By Olusegun Adeniyi
To be sure, we are all aware that there was no way President
Muhammadu Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) would have been able to
wrestle power from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) without poaching from
members of the then ruling party. But now that the APC is in government at the
centre, it is not too much to expect that the party would begin to forge its
own distinct identity. From the way things stand, however, no such thing is
going on. If anything, the PDP is gradually but steadily imposing itself on the
polity, essentially because nature abhors a vacuum. There is nowhere that has
become more apparent than in the National Assembly.
In most democracies across the world (whether parliamentary or
presidential) once a political party becomes the majority in the legislature
(even if by just a single vote), its members would assume the chairmanship of
standing committees. The essence of that is not only to compensate for victory
but indeed to also push the agenda of the new ruling party. But in Nigeria
*Buhari and Saraki
It must be pointed out that the “political hybrid” in the
National Assembly did not start with this administration since minority parties
have always been given some committees to chair. But it has never been this
pronounced though I will blame it on the way the new ruling party mishandled
both the election of presiding officers and its eventual fall-outs. In the
present circumstance, since APC members are not united by any shared ideals, it
is easy to see why, in the House of Representatives, virtually all the
committees that are important for reforms of certain areas of our national life
have been handed to the opposition PDP members by the Speaker, Hon Yakubu Dogara,
who is evidently more interested in shoring up his support base, in the absence
of any coherent policy direction by his party.
