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As Nigerians await the legislative election which
was postponed on Saturday and is due to take place tomorrow, it is
important to remind ourselves of the role of the legislature in the
democratic process.

The 1999 Constitution says that “the National
Assembly shall have power to make laws for the peace, order and good
government of the Federation or any part thereof with respect to any
matter included in the Exclusive Legislative List…” Without laws, a
democratic society, or any other society for that matter, is doomed.
The 17th century English philosopher, Hobbes, reminds us that without
laws, there can be no justice, and the only life available to citizens
will be a “nasty, brutish, and short” one.

We have in recent weeks been treated to a
semblance of activity from our National Assembly– the passing of the
Freedom of Information Bill, an Anti-Terrorism Bill, and the National
Tobacco Control Bill. We have no idea what spurred this seeming
awakening from a legislature that for most of its tenure has made the
headlines, not for its accomplishments, but instead for how much it has
cost the nation, and how obsessed it has been with self-gratification.

Perhaps the lawmakers realised that time was no
longer on their side, and that if they wanted to be judged kindly by
posterity then they had to start passing laws, which is what they were
elected to do in the first place. If that is the case, then they need
to be told that the realisation (of history’s looming judgement) has
come a little too late.

If only they had shown a dedication to duty from
the beginning. A look at some of the headlines and comments that have
accompanied our stories on the National Assembly in the last two years
will give a better idea of the kind of legislators Nigeria has been
burdened with since 2007 (not that their predecessors were any better):

‘An Assembly for looting’; ‘The luxury cars of our
lawmakers’; ‘National Assembly, the most expensive on earth’; ‘Our
National Assembly is not producing any laws’. In ‘An Assembly for
Looting’ (2009), our correspondents wrote: “If the citizens were to
dismiss the entire membership of the National Assembly and find other
uses for their money, our treasury will have nearly enough money to
fund the N88.5billion that President Umaru Yar’Adua plans to spend this
year on building power plants, so that children can do home work under
electrical lamps and not paraffin.”

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that
the choice Nigeria made was to keep the profligate legislators and
instead dismiss our vision of a transformed power situation. Late 2010,
the Central Bank Governor disclosed that the National Assembly – made
up of less than 500 elected officials– was taking up 25 per cent of
“total government overhead.” Even for hardworking legislators, that
figure would be unjustifiable.

In June 2009, two years into their tenure, we
reported that the Senate had succeeded in passing only 15 of the 284
bills that came before it. At the state level, the situation is not
much better. Many State Assemblies are either firmly in the pockets of
the state governors, and thus employed for nothing more than
rubber-stamping of the governors’ decisions; or embroiled in a
cat-and-mouse relationship with the executive. There is the tragicomic
case of Ogun State, where the House has been split into two since 2010.
We watched as a minority group of nine senators (sympathetic to the
governor) met and announced the suspension of 15 members. They then
went ahead to elect, from amongst themselves, a new Speaker, who was
immediately recognised by the governor.

We hope that the incoming batch of legislators, at
federal and state levels, will make a clean break with the past. If the
federal legislators want to convince us that they are serious about the
wellbeing of our country, they will have to start by doing something
about the N63 million (senators) and N45 million (representatives) that
they will be ‘entitled to’ per quarter as “constituency allowances”,
and for which they do not have to give account.

Legislators have no business awarding contracts
and managing project funds. Nigerians also have a duty to hold their
legislators accountable. We cannot continue to just complain about
dismal performance. Hopefully there will be an election tomorrow and
the votes cast will prove to be a just verdict on the performance of
the lawmakers. Until politicians get punished – with outright rejection
– by the electorate, there will be no incentive for them to shun
mediocrity and greed.