EDITORIAL – Resolving N/Assembly’s Constitutional Amendment Quagmire

The process to further amend the 1999 Constitution by the Ninth National Assembly has hit the rocks, as 25 States Houses of Assembly have not yet voted on the alterations, more than six months after they were transmitted to them as constitutionally stipulated. The leadership of the legislature has now beseeched one of the governors to lobby his colleagues to pressure their states assemblies to discharge their constitutional responsibilities on the issue in the interest of Nigeria. With barely five months for the present legislative dispensation to wind up, accomplishing this task seems to have become a race against time.

A total of 44 Alteration Bills, pursuant to the review of the Constitution, were forwarded to 36 states legislatures on 29 May, 2022. But only 11 states have considered them. They are: Abia, Akwa Ibom, Anambra, Delta, Edo, Kaduna, Katsina, Kogi, Lagos, Ogun and Osun states. Two-thirds, or 24 out of the 36 states, need to statutorily vote in approval of the amendments before the legislative process could be consummated in Abuja.

So manacled is the process that the Speaker, House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, at a public lecture late in December last year, lamented: “As it is today, it is doubtful that the current constitutional amendment effort will conclude before the expiration of the legislative term.” The President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan, who attended the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) lecture, joined Gbajabiamila in pleading with Governor Nasir el-Rufai, who chaired the occasion, to persuade other governors to bring their influence to bear on their states’ assemblies’ passage of the amendments. Interestingly, el-Rufai gave no assurances on this.

However, the state legislatures, through a letter of the Conference of Speakers, demanded the National Assembly to include four fresh amendments in their consideration, which they consider of interest to them and the country as well, for them to give their imprimaturs to the fifth amendment of the Constitution. These demands are: Establishment of State Police; Establishment of State Judicial Councils; Streamlining of the Procedure for Removing Presiding Officers of State Houses of Assembly; and Institutionalising Legislative Bureaucracy in the 1999 Constitution.
It is a quid pro quo setting that the upper legislative house has scoffed at; and it holds the governors responsible for the intransigence of lawmakers in the states. The Deputy President of the Senate and co-Chairman of the Constitution Review Committee, Ovie Omo-Agege, shortly after he received the letter from the Conference of Speakers in May, dejectedly emphasised this point. He noted that, “No doubt, some state governors have worked tirelessly to turn the Conference of Speakers and some state assemblies into political puppets, thereby undermining and de-legitimising the legislative institutions at the state level.” Therefore, he called on civil society organisations and relevant professional groups to intervene in order to resolve this seemingly devious legislative murk.

With el-Rufai’s response to the disillusionment of Lawan and Gbajabiamila, it is not difficult to see where the governors stand in the logjam. The governor echoed the multi-layer policing demand. He stressed that, “I think we are all clear now that the current policing system is broken. It does not work for Nigeria. Nigeria is the only federation in the world with a centralised police system,” among other requests that he tabled. Truth be told, a decentralised policing system has been on the national agenda for decades. It was hotly debated at the 2014 National Political Conference, to the point that a consensus was reached, which necessitated its recommendation for inclusion in the envisioned new Constitution that never came to pass.

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Given Nigeria’s increasing security concerns, with large swathes of territories under the control of non-state actors like Boko Haram, kidnappers and bandits, resulting in the alarming rate of carnage and millions of internally displaced persons, de-centralised policing has become imperative. It is difficult to fathom why federal lawmakers are yet to tweak the extant security template for effective performance, in spite of four successful constitutional amendments. Resolving the impasse is not as herculean as it is made to seem. If the demands of the state assemblies are justifiable within the praxis of federalism and constitutional democracy, then the Lawan-led Ninth National Assembly should act fast and strike a compromise deal with their counterparts in the states.

If the constitutional amendment ends in a fiasco, as it is being feared, the principal officers of National Assembly will have themselves to blame; and not the lawmakers in the states. It is naive of them to programme a critical legislative assignment such as constitutional review into a crowded election year, or close to the twilight of the tenure of the legislature, when the time for manoeuvres in the event of a divergence, such as this, is limited or non-existent at all.

The 44 alterations to the constitution, with the possibility of the process recording still-birth, contain provisions that deal with some of the country’s existential challenges. Local government financial autonomy, with the abolition of the State-Joint Local Government Account is inherent. Understandably, the lawmakers in the states, who have become rubber stamps of the governors, might have been made to view the entire constitutional re-engineering before them as a poisoned chalice. The illegal manipulations of the account are the reason why the 774 local councils exist only nominally, as their monthly financial allocations from the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC), are stolen by most state governors.

The devolution of powers, with focus on energy or electricity, railways, airways; prisons; independent candidacy in an election; separation of the office of the Attorney General of the Federation from that of Minister of Justice – also at the state level; the powers of National and State Legislatures to summon the President and Governors, to answer questions on security, or any other matter, are important details in the new amendments. These will decongest the Exclusive Legislative List with 68 items a bit, which hardly conduce to effective governance at the centre. By every means possible, this critical assignment must be completed.

The quest for a brand new or people’s constitution, different from the current one decreed into existence by the military, has always ended in debacle, due to mutual suspicions and disagreements among the country’s acrimonious ethno-regional elite. Federal lawmakers’ guarding their so-called sovereign powers jealously have not helped matters either. Consequently, incremental and inevitable compromise constitutional adjustments have been embraced. The reviews are not profound just yet, as each legislative session trifles with the basics of governance in a federal democracy.

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