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Tuesday, July 2, 2013

National Mirror: Benue Assembly not a rubber stamp but… –Leader

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National Mirror
All the Facts | All the Sides
Benue Assembly not a rubber stamp but… –Leader
Jul 2nd 2013, 23:02, by HENRY IYORKASE

Hon. Nick Odukeroho Eworo is the Majority Leader of the Benue State House of Assembly. In this interview with HENRY IYORKASE, the lawmaker speaks on the need for autonomy of state legislatures, as well as revitalisation of tax administration in the country, among others salient issues. Excerpts:

Political observers see the 7th Benue State House of Assembly as a toothless bulldog. What is your view on this perception?

Circumstantially, when we came in the first time, we raised people's hope because of the calibre and background of the people that came together. The Assembly has quite a number of young people, so there was high hope that things were going to happen. But the Assembly could do little or nothing to change situations. The reason is not far-fetched. It is said that he who pays the piper dictates the tune. If you are in the House of Assembly, you have so much pressure from your constituency. Back in your constituency, the people don't know you are a legislator to make laws for good governance. What they know is that you are representing them and you are there to collect money to bring to them; that is the truth. And that is why every morning, they wake up, they say there is a burial, somebody has given birth, somebody is going for marriage; all sorts of demands come to you.

And for the man who sits back home, who doesn't understand what your duties are supposed to be, there is no way you can convince him. This is what he knows and that is what he expects of you and if you don't give him that, it means you are not performing. Ironically, he is the one that judges your performance. So, it is not the reality that is the case here, it is the situation.

The legislature has the burden as the power lies with the executive, especially the governor. A legislator needs money to service all these demands. The governor also must approve whatever the Assembly does.

Interestingly, legislature has come to be an institution and bedrock of democracy and that is why the power of impeachment is vested in it; that is why the power of oversight is vested in it. The executive is supposed to hold the purse of the nation or state or the local government but the man who is giving you the purse to hold is the legislator, so he oversees what you are supposed to do. But that is on the paper. You are not free, you don't have financial autonomy, you can't even do anything, even if you have to buy pen in the office, if the governor says there is no money to give you to buy the pen, you cannot buy.

Hon. Nick Odukeroho Eworo

Hon. Nick Odukeroho Eworo

Yet you have the pressure from your constituency and you try to complain and they say: Are you the first person to get there? We've been enjoying that. So, now who is the master? It's the executive that is the master. If you radicalise from now till tomorrow and you cannot foot a bill back in your constituency and you cannot attract anything back to your people, you are a failed politician. This is the gimmicks, it is not only in Benue State; it is everywhere. The House of Assembly in Rivers State has not sat for almost two months because the governor's seat was threatened and because the Assembly was under his control, he used everything to get them off. It happens everywhere. Anywhere you hear that the Speaker is impeached, it is because he is at loggerheads with the executive. This is what goes on across the nation; Benue State is not an exception. That is the reality and the truth. Some of us can speak it and will stand by it and defend it at any time.

What is the way out of the situation?

Give autonomy to the legislature at the state level, amend the constitution and free them. Make your budget, decide what you do with your money and be independent of the executive.

Benue State House of Assembly has been plagued with intermittent change of leadership occasioned by litigations, impeachment and so on. What is the way forward for a stable legislature in the state?

The Assembly could be stable. The first thing is that it should be allowed to regulate its activities. That freedom should come from the autonomy first; it is the major thing.

Coming back to the issue of change in leadership, yes, the first speaker was sent out of the Assembly by the courts. That was not within our control. Then we had the second speaker; members of the Assembly sat down one day and said that they are no longer comfortable with his leadership style and there were a lot of rumblings. But he was not impeached, he resigned. Now there is a Speaker elected by the Assembly, and for a period of time now in terms of leadership, there has been stability, there haven't been too much noise. But again, it also goes back to the fact that in democracy, we are also learning. My only quarrel and this is what I say all the time is that I think we learn for too long, especially that if you have someone to copy from, then it shouldn't take you this long process. But again, we are just still learning. Learning is what is causing most of these problems and leadership generally is a problem in Africa.

Because we have refused to understand what it means by providing leadership, we make a lot of mistakes and because we make so many mistakes, we are so scared of situations and because we are scared of situations, we divert all our energies meant for providing things for our people into providing security for individuals and then individuals have become institutions.

In civilised societies, people try to build institutions but here we try to build ourselves as individuals. We have so much and yet we are lacking. In the midst of plenty, we are poor. I can go on and on because some of us in the system are not happy.

Observers are of the view that you are not checkmating the activities of the executive, how would you reconcile this position?

The basic job we are doing is oversight function and you can only act according to the information available to you. When somebody saw me recently and said we are not getting money at the local government level; it was an informal talk but I said: 'What do you want us to do? Let us know what they are giving you. Even you that is talking, if they give you a cheque to the local council, you will not show it to me, then what do we do?' How do you check the executive? On paper you have the power to oversight. The oversight is that for instance a ministry is given N20 billion to build so and so kilometres of road and the ministry goes to build the road. They had agreed that this project cost N20 billion and they have done it. Then you go there, they show you the road, the papers and everything is correct, what do you do? It should be participatory. Not for you to just go and see what is done, it's for you people to start it from the beginning together. Everybody should be involved in the process. I have been an advocate of down-up approach not up-down. For instance, I must sit with your community and ask what the community wants and this is what will inform what I will request; what should be done for the community. But in Nigeria, people sit in Abuja and say I want to sink a borehole in your place, or for instance they say I am going to donate transformer whereas these people have no water to drink. This is the problem and that is why every activity you do is of no value or concern to people.

The governor has complained of underperformance of the Benue State Internal Revenue Service, BIRS. What would you say is the problem with the tax outfit?

In Nigeria, the first problem and I say this with all sense of responsibility, is the fact that we sit and wait for the oil money to be shared from the top to the bottom. So, we sit like spoilt kids waiting for something to come to us at all times and once it comes, we all fight like birds to grab what you can grab out of the system and you go back and it goes like that.

Now come to BIRS, the truth is that after the law, they needed to give somebody who would be in charge. The whole effort was to make sure that the internal revenue generation would augment whatever is coming from the federation account. How do you do that? Government needed the expertise of someone who knows how to drive tax and revenue. So, they got someone involved and the agreement was this is our revenue profile, we want you to jack it from this level and if you can, you can take this percentage. That was done somehow, but in auditing the whole process, we realised that it wasn't that the guy was bringing additional income. It is that he has succeeded in gathering data of which government was not able to gather before and said I have generated this much. In other words, government was getting a lot of money but was not getting enough reports to know that this is the level of money that we are generating. This guy was getting all these things put together. So, government found out and said but I was generating all this money actually, all you are doing for me is just giving me report, so I don't need it. That was the complaint government had as against the generating formula, not that the law was wrong, it is the implementation or the process that was wrong.

Are you satisfied with the level of implementation of this year's budget in the state?

Well, I have not taking the report since I am not in the committee level and when we get the committee report we will know whether we are satisfied or not.

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