Opinions are often divided about the rightness or wrongness of political actions, such as the declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State as announced by President Bola Tinubu last week. This is because opinions are offshoots of attitudes and behaviours. They fluctuate. It is also a big difference between behavioral and natural sciences. Whereas the latter can be sure of its facts gathered through scientific laboratories, which process can be replicated by any other researcher, following the same prescribed methods, behavioral enquiries do come with variations in outcomes and less certainty.
So, when you hear the opinion expressed by citizen Bola Ahmed Tinubu about the declaration of a state of emergency by the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan in 2013 and juxtapose the same with his 2025 action on Rivers State, you should know opinions are not static. President Jonathan had in the wake of ceaseless Boko Haram attacks on Adamawa, Yobe, and Borno States, declared a state of emergency on the three states. Even though the former president did not tamper with the political strictures in the states he placed under emergency, citizen Tinubu did not spare the former president, accusing him of working out an agenda in favour of his party and his re-election.
He had told President Jonathan: “The body language of the Jonathan administration leads any keen watcher of events with unmistakable conclusion of the existence of a surreptitious but barely disguised intention to muzzle the elected governments of these states for what is clearly a display of unpardonable mediocrity and diabolic partisanship geared towards 2015. Borno and Yobe states have been under armies of occupation with the attendant excruciating hardship experienced daily by the indigenes and residents of these areas. “This government now wants to use the excuse of the security challenges faced by the Governors to remove them from the states considered hostile to the 2015 PDP/Jonathan project.”
Last week, however, President Tinubu declared that “No good and responsible President will standby and allow the grave situation to continue without taking remedial steps prescribed by the Constitution to address the situation in the state.” He added that the measures he had previously taken to restore peace to the state had been frustrated.
Politics and diplomacy share different things in common, especially in adherence to the words of Lord Palmerston, a British diplomat who said: “There are no permanent enemies, and no permanent friends, only permanent interests.” That was in a speech he delivered in the House of Commons on March 1, 1848. So, we can say that the words of Lord Palmerston are at work when President Bola Tinubu condemned the declaration of a state of emergency in 2013 and utilized the same measure to cure what he perceived as a malignant national tumour in 2025.
The National Assembly acted on the declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State with some precision, as each chamber passed the emergency rule without dissenting voices. But the development appeared to have landed on the wrong side of public opinion once again. We know that our people have tagged the assembly with different names, rubber stamps, and being one of the most common. Not a few had expected the leaders of the chambers to sweat before securing the required two-thirds majority needed to pass the emergency rule through the line. The constitution expressly says so. The constitution equally provides that once the emergency rule is declared, it must secure a two-thirds vote of the legislature. That ordinarily looks simple. Just get 73 senators and 240 members of the house, and the emergency rule is sailing home. But the way the 2023 election was won and lost altered the shape of things. No one party was able to muster two-thirds majority in each of the chambers. The three parties thrown up by the 2023 election shared the figures in the chambers. There are members of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Labour Party (LP), Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the All-Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Following the precision with which the NASS members dispersed the emergency rule declaration last week, and the variety of attacks on the institution of the legislature, I conducted a brief check on the very essence of representative governance and came up with findings that should interest our lawmakers. The first question that got thrown up in view of the attacks on the National Assembly was who are the lawmakers accountable to, the executive or the people? How are they required to conduct crucial affairs that require the attainment of certain thresholds? I discovered that whereas operators in the executive arm of government can exercise some latitudes and luxuries, in difference to the ‘no permanent friend and no permanent enemy stuff’, the legislators do not. While politicians and diplomats, especially in the executive arm of government, are allowed to apply the words of the British diplomat as circumstances permit, legislators have a burden of the constitution to carry. The 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria ( 1999) (as amended), provides that the National Assembly shall reserve the right to modify its procedure. And that’s where the trouble started for the legislature. In the exercise of that power, the lawmakers went ahead to give themselves rules and orders from time to time. The current assembly is guided by Senate and House Orders, 2023, as amended. In the case of the passage of the emergency rule, the constitution and the rule books jointly made provisions. None of the provisions, however, sidelined the need for voting.
From what we saw in the two chambers last week, none utilized the electronic voting system, and no manual voting was even applied. What we saw was voice voting. The question on the lips is how you ascertain the attainment of two-thirds majority in a voice vote situation. Yes, assembly hands have stated that there were no dissenting voices, but that constitution stipulates that the emergency rule shall be passed by two-thirds majority of members.
Contrary to what many would say that the development robs off on the executive, I say that the legislature comes off worse. Lobbying is a well-established mode of communication in the legislative arm. It means you sell your views and standpoint to the opposing figures until you can secure the required number. By opting for the easy way out, the National Assembly might just be adding petrol to a raging fire. Reports out there already suggest a worsening image for the legislature across the globe. The acceptability rate varies from country to country. The UNDP/IPU in a survey puts the acceptability rate of the Nigerian legislature at 34.5 per cent. But that is as must as the statistics say. In real life situation, we can see that the acceptability rate is far lower than that and if you go by the turnover rate of the legislature which has been hitting 70 per cent after every election cycle for years, we can conclude that the legislature’s acceptability in Nigeria is not above 30 per cent.
If you have an institution that has about 30 percent public acceptability rating, I think the onus should be on the leaders not only to be transparent but to be seen as actually transparent. Yes, some voices have said that there were no dissenting votes, but how can one independently ascertain the actual figures of Senators on the floor that day? And who keeps the register of lawmakers in the chamber? The register is not a public document, as we discovered years ago. It is locked up in the closet of the presiding officer. There was an instance where we tried to conduct a search on a senator who was seen as perpetually absent from the chamber some year back. The task was to know whether he was able to make one-third of the 181 days required by the constitution in a legislative year. It was a task we were unable to accomplish because the then Senate President usually locked up the register. So, if the register is not accessible to Nigerians, how do you defend whether the institution had fulfilled the constitutional provision or not? Some people have said that only 64 senators were on the floor during the emergency rule consideration, while the House of Reps announced that 243 lawmakers were in its chamber.
There is a trend around the world that a growing democracy like Nigeria must avoid. People of different destinations are losing interest in their parliaments and are beginning to place trust in the ombudsman and other sources. That is, even though the parliament is a distinguishing feature of democratic rule. The UNDP/IPU, in the first ever global parliamentary report released in 2012, had noted that declining public trust was presenting “a challenge for parliaments in that they offer alternative forms of representation, accountability and redress.”
The report further stated: “In the first place, the collective representative role of parties and parliament faces competition as citizens can now seek representation in numerous ways through a variety of organizations in civil society. Second, parliament’s traditional role as the route for the redress of grievance is now contested by the variety of statutory agencies and individuals, including ombudsmen, watchdogs, and audit agencies. Each is designed specifically to deal with aspects of maladministration and has far greater resources and expertise to deal with such cases than would be available through parliament.” This sort of situation can only portent a possible annihilation of the legislature, the unique symbol of democratic governance. To prevent things from getting that bad in this clime, parliamentarians need to emphasise lobbying and transparency in their dealings.
(Published by the Sunday Tribune, March 23, 2025)
