Cautionary note to Mr & Mrs Bukar Abba Ibrahim

By the time you are reading this, you probably must’ve discovered what a lawyer friend of mine told me last Wednesday afternoon. He pointed out that there is a clause in the Nigerian Constitution, which stipulates that when a ministerial nominee is not screened by the Senate after 21 working days, since his or her name was presented to the Senate, that nominee automatically qualifies to be appointed minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This means that if former Rivers State governor and now ministerial nominee from the same state, Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, was not screened yesterday and by October 30, he would not need to go through any screening process by the Senate to become minister because his name has been with the Senate since September 30.
And, in any case, considering the  humbuggery going on in the Senate in the name of “ministerial screening”, it just as well might have been better if the entire charade is called off and the entire list of nominees rubber-stamped and returned to the president for deployment to their appropriate ministries. Maybe, the senators have time to kill, but the rest of the country certainly have no such luxury; we are at least 20 years behind Egypt, which has since gone beyond surmounting the basic ingredients for development: Reliable national statistics, uninterrupted power supply, sound and affordable healthcare delivery system, qualitative, affordable education to all citizens and a thriving, patriotic middle class. And Egypt is not even the best in Africa! Neither, for that is it a fully developed democracy in the real definition of the word.
In our own case, since the return of democracy to the country in 1999, it is only from time to time, especially during ceremonial occasions, such as the screening of persons to be appointed to executive offices, that the media and the general public turn their searchlight on the Senate and the National Assembly as a whole. Once the ceremonies are over, a few people bother to pin down the legislators and subject them to thorough examination to understand and assess how well they perform their functions. As a result of our collective nonchalance, the legislators themselves have become used to treating their responsibilities with appalling negligence and incompetence.
Two of the basic functions of the Senate are to make, amend or repeal laws as the case may be, for the good governance of the country, and the second is to ensure that the executive arm of government does not overstep its boundary in the execution of the laws as prescribed by the Nigerian constitution. This is where their famous (or infamous) “oversight” functions creep in. Where the two, that is the executive and the legislature disagree, the third arm of government, the judiciary, steps in to clear the ambiguity. The role performance and division of labour  are supposed to be this simple; and they are indeed, that simple even in other democracies that are bigger and more complex than Nigeria, such as India.
Things have, however, reached a stage in our country where the ambivalence in the Senate has become so embarrassingly regular and frustrating to watch that we should seriously consider scrapping the Senate altogether.
Last Tuesday, for instance, the Senate set a new record of ignominy for itself. First, unlike the penultimate week where the same Senate scratched through and, albeit unimpressively, screened 18 nominees in two days, last Tuesday, the Senate curiously decided to scale down its activities and raised the bar for poor performance by screening only two – two, for God’s sake – nominees and sheepishly adjourned sitting for another 48 hours; mainly because most of them needed to escort the Senate President to answer questions at the Code of Conduct Tribunal the following day.
But that was not all. Among the two people they screened on that lazy Tuesday, one just happened to be the wife of one of them. Her name is Khadija Bukar Abba Ibrahim, who is currently a member of the House of Representatives. To start with, even if there are no legal obstacles, is it morally acceptable that having sought and obtained a people’s mandate, with specific promises enshrined in a presumed  social contract, that that same mandated person can just dump that same contract and just move on to another contact without obtaining the consent of the people? But that is not even the problem with Honourable Khadija’s nomination. The thorny issue around Hon. Khadijah is that by her own admission, the lady and her husband between them have dominated the political space in Yobe State for over a decade. Her husband, who is currently serving as a senator was governor of Yobe State for a cumulative period of 10 years until 2007; and from then on he and his wife have been the representatives of their Yobe East, zone ‘A’ constituency at the federal legislature up till today. Clearly, something doesn’t add up here, especially given the fact that the same Yobe State happens to be in the unenviable position of being one of the unluckiest states in reaping the benefits of democracy for all of the period that Mr. & Mrs. Bukar Abba Ibrahim have been ruling over the state in one capacity or another. And now, as if all of that is not enough, Mrs. Abba Ibrahim has to be the one to abandon her people’s mandate at the House and become a minister of the federal republic.
It is possible though, that this emerging political dynasty is being built with the full consent of the people of Yobe State, but even so, there are quite a number of people who are already showing their displeasure over this insensitive dynastic trend. I have read in the newspapers and social media different versions of protests all communicating one message, which, in summary, amounts to this: “No to the concentration of political power not only in one constituency or one household, but also in one bedroom”.
Whatever be the case, Mrs. Abba Ibrahim has already been confirmed. She was asked, by her husband and his colleagues in the Senate, to “take a bow and go.” Whether she received that special treatment  because of her husband who was among the senators that disappointing Tuesday afternoon, or in deference to the memory of her politically influential father and grandfather (may their souls rest in peace); or because of some outstanding quality about her, which the senators only knew to the exclusion of the rest of us, there it was. In your face, so to speak.
But it is necessary to point out, for the good of all concerned, that though building political dynasties is a legitimate political pursuit for politicians all over the world, it does come with inherent dangers. In almost all cases, political dynasties inevitably generate resentment from the people.
What all this means is that the temptation to create a political dynasty might be irresistible and the process of doing so exciting; but very often the consequences of that are scorn and resentment from the people, which they often display without reason, without provocation, and without warning. This is without any misgivings whatsoever to the integrity, competency level or even the suitability of Honourable Khadija to the position being proposed; it is rather, a matter of striking a balance between what is a right and what is politically correct.
SUN