Bankole And Envisaged House Committees

By ANTHONY AWUNOR

It has been in the news for upward of four months since Rt. Hon. Dimeji Bankole expressed serious misgivings about the House 72 Committees in terms of the disparities in their membership, distribution of members in various committees, composition and leadership, all of which concomitantly resulted in less than optimum performance. With a vision to ensure robust debates, at plenary, adequate representation by legislators, peoples oriented legislations and utmost keeping of faith with the oversight function of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Bankole realized early enough that the committees, the engine room of legislative and oversight function, has to be re-invented from their present state to one conducive to the forces and vision of integrity, transparency, anticorruption and good governance that threw up his leadership.
But immediate action could not be taken by the speaker who has ensured that the House was fully engaged in series of unprecedented investigations into various sectors of our national life as well as an unprecedented activism in the 2008 Budget passage process that yielded N450 billion unspent fund from 2007 Budget. But four months ago, at a plenary, Bankole gave official notice of the need to re-constitute the Committees to address some observable shortcomings of some of the Committees and the system they operate. Then, this was wrongly reported as dissolution of the committees. It was noted that contrary to the House Standing Orders (Order XIV, 1(2)) which states that no member shall belong to more than five committees some belong to as much as 10 committees while others belong to only two or three. The multiplicity of membership for some members often results in non-attendance at committee meetings. This has the effect of slowing down committee work and by extension the process of legislation and oversight. Some committees also have just a few members while other have upward of 20 members.
In other instances that were noted to contribute to dysfunction of the committees the leadership were based mostly on political considerations without cognizance of important factors as experience and professional pedigree. Some of the Committees are very technical in nature and even though it is expected that experts, professionals and consultants would be engaged, experience and technical expertise on the part of the leadership would greatly speed things up.
As earlier stated, Bankole was not in a hurry to re-organise the committees for effectiveness. To get a good job done, he enlarged the Selection Committee of the House to include a representatives from each of the geo-political zones in the House, nominees from opposition parties with a provision that no member of the enlarge selection committee will be a Committee Chairman or Vice Chairman. The mandate of the Selection Committee was to receive and review members' interest in various committees they want to serve in tandem with their experience, qualifications and other factors in that order. They are also to ensure that there is regularity in terms of members in the committees as well as the stipulated number of committees members can belong to.
Since then as usual, there has been a lot of lobbying, insinuation and even a rumoured attempt to upstage the Speaker on account of some members' perception of not getting their desired committees when it is finally constituted. Bankole however remained focused on doing the right things for the House and the nation. And happily enough he has the backing of majority of members and Nigerians backing his vision to take the House to a new pedestal that all will be proud of. Finally on Thursday July 31, 2008, Rt. Hon. Bankole dissolved all the House Committees except that of Appropriation, Finance and Rules and Business with a promise that headship and membership of the committees will be announced when the House resume from its six weeks vacation in September.
What are Nigerians to expect from the new House's Committees? For one Bankole has promised that its headship and membership would take cognizance of experience and professional standing of members. If this come to pass, Nigerians are not likely to see former or retired teachers in the Housing Committee or engineers in the Judiciary or Justice Committee. Indeed, one of the members of the dissolved Housing committee pointed out his lack of technical knowledge in Housing matters while contributing to a motion on the collapsed shopping mall in Abuja, saying his area of specialization as a teacher makes him incompetent to contribute expert opinion on the probable cause of the collapsed and what could be done to remedy the ugly situation in future. This is the kind of scenario Bankole is trying to do away with as it is not helping anybody. In other words, the new committees' members are likely to reflect the saying of “round pegs in round holes”.
It is also to be expected that there will be uniformity in terms of members spread across committees and number of members within committees. This expectedly will make for a more efficient committee system likely to deliver expected legislative outcomes in record time for consideration by the whole House.
In the area of oversight, where the House's Committees play a critical role, a renewed activism, building upon recent popular investigations and their positive outcomes, is expected when the new committees are in place. Similarly, the 2009 Budget passage process around the corner would be injected with a new fillip that would ensure that Appropriation Acts are in tune with the peoples needs.
Of course good intentioned as the reconstitution is and as painstaking and unbiased process that was the hallmark of the  selection process based on expertise, experience and the need for uniformity and regularity, some members are bound to be aggrieved as not all of them can be Chairmen of Committee or the selected for committee of their choice. This is to be expected in a House of 360 members and Bankole is aware of the potential for initial disaffections of some members. For him this is a normal political phenomenon whenever there is reconstitution of committees. He is banking on his good intention for the corporate image of the House and the need to deliver correct output and outcomes for the nation in its core mandate areas of representation, law-making and oversight to douse disaffection. Indeed, the way the reconstitution will be done and the new drive of the House will ensure that all committees have no dull moment and all members of the House would be carried along in the scheme of things.
As a former Chairman of the House Committee on Media and Publicity Hon. Eziuche Ubani succinctly stated in relation to the disaffection associated with committees reconstitution, no member contested election with the aim of becoming a committee chairman but to represent and serve the people stressing that any members worth his salt would carve a niche for himself in terms of contributions without necessarily being a chairman of a committee or belonging to any particular committee. If only other members can share the view of Hon. Ubani, the House would have advanced beyond some members seeing some committees as 'lucrative' while others are to be avoided. In Nigeria today, virtually all sectors of our national life that all the committees are to work on is in dire need of legislation and oversight and any member would have fully represented his people, nay Nigeria people by working hard in any committee he or she find himself.
Chief Kayode Odunaro
Special Adviser (Communications) to Speaker, House of Representatives