Buhari’s baptism of fire revisited by Mohammed Adamu

by Mohammed Adamu

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As I still struggle to come out of Sallah mood, I thought I should serve you a slightly rejigged version of Buhari’s baptism of fire, published sometime after Saraki’s emergence. Now that the ‘usurper’ Senate President stews in his own pot –or as the English would say ‘as he is being hoisted in his own petered’, I thought we should take a look again at Parliament and its many headaches. Enjoy.

“Soon after Gen. Buhari became President-Elect, I wrote four pieces almost in a sequence, viz: ‘BEFORE WE CRUCIFY BUHARI’; ‘BUHARI: BEWARE PARLIAMENT’; ‘BUHARI AND THE EIGHT PARLIAMENT’ and ‘THE JUDICIARY WAITING FOR BUHARI’. While appraising the different theoretical presumptions and practical realities about the democratic, the legislative and the judicial processes of government I tried variously to provide the basis –with the advent of Buhari- for caution against the expectation of quick democratic dividend. I also tried to warn that the Legislature, unless it is handled by sticks-and-carrots, could be a systemic drag rather than an incentive to our democracy

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I suggested that for the President-elect there was no better institution to begin to worry about as he prepared to come into office than the legislature which -I warned- is one institution that has “more capacity for self-serving legislative rascality than for public-spirited democratic good”. I observed that in mature presidential systems, ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ Presidents are judged “almost exclusively by the deftness of their initiative in the legislative process” -for the reason that even in the constitutionally-guaranteed requirement of ‘checks and balances’ among the three arms of government, the parliament, by the very nature of its powers and functions, is hardly amenable to the strictures of the other arms of government.

 And I said that there was “no time more auspicious (than before inauguration) to alert the incoming President about this enigma called ‘parliament’, so that for a man with purely military background and with no antecedent-democratic culture, Buhari could begin to ask the right questions about what practical approach to deploy in relating with this vital arm of government.

 Whereas a jackbooted approach would be normatively out of place and practically unsustainable, non-interference on the other hand would be terribly self-harming! In fact Rather than portray the President as respectful of democratic limits, executive non-interference in the affairs of parliament betrays a weak presidential initiative to the legislative process and by implication a weak presidency.

But it is in tactfully striking a balance between these two extremes that ‘strong presidents’ are reputed to live up to their executive billing. Thus the strength of a President paradoxically lies in thinking ‘independently’ but acting ‘inter-dependently’ with other arms of government. In fact a servile application of the notion of ‘independence’ of the arms of government is not any more practicable than the fallacious principle of ‘sovereign equality’ of nations has been in international politics. The concept of the ‘independence’ of the arms of government is practically a misnomer, because what exists in reality is functional ‘inter-dependence’ with the ‘Executive arm’ as primus inter pares.

  It is not undemocratic for a president to be interested in the  election of parliamentary leaders. A democratic consensus between a ruling Party and majority of its members in the Legislature on the sharing of elective offices (whether arrived-at by ‘acclamation’ or by ‘shadow election’, through the will of a ‘simple’ or ‘special majority’), is nonetheless democratic and in fact can sometimes even be binding in law.

While appreciating the framers’ raison deter for the creation of the doctrine of Separation of Powers (ingenuously devised to eliminate the possibility of ‘power’ uniting in one arm of government) I did also cite the opinion of many theorists who argued that “it is essentially in the unrealistic effort to make Parliament ‘totally free’ and ‘illimitable’ (i.e. not limited by any) that ‘dictatorship of the legislature’ – which Abraham Lincoln warned is the worst form of it- often finds a fertile ground.

Democracy is practiced as much by laws as by time-honored ‘conventions’. Most of the powers that presidents in presidential democracies wield reside more in ‘conventions’ than in the  ‘Constitution’. Woe betides the president who – in his dealings with the legislature- relies on strict application of letters of the law to the disregard of the sanctuary of un-written ‘conventions’. By the way ‘conventions’ too, –often through the ferment of ‘democratic age and practice’- can and do acquire the force of law.

 Conventionally there is hardly any more effective moderating force to keep the Legislature in check than a ‘strong President’ who -even in the absence of Constitutional guarantees- is ready to draw from the liberty of the un-written powers guaranteed to him by ‘democratic convention’. in fact he can act, sometimes, even if extra legally, to protect the nation from vested interests.

 “Whereas it is true that the legislature is the touchstone of democracy and the heart and soul of public freedom, its inadvertent elevation- as ‘illimitable’ is hugely ironic not only because it confers on a practically ‘fallible’ institution a toga of ‘infallibility’ but because it also creates around that ‘infallibility’ a ring of immunity against the rights of the other arms to subject it to ‘checks and balances”.

And it is inevitable that “these falsely arrogated virtues of ‘illimitability’ and ‘infallibility’ always result in the grandeur of self-arrogated ‘irreproachability’ – an arrogant station atop which high crimes and misdemeanors are committed by so called representatives of the people in the guise of legislating for public good.”

 I observed that lawmakers usually buoyed by these falsely arrogated virtues of ‘illimitability’, ‘infallibility’ and ‘irreproachability’ have, over time, come to grow avidly greedy, egotistic and cantankerous. In Nigeria for example  the law-making power of the legislature, its investigative powers, its powers of oversight over the Executive, of authorization of spending and of removal of the President, all combine to place the legislature as first among three equals.

ref: http://www.peoplesdailyng.com/buharis-baptism-of-fire-revisited/