By FELIX OBOAGWINA
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on.
Since the inception of this Republic, Information Minister,
Labaran Maku, has found himself living the Dream, lying on a blessed bed of
roses that has transported him far beyond his humble days as a journalist
pounding the streets of Lagos. Maku used to work with Champion newspapers, and
ran with the crowd of reporters who chronicled the conception and abortion of
the ill-fated Third Republic. But since then, for Maku, level don change.
Consequent perhaps upon his professional calling, Labaran
Maku was broken into full-time politics as Commissioner for Information in his
home Nassarawa State, following which he became Deputy Governor of the state,
and then Minister of State for Information. His meteoric rise in politics
undoubtedly answers to the clamour for generational shift in the Nation’s
leadership. And with his current portfolio as Nigeria’s Information Minister,
Maku sits among the 43 Knights-of-the-Round-Table, who run Nigeria under our
own version of the legendary King Arthur, President Goodluck Jonathan.
However, the former journalist recently proved that when you
operate from the dizzying heights of Aso Rock, it is perhaps difficult to see
eye-to-eye with humility.
Maku goofed –big time! On an issue that required him to
reflect the sincere sentiments of the common man, Maku pompously went overboard
in the opposite direction. He had the effrontery to badmouth the National
Assembly, which had succeeded in capturing the sentiments of commoners, and
asking the Executive and the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, to trash
controversial plans for the Naira. Belittling the mirror resolutions from the
two chambers on the CBN’s vexed currency restructuring, Maku said ALL decisions
from the National Assembly were “merely advisory,” and the Executive could not
be bound by them.
That proposition is as undiplomatic, as it is dangerous, preposterous,
juvenile and uninformed. Makes you wonder what kind of orientation ministers go
through. How can anyone with any iota of political education dismiss
resolutions from the Legislature to the Executive as “merely advisory?” A
rather unintelligent summation, especially when it emanates from a Minister
whose functions include informing, disseminating and educating the public about
government business, and reflecting corresponding feedback from the public back
to government.
It was in his failure to properly process public opinion on
the subject matter, beyond the prism of his personal sentiments, that Maku
missed the mark. And Senate President David Mark summarily took his fellow
Northern Christian to the cleaners.
Visibly irritated, David Mark, Senate President (the
Nation’s Number 3 Citizen and who, if the President and the Vice President
should ever vamoose from office in emergency circumstances, will step in as
President –Section 146(2) of the Constitution) said Maku “talks carelessly” and
is a “careless talker.” That is indicting enough. For, although neither Mark
nor the Senate can directly relieve a Minister of his job, they can sweep any
cabinet member out by piling political pressure on the President. Of course,
old sins long passed away under the carpet of political expediency can become
new and the sword of impeachment dangled over the head of Mr. President.
Although the Yoruba version of his name may translate to THE IMMORTAL or
UNDYING, Maku should really ask his Yoruba friends the meaning of another word,
Abobaku: He that dies with the king. Simply put, Maku loses his job when the
President loses his job. And in order to satisfy the NA, the President can
sacrifice Maku, and indeed any Minister, just to save his own neck.
Labaran Maku’s haughty dismissal of the Senate’s
recommendations undoubtedly provided ammunition for antagonists who insist
Nigeria has an overweight Federal cabinet –42 Ministers to the USA’s 15
Secretaries. Yet USA is half a whole continent of 50 states, has a population size
of 308 million and runs a budget of $796 trillion (2012). In contrast, Nigeria
has fewer people –160 million, fewer states –36, and runs an abysmally smaller
budget –$30.8 billion (for 2013). So how come Nigeria runs such a big cabinet,
beating the trim USA administration by all of 27 members.
As a member of the Jonathan cabinet, the Information
Minister owed an obligation to mirror feedback to the President, especially the
fact that, in this case, the NA’s position (analytical, objective, unanimous
and popular), accurately captured the mood of Nigerians, the vast majority of
whom greatly dreaded the superfluity of minting a N5,000 super-currency, and
the negative consequences of converting the paper N5, N10 and N20 denominations
to coins.
It little helped the fate of the N5,000 note that it would
be arriving on the same boat as the novel N5, N10 and N20 coins. Had the CBN
bothered to undertake an environmental impact assessment of the project, it
would have discovered that Nigerians have a manic aversion to coins. Here, coin
currencies don’t just jell. They are not pocket-friendly and Nigerians would
rather consign them to antiquity. We don’t know the veracity of this story. But
a section of the internet went viral with the tale that at the Press Conference
to unveil his plan, the CBN Governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, could not
produce a coin from his own pocket when a journalist challenged him. That
certainly proves a point.
It proves that the CBN Gov is a thoroughbred Nigerian.
Nigerians today find the lower currency notes useful, and if those notes
convert to coin, they become endangered species, like others before them.
Articles and services, and there are numerous, which currently lap up those
denominations, will automatically jump up in price to accommodate the more
pocket-friendly notes. Many goods and services currently going for N5, N10 or
N20 –sweets, biscuits, bus fares, fruits, etc, will become N50 minimum. Thus,
the new coins, apart from becoming recipes for inflation, will not serve Nigeria
any benefit. So who stands to benefit from the coining?
Ask the average cynic, and he will finger two sets of crooks
likely to profit directly from the project. Chieftains of the CBN, who will
award the contract, supposedly make up one set. The other contains those hordes
of illegal smelters who pilfer coins as raw materials for illegal production of
jewellery and artefacts –the same fate suffered by aluminium railings adorning
bridges and highways in this country. It clearly beats the imagination that the
CBN would insist on minting coins that Nigerians hate to use, and which will
only sustain the business of crooks who illegally cast the metal.
With all these facts and more, who can blame the Senate and
the House of Representatives for refusing to play the ostrich?
Maku apparently thought otherwise. But if truth be told, the
Information Minister over-extended himself by insinuating that the NA plays
only an advisory role in government. Quite untrue. Democracy stands on a
tripod. It sustains a delicate check-and-balance structure amongst its three
components –the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. The Legislature
offers the people the most direct channel for popular participation in
government, apart from through elections. And this the people do through their
elected representatives in Parliament. Unlike places such as the US, where
Chief Justices’ selection is democratised, Nigeria has a Judiciary based
entirely on career progression; so de facto democracy is virtually absent at
the judicial arm of government. And in the Executive, apart from the President
and Vice President, no one else is in office by virtue of being directly
elected. As it were, the President sits as the Queen Bee serviced by a vast
retinue of unelected and dispensable worker bees, in the form of ministers and
advisers. And no matter the exaltedness of their office, no matter the glory of
their portfolio, no matter the perceived indispensability of their services,
ministers are mere appendages to His Excellency, who wields exclusive power to
hire them (upon ratification by the Senate) and fire them unilaterally as he
wills.
Yes, ministers have a role defined by the Constitution as
members of the Federal Executive Committee, FEC. But their actions are subject
to oversight by the National Assembly, directly through a committee of the
whole House or customarily through the various committees corresponding to
ministries. Thus, ministers are made answerable to the people via the NA
–ministers like Labaran Maku.
Like Maku’s Ministry of Information, the CBN is also part of
the Executive, just as the police, the EFCC, the Army, the Nigerian Railway,
the Customs, the Prisons, etc.
The NA may legislate on any of these agencies and their
functions, but the Legislature lacks the power of direct enforcement. Even when
it reverses the President’s vetoing of a passed Bill, and invokes the
two-thirds clause to bulldoze a vetoed resolution into law, as the Constitution
provides in Section 58(5), the NA still must depend on the Executive (which
controls the Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs) for enforcement. The
same dilemma confronts the United Nations, which can pass resolutions on any
Nation, but lacks the Force to execute directives. However, a slighted NA can
always resort to other means.
Apart from invoking impeachment proceedings against the
President, it can lay ambushment over an entirely unrelated matter. Note that,
as a direct fallout of recent confrontations with the Executive, the NA
immediately refused to hear the President’s 2013 budget presentation, which the
Presidency had slated for this month.
This incident opens a new flank in the several battles that
the Executive and the Legislature have waged since this administration came on
board. On the New Year jack-up of Petroleum price, the NA had given counsel to
the effect that the President revert to the old price of N65 per litre, advice
that the Executive brazenly discountenanced. Both arms of government have also
waged battles over the CBN’s unbridled autonomy, the CBN exposé that
legislators have cornered 20 percent of the national budget, and controversy
over un-appropriated Intervention funds the CBN unilaterally disbursed to
distressed banks, to the aviation sector and the CBN Governor’s home state,
Kano, which had come under Boko Haram attacks. The Parliament insists on poking
into these matters, with the Executive insisting it has no right to.
The Parliament is the very heart and character of democracy.
Both the Executive and the Judiciary will always exist in one form or the other
in any other form of government, be it autocracy, monarchy, gerontocracy,
plutocracy or dictatorship. The Legislature is the missing element in all these
dying political arrangements. Unarguably, the existence of the elected
Parliament (in any form) confers the status of democracy on a government. It
may actually be the most important plank of democracy.
In fact, Nigeria’s Constitution in Section 4(1)(2) says:
“The legislative powers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria shall be vested in a
National Assembly for the Federation, which shall consist of a Senate and a
House of Representatives. The National Assembly shall have power to make laws
for the peace, order and good government of the Federation or any part thereof
with respect to any matter included in the Exclusive Legislative List set out
in Part I of the Second Schedule to this Constitution.”
Did Maku know that “Currency, coinage and legal tender”
belong on the Exclusive Legislative List, which the Constitution grants the
National Assembly unqualified monopoly to deliberate and legislate upon?
Perhaps, that knowledge would have moderated the reaction of the Information
Minister and allowed him handle the situation more maturely and diplomatically.
There is a bright side to all this, however. Political
frictions, like the one between Maku and Mark, form the bedrock upon which this
democracy must be founded, in order to turn Nigeria into the land its people
have always dreamt about. And that is the Gospel truth.
FELIX OBOAGWINA, A JOURNALIST, LIVES IN LAGOS
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