President Buhari should take Senate dilemma more seriously

The pussyfooting over the 8th Senate’s forged Standing Orders 2015 is truly annoying and irritating. Neither the government of President Muhammadu Buhari nor Nigeria’s usually timorous but exploitative political class has given the matter sufficient or sensible consideration. Not only is the matter swaddled in partisan politics, and reduced insensitively to a matter of whom you support, virtually all law enforcement agencies have been tiptoeing around the controversy as if they are wary of being

tagged partisan and prejudiced. They seem apprehensive of the obnoxious and repudiated legacy of the Goodluck Jonathan presidency in which national security interest became indistinguishable from private interest. Exasperatingly too, most Nigerians continue to squirm over the matter, perhaps anxious to be adjudged impartial.

But the Senate is Nigeria’s highest lawmaking body. If the country is to get its moral compass right, and its politics too, the Senate must live and operate above suspicion. There is sadly nothing the 8th Senate has done so far, not even its very first simple act of electing its leaders, that shows it appreciates its overarching role as a lawmaking organ, not to talk of its status as a chief component of national ideology and political character. What is clear today is that the Senate, as it is constituted — the considerable number of fawning and snivelling floor members not excluded — is out of sync with Nigeria’s national ambitions. Something must therefore give if the transformation the country sorely needs is not to miscarry.

To establish the incontestable fact that the Senate’s 2011 Standing Orders were surreptitiously and illegally amended to guide the elections into the Senate’s leadership positions in 2015, the investigating but vacillating police officers assigned the case have hemmed and hawed so blatantly that they even failed in their preliminary report to conclude whether a crime had been committed or not. They would need the Justice ministry to tell them that forgery is a crime. Worse, according to some reports, the police report that established a case of forgery but not crime was quoted as failing to identify those who conspired to author the surreptitious amendments. Who on earth are the police fooling? The Clerk of the NASS was interviewed; surely he would know who penned the offensive items.

The main beneficiaries of the surreptitiously amended Standing Orders 2015 — Senate President Bukola Saraki of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) — have carried on as if no crime was committed, and no attack upon the national conscience had been carried out brazenly. To placate his conscience, Senator Saraki has struggled to worm his way into the heart of a smouldering and aloof President Muhammadu Buhari. For now, the president is standing pat. Senator Ekweremadu and his supporters have on their own made the ingenious argument that his implausible election as deputy to Senator Saraki is a fortuitous and expedient remedy for the incipient alienation of the Igbo by the Buhari government and the APC. In all this, the morally offensive act of forgery has been rendered secondary, and is attenuated by the perceived or presumed act of political alienation.

There are two main problems with the ongoing pussyfooting. First, by defending their elections, especially the manner they were procured, and sustaining the profit they had made from the June 9 act, Senators Saraki and Ekweremadu suggest that notwithstanding their leading positions as Nigeria’s top lawmakers, they lack the depth and the ethics to abjure both the processes and bases of their elections. If they have no conscience, or have stilled them, how can they be trusted with the onerous and sensitive job of making great laws for Nigeria? Second, by needlessly and combatively passing a vote of confidence in the Senate leadership, particularly in Senator Saraki, members of the Senate, across party lines and without exception, give the impression of themselves as a bunch of grovelling, selfish and inconsiderate lawmakers. The lawmakers even capped their comicalness when about a dozen of them, together with a horde of House of Representatives members, escorted Senator Saraki’s wife to the office of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to answer to allegations of financial impropriety. It is still not clear by what authority and on what grounds they displayed that act of loyalty and empathy to someone who is not a lawmaker but simply the wife of the Senate President. The conclusion is unavoidable that Senators — leaders and members alike — simply fail to appreciate the weight of the office they occupy and the centrality of the legislature as a brewer and synthesiser of great laws.

And this is precisely where President Buhari comes in. As a president wary of confronting once again the challenges he faced as a former military head of state and maligned dictator, as well as the limiting and brutal weaknesses that stymied his past and person, he may now feel castrated by the remonstrating pangs of conscience and the constricting weight of pluralist democracy. But given the false start in the 8th Senate, and the seeming hijack and distortion of the levers and rubrics of the country’s top legislative assemblies by apparent reactionaries, the president must now summon something deeper in him, something unambiguous, pristine, subliminal and celestial, to influence the direction and destination of Nigerian democracy. The cost of not doing something is much higher than the cost of doing something and unintentionally risking fresh and insidious labelling of partisanship and dictatorship. The peace in the lower chamber is tenuous, for the dividing lines are still evident and probably calcifying underneath. The Senate, so cavalier and so shorn of principles, character and morality, is unlikely to know peace as long as the injury done the hallowed upper chamber is neither salved nor honestly tackled.

Many analysts have referred to President Buhari’s salutary body language as a factor in some of the positive movements being witnessed in some areas of national life. That may be true. But that same body language has also been perceived in other areas as either being permissive of the mundaneness and political corruption of the country’s recent past, or tolerant of the hesitancy, dilatoriness and paralysis that appear to be enervating the country since his inauguration. He had felt impelled to nudge the lower chamber into compromise and rectitude, perhaps because he felt it was not beyond salvage; but he has been quiet about the Senate and indifferent to Senator Saraki, again perhaps because he feels the upper chamber is beyond salvage. By doing nothing more than resisting the Senate President covertly, and spurning the Senate as it were, he risks allowing the impertinent Senator Saraki to consolidate his power base and even embark on the sort of showy and spurious trips he made to Maiduguri recently purporting to empathise with internally displaced persons.

The president must give life to federal agencies and law enforcement within the ambit of the law. The agencies must know that when they operate vigorously and firmly within the law to tackle graft and political corruption, such as was enacted on Senate floor on June 9, he has their backs. Senators must not be allowed to casually and carelessly rephrase the dialectics in the upper chamber, and recast the polemics in such a way as to confuse the issues and paint a different battle scenarios other than the ones evident to every sensible and judicious Nigerian. Powerful APC leaders may have their preferences for Senate leadership, and support those preferences with all the resources at their disposal, but they can be defeated — only that that defeat must be lawfully procured in such a manner that it does not transform the Senate into a moral outrage, lawless body, and sinister and defiant iconoclastic organ.

It is not an option for President Buhari to have himself second-guessed all the time. He should make himself clear on the Senate dilemma, and have the boldness and courage to let the world know where he stands. He must give direction to the law and its enforcers, and move steadily and steadfastly into becoming the chief custodian of the values and probity of the people the constitution envisages him to lead with all the moral armaments he told the people he possessed when they voted for him. The stalemate in the Senate is untenable. It must be brought to an end for the nation to move on.

The Nation