aspect of the law passed depend on the president, who is the head of the executive. The presidential assents is required for a bill passed by the national assembly to become law. It does not end there, in some cases, the implementation of the law is in the hand and the prerogative of the executives, these are all the hurdles to be scaled before a law comes into effect.
Looking at the ninth assembly critically from the perspective of law making, it is expedient to us to note a critical point in the political life of the country. The politics of the country is so dynamic and complex that only laws that will have direct visible impact on the lives of the people and whatever they represent will help quench the raging fire of agitation from so many minority groups, whose notion is that governance and the government is not being fair to them in all ramifications. Also bringing institutions to the doorstep of these ethnic minorities will also go along way in solving the problem of agitations and the claim of injustice. In the past, community that were privileged to have government institutions established in their domain seems to take advantage of it to assert authority on such institutions by being the major beneficiaries.
Just like developed countries, where the tenure of legislators are unlimited unlike the other arms of government, in Nigeria, we are not able to tap into the benefit of this idea by those that formulated the democracy that we practice, the whole idea of allowing legislators to represent their constituents as many times as possible is to entrench stability in the political system. The parliament is like wine, the older the better its taste. In Europe and America, the longer a legislators stays in the parliament, the more experienced they become, and Nigeria cannot be an exemption.
Looking at the performance index of all legislators in the ninth assembly, both in the senate and the House of Representatives, there’s no gainsaying that Honourable Tajudeen Abass surpassed the expectation of not only his constituents, but Nigerians as a whole and this is evident in the number of bills he sponsored and number of bills passed and number of bills assented to by the president.
Honourable Tajudeen Abbass will likely be compared to Senator Amy Klobuchar and American congressman (a Minnesota Democrat) with 27 bill which is the highest number of bills passed into law in the United State by any lawmaker in the present congress.
On his part, Honourable Tajudeen Abbass hold the ace in Nigeria as the best legislator in the ninth assembly and no wonder his people gave him their mandate again without stress. Looking at his antecedents, Honourable Tajudeen Abbass deserves to be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives in order to guide the freshers coming into the tenth assembly for utmost performance.
What else can a parliamentarian do for not only his people but for Nigerians as a whole? A parliamentarian with the highest number of sponsored bills from 2011 till date, (72 in total) in the ninth assembly the highest number of sponsored bills,(more than 20) and the highest number of bills passed and signed into law by the president (21 bills) the bill are bills that gave birth to institutions not only in the northern part of the country but across the length and breadth of the country. For example, bills establishing 18 Federal Medical Centers across the country was sponsored by him.
The success of any nation in any sector depends on the people put forward to preside over it, be it economy, politics, science and technology e.t.c. The choice of leaders is a major determining success factor. Putting our best in the forth coming parliament regardless of our various biases will be our greatest strength as a people at this moment, if we must compete with other nations of the world.
Honourable Tajudeen Abass is undoubtedly our best hand as a nation for the speakership position of the incoming 10th House of Representatives, if we must experience the great and working Nigeria that we all crave for.
Comr. Haruna Okatahi, the Convener, Conference of Civil Society for Transparency and Accountability, Writes from Abuja.
