Holding National Assembly hostage

Look no further than the election of Tajudeen Abbas as Speaker of the House of Representatives and Jibrin Barau of Kano North senatorial district as Deputy Senate President of the 10th National Assembly to understand why newly elected senator and former governor of Zamfara State, Abdul’Aziz Yari, so fervently desired to be Senate President.

The political back-and-forth between northern and southern Nigeria is likely a conflict between conservative and pseudo-progressive Nigeria, who are actually conservatives.

The northern Nigerian political establishment wanted the ultra-conservative North-West Nigeria to lead the legislature after ceding the presidency to the South in order to thwart any radical restructuring President Bola Tinubu might be planning.

If Speaker Abbas, who represents the Zaria Federal Constituency of Kaduna State, cannot stop President Tinubu from winging constitutional amendments that do not favour northern oligarchs from a Senate led by southern Nigerian Godswill Akpabio, he will checkmate Barau.

As a result, Speaker Abbas, a great-grandson of a Zaria Emir of the Mallawa dynasty, will use his legislative hand to reclaim the presidential powers that the northern political establishment appeared to have conceded to the South with one hand.

This is straight out of Henry Kissinger’s rulebook, the main character in America’s diplomatic zero-sum game, where your loss is your traducer’s gain. Franz Fanon, a protest author, would have argued that because you are poor, your oppressors are wealthy.

The 1999 Constitution of Nigeria states in Section 58 that “The National Assembly’s power to make laws shall be exercised by both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and.. assented to by the President.”

Anyone from the south of Nigeria who believes President Tinubu will implement a radical constitutional restructuring may want to reconsider. It won’t be an easy ride at all for those political establishment members in the north who openly admit that they survive on political power-mongering.

Senator Ali Ndume, who represents the Southern Borno senatorial district, described how presiding officers who might be interested in the topics being discussed in the legislative houses play the game of parliamentary subterfuge. “The presiding officers have a smart way of doing things,” he reveals. If they turn around, will they see Ndume or another person who will be critical? He brings extra order papers if they are not present. And that’s how it ends.

This implies that whatever the presiding officers of the legislative branch desire can easily become law. Additionally, they will use legal loopholes in their respective chambers of the National Assembly to block anything they believe to be contrary to their interests or the interests of their region.

That was Senator Ndume’s justification for the hotly contested conversion of the short-term Ways and Means loan into the long-term loan, which Godwin Emefiele of the Central Bank of Nigeria recklessly granted to President Muhammadu Buhari’s debt-loving administration. All it took was the Senate President’s deceitful buy-in.

According to Nicolo Macciavelli, the protagonist of political brinksmanship, the ends justify the means. Even near the end of the compliant 9th National Assembly, President Buhari got his way despite the media’s cries and some lawmakers who displayed some decency.

In the past, when Godswill Akpabio, the then-minister of Niger Delta Affairs, was outing the shenanigans of some lawmakers questioning him, the chairman of the committee exercised his authority to order Akpabio to “Off his mic” and stop further obscene revelations about how lawmakers’ hands got caught in the cookie jar of contracts at the Niger Delta Development Commission.

The National Assembly may not amend the Constitution unless the purpose is supported by the votes of not less than two-thirds of all members of each House, according to Section 9, even though neither northern nor southern Nigeria has two-thirds of the National Assembly’s membership.

Furthermore, the amendment must “also be approved by the resolution of the Houses of Assembly of not less than two-thirds of all states,” despite the fact that neither northern nor southern Nigeria have two-thirds of the states in the federation.

However, politicians in Nigeria generally don’t consider or care about the interests of Nigeria as a whole. They only have consideration for their own racial, ethnic, or regional interests. If you disagree with this statement, read the following account from Daily Trust columnist Dr. Farooq Kperogi:

When I brought up (President) Tinubu’s (Jagaban) Borgu title with my paternal uncle a few days ago, he jokingly questioned whether (President) Tinubu was aware that he was evading the obligations his title required of him by removing fuel subsidies, which has increased the deprivation of border communities like Borgu.

Ancient Borgu, according to Kperogi, extended from the present-day Baruten and Kaiama Local Governments in Kwara State, as well as Bagudo and Dandi Local Governments in Kebbi State, to what is now Northeastern Benin Republic (where Borgu State is located).

Such sentiments, as documented by Kperogi, only serve to highlight the possibility that some Nigerians may not be wholly of Nigerian orientation. The interests of their ethnic nationalities, wherever they may extend, may therefore take precedence over those of Nigeria, their country, in their eyes.

Remember the President Buhari’s response when Dr. Reuben Abati’s team of Arise News TV journalists questioned him on why he believed it was necessary to build a railway line from Kano to Maradi in the Niger Republic, which is unlikely to be profitable.

They were informed directly and without hesitation by President Buhari that he had first cousins in the Niger Republic. Everyone is aware that his father was from Niger, and that he travelled to Daura, which is only about 9 kilometres south of the Nigeria-Niger Republic border, to sell duck.

Therefore, whatever the inhabitants of northern Nigeria’s political establishment decide is in the national interest effectively becomes that interest. This is similar to W.I. Thomas’ and his wife Dorothy’s aphorism, which goes, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

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It might take a long time and a lot of effort to end the political space-contesting between northern Nigeria’s Islamic Middle-Eastern orientation and southern Nigeria’s Judeo-Christian traditions.

The architect of this confusion and unnecessary suffering that Nigerians on the two cultural and political divides are going through is the first Governor-General, Lord Frederick Lugard, who allowed the two political cultures to grow side by side in Nigeria.

You could almost say that Lord Lugard sowed and cultivated this dividing seed of strife on purpose to ensure that Nigeria will never advance and experience peace. As a result, Nigeria’s politics took on a persistently precarious trajectory that oscillated between taking one step forward and two steps back.

The President may need to actively cultivate those who might not fully understand that when everyone works together, everyone wins if he wants his campaign platform to avoid becoming nothing more than empty promises lost in the mists of time. Although it may sound gloomy, the restructuring of Nigeria is probably not quite at creation day.