By the time the two day Legislative Summit on National Security initiated by the Senate rounded up last Friday at the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) Conference Centre in Abuja, its merit for promoting good governance in Nigeria had become manifest. Of special interest was the novelty of the leading lights of the legislature meeting with stakeholders and top guns in the country’s security architecture. The twist here is the fact that the parley took place not in the regimented confines of the National Assembly plenary chambers or even its Committee Rooms where parliamentary protocol would hold sway and keep many invitees ill at ease.
Rather this time the atmosphere was more relaxed though still business like, typical of the now trending, stately NAF Conference Centre. The participation of President Muhammadu Buhari, who was ably represented by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo accentuated the ambience as no atmosphere more authoritative could have been contrived. The atmosphere could not have served a better purpose than providing a platform for consensus building across the various stakeholders on the way forward.
Setting the tone of the parley President of the Senate Bukola Saraki referred to it as a “forum to share ideas and map out strategies to see the country out of its current predicament” According to him, “the coming together of the executive and legislative arms of government for the discussion about security is a pointer to the seriousness of the situation and our determination to tackle the problem. It is all hands on deck. No one person, organisation or arm of government can single-handedly tackle the hydra-headed monster of insecurity”. In a nut shell, his advocacy rests on the building of consensus across the various political, cultural, ethnic and religious interests that are presently fixated in various degrees of polarity, so that they can all work together on the same page.
The spreading, destructive wave of insecurity in various parts of the country and which is the theme of the summit, ordinarily claims a pride of place as it is a sensitive issue that demands prime attention due to the finality of its negative consequences. The Senate, acting on behalf of the entire National Assembly deserves commendation for the initiative of the security summit given the prospective dividends of increased stakeholder consensus and expected acceleration of traction in addressing such challenges.
In the context of maximizing the dividends of the summit the National Assembly should look beyond the parley’s theme, as while insecurity may be currently dominating in its nuisance value, the country is also presently steeped in a vortex in which it is crises that have kept her stagnated. By the same logic, the hydra headed nature of Nigeria’s problems immediately betray the fact that several other areas of national life remain intractable simply due to the lack of consensus over the way forward in resolving them. For instance the all-important education sector is virtually collapsing due to the log-jam caused by a riot of policies – many of which are in conflict with each other as succeeding administrations failed to key into the enterprise of their predecessors. As it is in the education sector so is it in health as well as virtually all other sectors of the Nigerian socio-economy.
In deed it does not require a soothsayer to proclaim that much of the present wave of unrests in the country along with their attendant security challenges derive from deep seated resentment among many Nigerians, which now find expression in aggravated protests and anomy – the very reason for the National Assembly Security Summit. By iteration it remains valid to ask if the present state of insecurity could have been averted if the causative tendencies of disorder were addressed early enough through dialogue. Perhaps the country could have been singing a different song by now.
It is therefore by the same logic that the National Assembly needs to explore the prospects of initiating more summits in other areas of disorder in national life as the central institution for promoting dialogue in the country. It is not out of place to see the federal legislature going out of its way to launch sectoral outreaches in the context of summits on various aspects of national life. If nothing else the level of anguish among Nigerians in respect of which the average citizen feels abandoned by the government dictates so. Contemporary street life in Nigeria has degenerated to an abysmal level that seems largely unnoticed by the operatives in the executive branch. Who comes to the rescue of the common man is the legislature. And when the legislature fails in that regard, the people suffer without respite as it is in Nigeria today.
The imperative for the National Assembly to reach out to Nigerians as a body and directly is justified by several factors. Primarily as the constitutionally designated first arm of government at the centre it has a more than a vicarious responsibility to guide the process of governance at every tier of government. The constitution gives it the powers to act as duty bound to demonstrate more visibility before and assertiveness on behalf of the public. It can therefore develop programmes with which it can collaborate with virtually any other stake (s) in the country, to push the agenda of good governance forward.
Legislative summits in other parts of the world serve as ram rods for pushing through critical political agendas whose success depend on consensus. For a country as rich in variety of plumages as Nigeria in the context of the varied antecedents of its constituent ethnic groups, the ultimate dividend from the legislature is to blend them in the spirit of unity in diversity.
