7th August, 2012
Member of the House of Representatives representing Agege Federal Constituency at the House, Babatunde Adejare, in this interview, speaks on the many impeachable sins of President Goodluck Jonathan and why the House is going ahead with the threat. EROMOSELE EBHOMELE was there:
How has it been for you as a member of the House of Representatives in the last one year?
The major work I have put myself to doing in that House is how to see that the Public Procurement Law works to perfection. We have a very nice law about procurement, but the execution has not been the way it should be. There is supposed to be a procurement commission; there are lots of agencies that are supposed to be set up by the executive arm that have not been set up; there are a lot of things they are not doing as per what the bill says.
We as a House started the subsidy thing. It was a serious problem on our hands then; remember we cut off our recess and sat on a Sunday. And one of the things we promised the people was that we will look into the subsidy issue. We even went to the extent of looking into whether anybody was even subsidising anything, and that was how it started and here we are today. As far as subsidy is concerned, you have seen that there are so many shady deals; we have been able to discover that we don’t need that huge amount to subsidise our petrol. We also discovered that the way the subsidy was managed and funded was not according to the law of the land.
The law does not permit anybody, not even the president to dip hands into our money without any appropriation to back it up. But in the subsidy issue, we found that the executive went ahead and spent money we did not appropriate. And that was why we said even if we are going to put our feet down and say we want to make laws, there are a lot of things the President has done that are impeachable offences. You cannot spend people’s money anyhow, the amount of money they used to fund that illegal subsidy was so much that if we had said we wanted to impeach the president; a lot of people would have supported us and say it was reasonable. Those are some of the things we have been doing as a House. As a legislator, I have seen that it is not that we don’t have robust and effective laws, but the problem is that we have forgotten some of these laws; the execution of these laws are not the way they should be; we are not doing some things according to the laws in the book. I have suggested to the House, and there is a Bill we are proposing that will help us do a kind of impact assessment of our laws. With that, we will be able to know which one is effective and which one is useless; we will know the ones to amend and those ones to be chopped off in order for them to be more effective. There is no genius in government; it is about making the system work and doing what we swore to do.
The belief is that we do not have a problem with our laws, but with the implementation. What is the House doing to strengthen the legislative arm of government to make it work effectively and independently?
First of all, I will like to praise the courage of my leader, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He has decided that if you want to strengthen an institution, you cannot afford to let the element of that institution change frequently. I started as a legislator at the Lagos State House of Assembly where I did two terms and now I am at the Federal House of Representatives. So nobody can tell me that someone that is just coming in to the House of Reps will know better than me as far as the parliament is concerned. What I am trying to say is that it is so unfortunate where we have found ourselves in this country, some people believe that politics is poverty alleviation, but it is not. Some of us are into it to provide service to our people.
This legislative arm you are talking about is the youngest of the three arms; it is the one that is always chopped off when coups happen, and it is the one we have little experience about. So in the first instance, we have to make sure that a lot of people that are going there are people that have gained experience over time because it is not something you can buy; you have to gather the experience in that line.
As far as the House is concerned now, we have decided as a House and I know that speaking the minds of the other 359 members, that we will not allow sentiments to affect our judgments anymore. When we were elected, we were elected on the platforms of our parties, but immediately we get there, it is about good governance that will yield better living for our people. That is why you see a lot of things coming up on the floor of the House that have not been happening before now.
This budget thing, if it were to be before, you know what will happen; it would have been handled in the family way. But now, everybody is so conscious of the fact that the electorate is getting wiser and they are asking questions. So if they don’t see you asking the same questions or they don’t see you on the same page with them, they will deal with you when elections come. One of the fantastic things happening this time around is that no party has the absolute majority in that House. Whatever any of the parties wants to do, it needs the other to do it, and that is fine by me.
As a House, we have decided that whatever we do in that chamber will be to benefit our people. If this country must get to where we want it to be, we should all encourage the legislators to do their job. When some people want to talk about us, all they want to say is our salary, but seriously speaking, we are not earning any fantastic salary. I think our people need to know and be enlightened that to get to the roots of our problems in this country, all these systems must work and they must not only work, they must work very well. We need to cautiously encourage them to work.
You have talked about working at same pace with the people, but the executive arm doesn’t see it that way; instead they now see the House as a threat…
One of the saddest days I have had in recent times was 28 May when the president said that the House of Representatives is his problem and without being prompted, he went ahead to say that we don’t do things the way they wanted us to do it, and that it is only we that will not do things the way they wanted them. I felt bad because it came from my President, who I believe should not see things in that light. At the same time, I was so happy that the president knows this.
Sincerely speaking, we are not there to satisfy the President; we are there all of us, including the President, to satisfy the people. If we are doing that, no apology to Mr. President for him feeling the way he is feeling. I am even happy he is feeling that way because that has made him and his cabinet to even sit up. The fear of the House of Representatives is the beginning of wisdom in government now; it is not about intimidation, it is because they all know that we will do it the way it ought to be done. There are a lot of things we need to do, but believe me sincerely, in the nearest few months, you will start seeing all these things coming up.
I just want to beg the people on behalf of my colleagues that we need your supports; we are your representatives in that government and we are both your eyes and ears. For the little we have done, I can assure our people that they have not seen anything yet. This is our country and we won’t go and import outsiders to come and run it for us, we have to do it ourselves. I believe that Mr. President should see us as instruments to use to achieve his aim of making Nigeria better.
What is your position concerning the current impeachment threat of the President by the House if he fails to implement the 2012 budget to capacity by September
We all felt that as a House, we owe it a point of duty to our people to see that our budget is not just paper documents; we have to see that the budget is executed to the letter. We know that the budget cannot be implemented 100 per cent, but at least, let us start targeting up to 80 or 90 per cent. In that way, even the infrastructure renewal that we are talking about would be easy to achieve. But you are talking about building up your infrastructure, which is what we should do as country, but your budget as at now which is half of the year is still less than 30 per cent executed, it does not speak well of us.
It is true that as the President, he has the right to say this budget should look like this just as the House has the right to say what should be because of what we get from our constituencies. So if we as a House see that what they are doing is not right, we need to talk and say no, you are not doing the right thing and that is what we are doing.
As at July, all the revenue generating agencies of the Federal Government had already generated about N3 trillion, which is N1.7 trillion less than the total budget, yet we have plans for deficit. This government has taken a loan of N400 billion to balance the deficit, yet, you have not released more than N400 billion out of the N1.7 trillion Capital budget. This generated money we are talking does not include the revenue from NNPC. We have a feeling about this and the first thing I am going to do when we resume from recess is to put up a motion that would compel the NNPC to make their account public.
I will move a motion to have a public hearing on the account of NNPC. It cannot be done the way they are doing it; it is not a secret society organisation and we all have the right to know the way things are being done there. Some of us believe that we don’t need to have a deficit budget but a surplus one. We are making more money than we are spending and that is the belief of some of us. But if it is not like that, they should make their account public.
The Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, says the 100 per cent implementation of the budget is not possible and President Jonathan has said the Boko Haram sect derailed his promises…
With all due respect to the Finance Minister, I am aware she knows we are not buffoons in that House. When we say 100 per cent, we know it might not actually be 100 per cent, but something close to that. If we are all serious and determined to face these issues, let us start from somewhere and believe me sincerely, we will go ahead and start the impeachment process if that target is not met. At least, we all saw it when the Deputy National Secretary of the PDP came out to say it is true that the President has done some wrongs and that the House is right to say it wants to start impeachment process. If his party has alluded to that fact, then what are we talking about? We are only trying to help the President to make sure he doesn’t disappoint our people. I am sure that Mr. President will be as surprised as I am to know that the budget performance as at today is still about 12 to 18 per cent.
On the issue of Boko Haram being a stumbling block to his administration’s performance, when we get to the floor of the House, we will take all issues as they come. The budget is a concise and precise document that says this road here and that road there; we will see how many of these roads are in those places Boko Haram is terrorising and we will see how many of the roads are in places they are not terrorising. So people should stop talking as if those of us in that House are buffoons, we will not take it.
There have been clamour for a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) and this seems to have divided the National Assembly. What is your own take on the issue?
It seems some people are not comfortable with that word “sovereign”, so let’s remove the word if that is what is causing problem. Let’s just have a national conference. There is no way we won’t come to this table. We must come to the table to avoid war. This country must not allow war because we will not survive another civil war. So I support that we should come together and talk about issues. We in government are not the most brilliant people in the country; there are fantastically brilliant individuals who are not even interested in politics, so we must not preclude them from this thing.