IRIN Focus on rift between executive and legislature

The ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has a 60 percent majority in Nigeria’s national assembly but President Olusegun Obasanjo has had a hard time obtaining approval for bills placed before the legislature. Nearly one year after he assumed office as elected president, bills he submitted within his first month in power have either not been passed or were passed with severe amendments that he has found difficult to accept. Perhaps the most controversial of the bills is one on the 2000 appropriations budget. Sent to the national assembly in November 1999, it was only passed last month, but with amendments which pushed up proposed expenditure from 598 billion naira ($US 5.98 billion) to 677 billion naira (US $6.77 billion). Of this amount, the legislature set aside 28 billion naira (US $280 million) for its own specific use, forcing Obasanjo to refuse initially to sign the bill into law. Not only have economic activities suffered because of the delayed budget, but government programmes to redress and alleviate poverty engendered by years of military misrule have remained grounded. On 5 May, Obasanjo finally gave his assent to the 2000 Appropriation Bill after a truce with legislators brokered by PDP Chairman Barnabas Gemade and other senior party officials. One key condition for the truce was that only those provisions not in dispute would be implemented pending a review of the controversial ones by a special committee comprising representatives of both arms of government. “It was perhaps to be expected that at the beginning of our search for the meaning and form of a true republican democracy, mistakes would be made and extreme positions taken by those involved in this search,” Obasanjo said during the signing ceremony. “From our previous misunderstandings, we have also come to recognise the proper limits of each branch’s constitutional powers,” he added. But there is a widespread view in Nigeria that the PDP has lost control over elected party members, with the result that Obasanjo often finds that he has the support of certain opposition legislators but not of some members of his party. Key bills on fighting corruption and developing the troubled Niger Delta that are at the heart of the administration’s programmes and which were sent to the legislature in the early days of the new democracy, have been blocked by the rift between the executive and the legislature. “It is a situation that portends great danger for Nigeria’s new democracy,” Inatimi Spiff, a political analyst, told IRIN. “One consequence of such a state of affairs is that the gains of democracy are not yet being felt by Nigerians and before long, people might start yearning for a change in the situation. Things might spin out of control and, going by our past history, some military adventurer might want to take advantage of the situation,” he added. Party leader Gemade has been quick to explain away the problem between the executive and legislature as the early falterings in a learning process rather than evidence of a breakdown in party discipline and cohesion. “People feel we (the party) are not in control because of the fact that we have the controlling majority in the national assembly and bills which are being initiated by this government do not seem to pass through quickly,” he told journalists. “We are running an assembly full of people who never had a chance to be in the assembly before ... And they were not given the right guidance in terms of early education on parliamentary system and procedure, and even interpretation of the constitution.” But some people trace the problem to PDP’s antecedents as an amalgam of various political movements, often with rival political interests, brought together by the sole need to wrest power from the departing military rulers and to Obasanjo’s late emergence as a flagbearer for these diverse interests. “Many of the politicians who found a political camp in PDP had been active collaborators of the succession of military regimes that ruled (from) 1984, and were active participants in late dictator Sani Abacha’s plans to transform himself into a civilian ruler,” Segun Adesina, an analyst, told IRIN. When, on Abacha’s death in June 1998, Obasanjo emerged from jail where he had been consigned by the former dictator on the accusation of plotting his overthrow, he became the most popular political option at a time when a northern elite that had dominated political power since independence from Britain in 1960 felt it was imperative to cede it. Particularly in his favour were his credentials as a former military ruler (in the 1970s) who did not antagonise perceived northern interests. But on taking office on the back of votes from all over the country, except his ethnic Yoruba homeland in the southwest, Obasanjo embarked on political and anti- corruption reforms that have meant stepping on powerful political toes and changing the internal balance of power. “Many party members who had expected their special, sectional interests to be protected have been disappointed,” Adesina said. “And many of them are either members of the national assembly of have their allies there; and they have used it to fight back.”