A former Political Adviser to President Bola Tinubu, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, on Tuesday argued that the ‘collusion’ between the executive and the legislature was capable of destroying Nigeria’s 26-year-old democracy.
Speaking on national television, Baba-Ahmed, a former spokesman of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) and ex-Secretary to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), maintained that the current democracy is only serving the needs of Nigerian leaders, rather than the people’s.
Many Nigerians, especially the opposition, have recently expressed concern over the relationship between the Senate led by Godswill Akpabio and the Tinubu-led executive relating to the perceived erosion of legislative independence in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic.
Since assuming office, Akpabio has often projected loyalty to Tinubu in both rhetoric and legislative conduct, sometimes marked by the Senate’s swift approval of key executive requests, including loan approvals, with minimal scrutiny or public debate. In fact, the Senate President recently led the National Assembly to endorse Tinubu for a second term, two years away from the 2027 election circle.
“We have never seen a more pliant, a more complicit National Assembly than the way we see now. And they are in that, largely because the executive now determines who becomes the head of the other arm of government. That is not done.
“You cannot have a President who insists that he must have a Senate president, he must have (pick) the speaker. You cannot do that. That’s why they are called independent arms of government. They are related, but they are independent.
“The moment you have the leadership in your pocket, they also have you in their pocket, because there are things you have to go to them for. But what we have in Nigeria is the highest collusion between the executive arm of government and the legislative arm of government.
“And when you have that, then you are finished. Your democratic system has gone beyond redemption, unless you are actually able to have an executive arm of government that will say, I will go by the letter and the substance of the constitution,” Baba-Ahmed argued.
According to him, democracy is subverted fundamentally because leadership in Nigeria fails to recognise that they are given the power to govern by the people on their behalf, and not to become big men.
Baba-Ahmed further pointed out that successive governments since 1999 have been worse than their predecessors, starting from Olusegun Obasanjo to the Tinubu administration.
“ I think that if you start from the first seven years of President Olusegun Obasanjo… President Umar Yar’Adua came into power, with some kind of fresh air, youngish president, seemingly clean, visionarily strong. Unfortunately, he didn’t last longer than two years.
“ Goodluck Jonathan took over and ran the country aground, and we fought against Jonathan. We didn’t realise that we were going to put in place someone who was not even going to govern at all.
“Jonathan governed badly. President Buhari didn’t govern at all. Now you have a president who says ‘I’m going to become president because it’s my turn.’ You don’t have a turn to run the country. It’s not your turn. It cannot be your turn. But in any case, even if we forgave him for that comment, you judge the leadership today,” he stressed.
Baba-Ahmed stated that even if the current administration says it’s doing well due to international and global ratings, it is not the only criterion used in measuring government success.
“You measure it by the way the citizens live, the way the citizens feel. And if that is the article by which we are going to measure this administration, then clearly, the Tinubu’s administration has failed the expectations that it was going to radically improve the quality of governance of President Buhari,” he maintained.
He stressed that Nigerians were looking to Tinubu to change his style of governance, show a little empathy to the situation Nigerians live in, tinker with a lot of his policies, stop waste and corruption, and address the issue of insecurity.
“One of them is that we are now getting a huge amount of money coming to the federal and state governments that should go into areas of security, mitigating poverty, building infrastructure, improving education, health delivery system, and giving young Nigerians hope that there is something to do in this country that is meant for them.
“So that (subsidy removal) means a huge amount of money. Where is it going? Some of it is in Abuja, and a huge amount of it is going to state governments, and maybe local governments. We don’t know whether the governors are still allowing this huge massive increase in their revenues to go to them or to go to local governments or not. We are not sure.
“But in any case, we can do something that will improve accountability, transparency, openness in the manner in which this increased revenue arising from the removal of subsidy (is expended),” he stated.
Emmanuel Addeh
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