We can’t be probed – Speaker
By Bode Olagoke and Joshua Egbodo
Abuja
The All Progressives Congress (APC) has ruled out the possibility of sanctioning the party’s lawmakers allegedly involved in the 2016 Budget padding controversy, currently rocking the House of Representatives.
Similarly, a confident Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, yesterday said no lawmaker, can either be investigated or prosecuted in the course of performing his/her constitutional role of lawmaking and budgeting.
He noted that the budget had been controversial from the beginning and that it took dialogue, compromise and consensus to produce a workable document.
The immediate past chairman of the House Committee who was sacked by Dogara, reeled out various allegations bordering on budget padding, against the speaker, his deputy, Lasun Suleiman Yusuf and two other principal officers.
But the APC, however, assured that the party would not sweep the matter under the carpet, even as it disclosed that its handling of the situation would not be in the public domain.
The APC similarly cleared the air on its main source of finance, saying the party solely relies on the N100 registration fee from about 12.7 million members in its data base.
Speaking with newsmen at the party’s national secretariat, its Deputy National Chairman (North), Senator Lawal Suhaibu, Article 7 sub-section 5 of the APC, gives the party power to
do certain things, adding that “what we are doing, we are doing the right thing, but only that we don’t want it in public gallery.”
When asked specifically whether APC will sanction the parties involved in the saga, Shuaibu asked: “What is padding? The party does not sanction anybody on that, what concerns us is where any member contravenes party constitution in his conduct. That is why I refer you to Article 7 sub-section 5 of our party constitution.
“We are not a law enforcement organisation, we don’t enforce law. We only ensure that the constitution is complied with. Any member of the party is answerable to the party and answerable to its constituency. The two members that are subjected to this are elected or appointed members of the party, including those that are holding public office.”
On party funding, Shuaibu said: “We have credible source of funding, every member of the APC in this country shall pay N100. So far, on our data base, we have 12.7million registered members; others are still waiting for us to just open our porter to do their membership registration.
“Assuming those on our data base paid their membership levy; just calculate 100 naira of 12.7 million members for you to know how much we can get. So, we have our way of sourcing for fund.”
Shuaibu, however, disowned a factional chairman of the party in Kano over his recent outburst against President Buhari, saying, “That man who claimed to be our chairman in Kano is unknown to us as a party.
“Go to the directorate of organisation of our party here and demand to know who our state chairman there is; if you check our data base, you will see the name of our state chairman in Kano state. That person who made that statement is not our member we actually don’t even know him to be very honest.”
He assured that a committee has been set up to review the party’s constitution before a mini convention would hold.
“There is a committee looking into our constitution, we are waiting for them. The convention is a mini convention, what we want to do their is to amend some parts of our party constitution after operating this one for about two years. Where it is inadequate we want to perfect it.”
Dogara rules out probe
And speaking at the Civil Society Dialogue Session on one year of the Legislative Agenda, organised by the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC) in Abuja, Speaker Dogara contended that, by virtue of the provisions of the Legislative Houses Powers and Privileges Act, no member of the parliament can be charged to court or investigated for exercising their powers of lawmaking.
He said: “The constitution talks about the estimates of revenue and expenditure to be prepared and laid before the National Assembly. The constitution did not mention the word budget. And the reason is very simple. Budget is a law. Going by very pedestrian understanding of law which even a part one law student can tell, is that the functions of government is such that the legislature makes the law, executive implements and the judiciary interprets the law.
“The budget being a law, therefore, means it is only the parliament that can make it because it is a law. And I challenge all of us, members the media and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to look at our law and tell me where it is written that the president can make a budget.”
Relying on the provisions of the 1999 constitution which give the National Assembly the powers to scrutinise the revenue and expenditure estimates submitted by Mr. President, he said, “what I am saying is further reinforced by section 80(4) of the constitution which says that no money shall be withdrawn from the consolidated revenue fund or any other fund of the federation except in the manner prescribed by the National Assembly.”
“I want this thing to sink so that we can understand it from here and perhaps it may change the ongoing discourse. If you say the National Assembly doesn’t have the powers to tinker with the budget that we just pass it.
When it is prepared and laid, we turn it into a bill. If it is a bill how do other bills make progression in the parliament in order to become law?
“If you contend that we cannot tinker with the Appropriation Bill, even though it is a Money Bill, it therefore goes without saying that we cannot tinker with any Executive Bill. Because if they (Executive) bring a bill, they will not consult the public to say, come and give us your input on this bill.
“It is the legislature that does that by the instrumentality of public hearing and when we aggregate your views, it is only our duty as representatives of the people, including the media and CSOs to make sure that your voices are reflected so that by the time we hear from you, we now turn it into a Legislative Bill, and when it gets to the President and he signs, they say ooh, some people have padded the bill,” the speaker stressed.
Continuing, Dogara posited that “it doesn’t even make sense and they have forgotten about the legislative houses powers and privileges Act Sections 24 and 30 and others, which means most of the things we do in the National Assembly are privileged. They cannot be grounds for any investigation on the procedure or proceedings to commence against a member of parliament, either the Speaker or the President of the Senate once they are done in the exercise of their proper functions.
“The law is there; you can go and read it. This is in order to give independence to the legislature. If the legislature is not independent, we can’t do anything. If whatever you say on the floor of the House or either in the Committee is subject to litigation, then all the members will be in court, and at the end of the day, when debate comes, you cannot even air your view. Nobody can hear you.
“The budget is a law and nobody can object to the fact that only the legislature can make law, so only the parliament that can conclude it.”
On zonal intervention projects otherwise called constituency projects for members of the National Assembly, Dogara said it is the only means through which lawmakers attract federal projects to their constituents.
This, he said, was necessary because the projects selection process lacks integrity as it’s always lopsided against most federal constituencies.
“The integrity of the project selection process is the bane of the budget process. I ensured also that it reflected in this legislative agenda and this thing started long before we started this discussion on the 2016 budget process as to what happened wrongly or whatever happened.
“Now, the reason why this thing is here is that when it comes to National Budget, who actually sits down to say these are the projects we will fund? Is the process open, is it transparent?. Are the people responsible to anyone or it is that we just find these projects littered in the budget.
“The answer is no, but some people sit down in the budget office. Now, as civil societies, I want you to achieve for us one thing. Just take the budget, for instance, of a particular ministry, just check where the directors come from, or some of the officials come for, I wouldn’t want to mention their names, and look at their allocations in that ministry. It is all over.
“If you do that exercise, you will be shocked. And that is why we are calling to question, the integrity of that process.
The minister perhaps comes from a particular region and you will see up to 60, 70 percent of that ministry’s funds go to that place and in furtherance of our responsibility and duties as representatives of the people, you want to attract projects to those people,” the speaker explained.
In a veiled reference to the furore generated by alleged budget padding, he said, “recent efforts seeking to discredit the document are a consequence of inadequate knowledge of the legal framework governing appropriation in a presidential democracy.
“This has, nonetheless, opened a new vista of duty for us as a legislature to enhance both internal competences of members as well as the sensitisation of the public on the role of the legislature in a presidential democracy.
“The 2016 Budget was controversial from the onset but the House handled the controversy with maturity, employing the democratic tools of dialogue, compromise and consensus by which an implementable 2016 Budget was passed and assented to.”
While commending the role of civil society organisations in educating the public, he stressed that “It is our duty and responsibility to remove any clog in the wheel of progress once we have made the determination that such a situation exists.”