BASTARDS


‘Trip is for parliamentary improvement’

The House of Representatives has defended the numerous travels of the Speaker, Hon. Dimeji Bankole who just returned from the United Kingdom a few days ago, saying he is seeking parliamentary improvement.

According to the Chairman of House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Hon. Eziuche Ubani, who spoke with reporters at the weekend, the need to build the capacity of the legislators is solely responsible for the incessant travels of the House Speaker.

Eziuche said: "Ther is problem in several parliaments in Nigeria and that is the rate of returns. 80 per cent of the members are now new from their constituencies, and apart from the orientation programmes we had before we were sworn in, or thereabout, not so much has been done in terms of enhancing the capacities of members to be able to do the work. So, what the Speaker has been doing is to get the resources required to bring the members, committees and support staff up to date in terms of what they need to do is enormous.

"Therefore, the Speaker went on some kind of shopping. Shopping in the sense of going to the Parliament of the United Kingdom , he also went to the Westminster Endowment Foundation for Democracy. He went to the Department of International Development of the British Government (DFID). DFID has been involved in founding governance successes in Nigeria here, whether in the states or National Assembly. So, the Speaker went and told them about the problems that we have. That problem is the problem of capacity and knowledge and improving the skills of members in doing their work."

Eziuche said the House got assurances that they would now get direct intervention from these organizations as they had been operating through NGOs previously. He said the Speaker also visited the National Audit office of Britain, which according to him, is equivalent to the office of the Auditor-General of the Federation.

He said it was impossible to talk about oversight, accountability and transparency unless the office of the Auditor -General is allowed to do its work under the Constitution.

"The other side of this is the Public Accounts Committee of the House. Most of these problems we have with monies appropriated and how finances are used, if we have a well-developed and well-funded public accounts committee that has capacity, some of these offences would have been detected before they weree committed."

Eziuche said reports that were supposed to come from the Auditor-General’s office to the parliament never come, and that since the British Constitution says that the Auditor-General’s office should report to parliament, there were some aspects that could be learnt from them by the Nigerian Parliament.

He said the investigations being carried out by the House is very popular abroad and that the outside world would love to see an outfit like the EFCC run without political interference, and other ministries and departments get very active in terms of programmes.

Eziuche said that it was imperative to have a continuous capacity building programme in place as the House does not have control over if a lawmaker trained by the parliament would be returned by his or her political party or constituency.

"Whether anybody gets back here does not depend on parliament. So, something needs to be in place so that whoever comes in can walk into some kind of template that has already been designed and agreed on.

According to the Lawmaker, the process is an on-going one, as the visits may extend to the United States and India in due course because there are some agencies that are far beyond the UK that are critical to this - we have the NDI and the RII in the US.

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