Udora Orizu highlights the achievements of Speaker of the 9th House of Representatives, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, as he prepares to bow out of office after a four-year tenure
For the Ninth House of Representatives, a journey that started well, is also ending well on June 11, 2023.
The House led by Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila as Speaker, would have fully wound down its four-year term, a journey, which started precisely on June 11, 2019.
What an eventful journey, and how time flies These four years have been a journey of mixed grill for Mr Speaker and his colleagues, one of which (2020) was almost entirely claimed by the COVID-19 pandemic that took the world by storm.
And amid challenges, the House, led by Gbajabiamila, kept faith in keeping its promises to the Nigerian people, churning out reforms and upping the ante of legislative deliverables.
Right from kick-off time on June 11, 2019, Gbajabiamila and his colleagues made no pretences about their mission to work at a pace, perhaps unprecedented in legislative business in Nigeria since 1999.
The speaker’s famous ‘shaking the table’ inaugural speech, set the mission ball rolling.This was what he said, “The 9th Assembly under my leadership is going to be a House of reforms or if you like a reform Assembly. The reforms will be dished out piecemeal and at intervals so as not to shock the system. Moving forward, therefore, my dear colleagues, it will not be business as usual, and we will be shaking the table just a little.
“We will be introducing various reforms that will reposition this institution, but please rest assured that they will be for the greater good.”
Taking that unity of purpose among the 360 members would be the oxygen to accomplish the job ahead, Gbajabiamila immediately promoted his unifying slogan, “Nation Building: A Joint Task”.
This, he inscribed on a board he hung directly behind the speaker’s seat in the chambers to serve as a constant reminder that together, irrespective of political party affiliations, the 9th House under his leadership would serve only one purpose -Nigeria first!
It wasn’t a surprise that the speaker set off to constitute the Standing Committees of the House on July 25, 2019, and also had some special committees in place.
One of such special committees, the AdHoc Committee on Legislative Agenda ( it later became a standing committee) quickly laid out the Legislative Agenda (Our Contract with Nigerians) of the 9th House; a document that encapsulated everything the House set out to do and meant to the deliver to Nigerians from 2019 2023.
First launched in October 2019, the Legislative Agenda was later reviewed in 2020 at the outbreak of COVID-19 to accommodate programmes that would tackle the economic and health challenges brought by the deadly pandemic, but were not envisaged in 2019 when the first document was rolled out.
What does the document say? The Agenda captures 10 key areas where the 9th House would focus its legislative interventions/decisions and be assessed in four years -healthcare delivery; education; economy; security; agriculture and food security; sustainable power; environment and climate change; human capital development and social development; governance; and House reforms.
It goes without repeating the obvious that every action of the House taken in the last two years fell within the lines set by the agenda, whether bills, motions, debates, oversight duties, constituency outreach, investigative hearings, budget and budgeting, or parliamentary visitations.
For instance, the Mr Speaker led the House early in the day to expedite action on the 2020 Appropriation Bill in a manner not seen before by ensuring its passage within a record time to set the stage for implementation in January of the year!
This was achieved by the speaker, who in an unprecedented commitment to nation building, personally attended budget defence sessions by committees, including attending a joint session of the Appropriation Committees of the Senate and the House ahead of the passage of the budget.
Recognising the fact that research is key to the legislative competence of members, the speaker facilitated the take-off of the Legislative Library project of the National Assembly, the first since 1999.
The House, with the support of the Senate, made sure that an initial provision of N2 billion was included in the budget for the project.
Insecurity and safety of Nigeria
Insecurity is a key component of the agenda and remains one of the areas the House has performed well in the last four years.
With insurgency, kidnapping, banditry, herders’ crises, murders and other forms of criminality hitting the rooftops in the country, the House moved early in 2019 by passing a series of resolutions, calling for urgent actions by the Executive Arm of government. By June 2021, the House had passed over 98 resolutions on insecurity alone!
Besides the resolutions, Mr Speaker and various standing and special committees paid physical visits to crisis spots to assess the situation on ground and hear the pains of the victims.
For example, between August and September 2019, the speaker visited Borno, the epicenter of Boko Haram insurgency, Katsina and Zamfara States, to share in the pains of internally displaced persons living in camps outside their ancestral homes.
In one particular encounter, Speaker Gbajabiamila paid for the surgery of a baby delivered with Cleft in one of the IDP camps located in Batsari Local Government Area of the North-West state of Katsina.
Kidnapping and banditry clearly worsened in 2020, spreading not just to all the six geopolitical zones of the country, but also left in their trails the death of many Nigerians, from the poor to the rich.
However, after insurgents beheaded over 43 rice farmers in Borno state on November 28, 2020, the House resolved that President Muhammadu Buhari must act faster in addressing insecurity.
In a fresh resolution on December 1, the House invited the President to appear before members to speak to them on the security situation in the country.The leadership of the House followed up on the resolution by holding a physical meeting with Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. At the meeting, Buhari indeed assured the leadership that he would come to address the members.
Although the visit did not materialise, the resolution and the constant calls on Mr President to review the security architecture of the country, including injecting new hands to head security agencies, demonstrated the seriousness with which the House took the issue of insecurity.
Fast forward to April 27, 2021, the House, after an executive session that lasted over three hours, urged Buhari to declare a state of emergency on the security sector as part of the measures to arrest the widening insecurity across states. An added dimension was the increasing attacks on security formations and the killing of personnel by unknown persons, particularly in the South-East.
The House resolution specifically mentioned some of the affected locations, namely, “Ukpo, Ifitedunu, Dunukofia, Geidam LGA, Abagana, IDP Camp in Makurdi Urikpam, Jato-Aka, Police Divisions in the South East, Ehime Mbano, Uzo-Uwani in Enugu State, Uzuakoli, Abia State, Balenga Local Government Area of Gombe State, and parts of Imo…”
The House also invited the National Security Adviser (NSA); the service chiefs; paramilitary chiefs; Controller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service; and the Managing Director of Nigeria Communications Satellite (NIGCOMSAT) to brief it on the measures taken so far to address the security challenges.
On its part, it took up the task of organising a “Special Summit on National Security”, where it engaged stakeholders both in government and outside government from May 26 to May 29, 2021, to find broad-based solutions to insecurity.
The recommendations from the summit would be approved by the House and forwarded to Buhari for implementation as another legislative intervention to the problem of insecurity.
Flowing from the summit, the House already started taking further internal legislative steps to combat insecurity.
For instance, just on June 9, the House introduced 13 new bills to the floor, dealing strictly with security issues.
Some of the bills included Armed Forces Act (Amendment) Bill, 2021 (HB. 1405); Police Act (Amendment) Bill, 2021 (HB. 1406); Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps Act, 2003 (Amendment) Bill, 2021 (HB. 1407); Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps Act, 2007 (Amendment) Bill, 2021 (HB. 1408);Economic and Financial Crimes Commission Act (Amendment) Bill, 2021; Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission Act (Amendment) Bill, 2021 (HB. 1410); Customs and Excise Management Act (Amendment) Bill, 2021 (HB. 1411); ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms, Light Weapons and Ammunition (Ratification and Enforcement) Bill, 2021 (HB. 1413); and National Security Agencies Act (Amendment) Bill, 2021 (HB.1415).
Police Reform is a vital part of the reform agenda on insecurity as demonstrated by the House in the last four years. It has focused attention on improving the operations and the human face of the Nigeria Police Force.
The House gave a push to its promise to reform the police by taking some key decisions in 2020. This means that before the #EndSARS protests that rocked the country in October of the year, the House already had a plan to bequeath to Nigerians, a better police force.
However, with the #EndSARS protests, the speaker, through the support of key stakeholders like the Nigerian Bar Association and the National Human Rights Commission, got the House to introduce a Police Service Commission Reform Bill 2020.
The aim of the bill is to strengthen the commission by giving it more powers to hold personnel who abuse their offices to account.
The bill was well dissected at a public forum, where the House also seized the opportunity to launch its Public Policy Dialogue Series as encapsulated in the Legislative Agenda.
The theme to kick-start the series was on “Policing and Human Rights in Nigeria.”
The bill eventually made its way to the floor and was duly treated for passage.In April 2021, Gbajabiamila, at a meeting with the Inspector-General of Police, Mr Usman Alkali Baba, made a case for special budgetary allocations to the police in the 2021 Supplementary Appropriation Bill.Recall that the House had also given backing to the executive in speedily passing the revised Police Act 2020, all tailored toward improving policing in Nigeria.
Bills, Motions/Resolutions, Petitions
Lawmaking tops the chart on the three major functions of the legislature. The other two are oversight and constituency outreach.
In the main business of lawmaking, the 9th House took off on a supersonic speed, setting to break the records of previous assemblies in four years.
In the first session alone (June 11, 2019-June 10, 2020), the House introduced a total of 853 bills. 105 of the bills passed second reading in record time, while another set of 638 bills progressed for second reading.
A total of 41 bills were fully passed by June of 2020, leaving another 66 awaiting action by the Committee of the Whole.
In the second session (June 2020-June 10, 2021), 554 new bills were introduced to the House, bringing the total of bills introduced for the two sessions under review to 1,407. The total of bills awaiting second reading also rose to 942 as of June 10, 2021.
In addition, the number of bills referred to committees stood at 222, while 79 out of the 554 bills introduced in the second session were awaiting consideration by the Committee of the Whole.
In the first two sessions (2019-2021), a total of 88 bills were passed, out of the 1,407 introduced; four were negatived and two were withdrawn.
Compared to earlier assemblies, the 7th House, for example, introduced 755 bills and passed 123 at the expiration of four years in 2015.
For the 8th House, also reputed with the hunger to pass many bills, it introduced 1,643 bills in four years from 2015 to 2019.
Out of that number, 685 were introduced in its first session, compared to the 853 introduced by the current House within the same period.
By the close of its term in June 2019, the 8th House had passed 382 of the bills in four years.
In the case of the 9th House, by March 2023 (and three months to end of tenure), it had introduced 2, 209 bills, excluding another set of 137 it received from the Senate for concurrence.
Constitution amendment bills alone stood at 258. Out of the 2, 209 bills it introduced, the Gbajabiamila House successfully passed 451 by March 2023, thereby beating previous assemblies on number of bills.
