Wasteful Constituency Projects The chairman, Senate Committee on Millennium Development Goals, Senator Ali Ndume, and the minister for special duties and inter-governmental affairs, Alhaji Tanimu Turaki, are agreed that over N900 billion had been committed to constituency projects that lawmakers “smuggled” into the appropriation acts in the past nine years. Though Section 80, subsections 2–4, of the 1999 Constitution, as amended, stipulates that no money shall be withdrawn from the consolidated revenue funds of the federation unless it has been authorised by an Act of the National Assembly, Section 4, sub-sections 1-5 of the same constitution emphasises that the primary responsibility of the National Assembly is to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the federation. The constitution does not approve of the National Assembly appropriating to its members certain amounts as threshold to prosecute what is now known by the ordinarily innocuous but dubious “constituency projects”. In the 2013 Appropriation Act, each of the lawmakers was given a doorsill of N162m. In addition, they also have a number of MDG projects allocated to them by the presidency. This is a massive drain on the people’s resources and a bribe by another name. There is nowhere that lawmaking dovetails into identifying and locating projects. Doing so is inimical to the principle of separation of powers. In the spirit of checks and balances, the National Assembly should stick to its social contract of making and monitoring the execution of laws, projects and policies of government. In any case, constituency projects can be done with personal resources: after all, Nigerian lawmakers are the highest paid lawmakers in the world. To facilitate projects or compel the executive to site projects in their wards and constituencies, the legislature has institutionalised this “lobbying claptrap”. It is a sign of the culture of impunity in governance — a constitutional and democratic aberration for lawmakers whose utmost concern should be the improvement of the corpus of our written norms. By usurping executive responsibilities through subterfuge, the lawmakers are endangering democracy and not strengthening its institutions. In most cases, the lawmakers influence the choice of contractors for the projects. This is a classic case of being a judge in one’s own case. It not only distorts design, integrity and implementation of projects but leads to poor implementation of annual budgets. The face-off between the lawmakers and the Economic Management Team often stems from this kind of amorphous budgeting. The inability to have full implementation of budgets is often blamed on the executive arm while the lawmakers ignore their vicarious liability in foisting bloated budgets that were not contemplated at first. It is inexcusable that the various ministries and agencies award constituency contracts. Their commitment to projects not initiated by them is always half-hearted. It has been established that some of the lawmakers, in absolute ignorance of what role they are expected to play, make promises of constituency projects during campaigns. Constituency projects are a hollow development, which the hallowed chambers should abstain from. Our legislators need to revert to their traditional roles of lawmaking, oversight, representation, and approval of important appointments; they should not dabble into the cesspool of contract awards.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 21:13:38 +0000
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