Competence level of Nigerian lawmakers not debatable — Rep Doguwa

Alhassan Ado Doguwa, the member representing Doguwa/TudunWada Federal Constituency from Kano State, is the chairman of the Northern Caucus of the 10th House of Representatives. The Majority Leader of the 9th House, in this interview, addresses the issue o

Lawmaking is a serious business but many still believe that the crop of lawmakers we have had in Nigeria in the past few years have not really delivered, and they keep giving examples. The recent example, they said, was the N160million SUV said to be budgeted to be bought for lawmakers in the face of the poverty in the country, with over 100million people living below the poverty line. How do you intend to change this narrative?

Members who have the capacity to be lawmakers and play to the expectations of the people are one thing, and the procedure of electing them is there. If you have 101 competent people in my constituency to come and represent the constituency excellently on the floor of the House and those people decided not to partake in the election process, people like me who may not be as competent as those people you have in mind partook in the election process and got elected. By that, we should be called as competent members of the House because we have been competently elected by our people. You cannot force the more competent ones to come.

For the past 32 years I have been coming to the House of Representatives; that does not suggest that we do not have any better person from my zone or constituency. You could have, but when such persons do not offer themselves for this public or legislative service, do you force them to come simply because they are competent?

So take it or not, those that are being elected by the process are elected because they decided to competently engage in the process of elections and their people found them competent enough to come and represent them.

So I want to disagree with you on the issue of bringing in less competent people, or that the people coming are not capable enough to make laws or participate in the governing process. It is a very wrong notion.

Those who have offered themselves to serve Nigeria in this capacity are ordinarily the best we could have and they are doing their best.

Come to the National Assembly today and you would see that we have so many people from different professional backgrounds.

We have engineers, lawyers, pilots, retired soldiers. I don’t want to believe that these people are not competent enough to handle the legislative business of the National Assembly.

We have the right people in the right places. The Speaker, for instance, is a PhD holder. And he has a lot of private and public background in administration and what have you. So do you want to tell me that the Speaker is lacking in capacity and competence to lead the House? No. Or do you want to tell me that people like retired Generals that are in the system now, retired civil servants, some of them were even permanent secretaries of federal ministries and at the state level, some speakers of state houses of assembly who have now come together to serve this country in the present 10th Assembly are not competent? No!

Why do you think people feel that they are not being represented well?

It is not true. The fact is that people sometimes come with sentiment. People sometimes come

Doguwa

with envy. No matter how well you perform, people who are sentimental, people who are envious will go out in the street to make noise.

Whoever thinks that the right thing is not being done, that we are not competent, I also challenge him to go and join the process. Let them come and replace the incompetent ones. As long as you don’t have the capacity to engage in the process and replace those you think are not competent, then it is you that are incompetent. We don’t have incompetent members in the House of Representatives.

We are all competently elected by our people and we are competently doing the best we could to represent our people for the overall interest of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

About the SUV cars, why is it that you have not spoken about more sophisticated vehicles given to the presidency? Why don’t you speak about the ministers’ cars? Why would you not speak about the cars that are provided even to permanent secretaries, who by protocol are occupying lesser positions than members of the National Assembly? Why is it always about the members of the House?

There may be other priorities we may have channeled the resources to, probably to benefit our people more, but such arguments, as far as I am concerned, should be addressed holistically.

I have no problem with people expressing concerns about misplacement of priorities or misusing public funds, but it has to be done without anybody being spared. That is my position.

As the chairman of the House Committee on Petroleum Resources (upstream), what is

your assessment of the performance of that sector in 2023, especially vis-à-vis the current realities in Nigeria?

In a nutshell, the oil and gas industry today is being bedeviled with a lot of issues and challenges, ranging from security problems, financing, to lack of investment from global communities; and more especially, the takeoff of the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA)

The PIA has come with a lot of visions and missions. It is like a reformatory act. It is an aggressive act, a legal framework aimed and intended at redesigning the whole industry. These are some of the challenges bedeviling it.

We (committee) are out to ensure that the noble objectives of the PIA are achieved, and this can only be achieved through aggressive transformation.

We are into the sector, the system and the industry with a vision. And we are there with a lot of determination to make sure that business will not continue as usual.

The oil and gas sector, which is the major economic stay of this country, should not always be seen as a platform for corruption; that is what is being seen now. We will check that and ensure that the right thing is being done.

Your recent appointment as the leader of the Northern Lawmakers Caucus has put you back in national limelight. What was the rationale behind this appointment and the caucus itself?

Setting up caucuses and working with their arrangements is a global thing. Virtually in most of the developed countries you also find some of these structures called caucuses.

It is from that section that the Speaker got the power to create what we call caucuses. The caucus structure is to help ease our functions in terms of administrative and parliamentary engagements.

The main leadership of the House will always want to rely on the caucuses to relate well with outside communities - religious communities, traditional institutions, or sometimes even social outfits and engagements.

Apart from that, the caucus also helps to provide succour, something like a shock absorber. When you have as many as 360 members and there are those we call first among equals, it is going to be a very difficult thing to expect 10 people to manage 360 people at a time.

But people say lobbying is majorly what you use the caucuses to do.

Oh yes, lobbying is a constitutional instrument in the business of legislature and some parliamentary engagements. Sometimes the Speaker may have one issue or another and he may have the need to also address some concerns among members. But you don’t expect the Speaker to always come down, even though in this case we have a very different Speaker. For the past 32 years that I have been in the House of Representatives, this is a time I have come across a Speaker that is not only humble; he is a completely demystified Speaker.

The structure is now outlined in a form that you have a zonal regional chairman of the Northern Caucus; and that is what, by God’s grace, Speaker Abbas Tajudeen found me fit to hold brief for him. You would be surprised to hear that when we get into a meeting I preside over it because he will step down as the Speaker of the House to call himself a member of the Northern Region Caucus.

When you say zonal caucus, it has got nothing to do with party affiliation. Any member of the House from the North, no matter his or her political party, is under the jurisdiction of my leadership as a zonal leader.

When the election for the speakership was coming up, a lot of people expected that you would be among the frontrunners. And when it was zoned to your region, North West, everybody expected that you would be the Speaker. In fact, you came out at the earlier stage, but eventually, you became one of the chief campaigners for the eventual Speaker. What political drama played behind the scene that made you change your mind?

I don’t want to call it a drama, it was a political reality; and as a Muslim, I am always guided and bound by my faith.

I was the Chief Whip of the House of Representatives in the 8th Assembly. I was also the Majority Leader of the 9th Assembly under Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila. And when I came up to vie for the office of the speakership, I lost the two. I couldn’t get the speakership and I lost my position as the leader of the House.

I am bound by the Islamic principle that it is God that gives. This is just it.

So I don’t look at it as drama. Parliamentary politics has always been like this, especially in a system you call federal democracy. Once you have a federal democracy where you have federating units being components of our political systems and political platforms, then definitely, this idea of give and take is always there. This idea of rotational power is always there. That is what simply worked out.

After the election of February 25, 2022, my election process was engulfed in crises. I was into so many crises, which I want to say, without any fear of contradiction, that it was simply the