.Abati : The National Assembly’s unfinished tasks .

Guardian

13 May 2011

.Abati : The National Assembly’s unfinished tasks .

By Reuben Abati Opinion

TWO proposals by the National Assembly, class of 2007, seeking to wind up ahead of the transition to another government in May 2011, do not seem to make sense, or rather should be carefully interrogated. It is a matter of public record that the National Assembly is perhaps the worst hit by the gale of surprises that formed part of the substance of the 2011 elections. More than half of the members of the Senate and another half or so in the House of Representatives lost their re-election bids, producing a National Assembly, class of 2011, that will be peopled by so many rookies.

This is good for Nigerian democracy, for it rhymes with the Nigerian people’s dissatisfaction with the conduct of the 2007 – 2011 federal legislators, who seemed to have been more interested in the perquisites of office than service to the Nigerian people. The people lent weight to their anger by shutting out many of the lawmakers. However, the National Assembly returning from the polls, still has a lot of tasks to conclude, or clean up, before May 29, but it seems the lawmakers, wearied by their loss at the polls, and gripped by anxiety about the future, do not intend to do any more work, and so they have come up with two proposals that would seem to look like a legislative equivalent of the notorious “419”, pretending to be serving us but on completely false premises.