Once in a time, a member of the Lagos State House of Assembly reportedly said assertively: “
The legislator is not an ordinary arm of the government. It is the government by itself”. Whatever could be his source of knowledge for assay of this claim, it is to be understood that the parliament wields enormous powers in a state where organic democracy is well rooted. Thoughtfully, therefore, the Constitution that prescribes unlimited terms by which a constituency could present a representative cannot be deemed stupid to fix its eyes on the importance of continuity of governance with clear consistency for the constituency’s direction and pace of development.
The parliament is a congregation and assemblage of different people representing diversity of interests competing for attention in the sharing of scarce state resources. These interests in their individual and overlapping differences are as large and wide to the size of total number of the constituencies making up the parliamentary body. That explains the steep smuggle that goes into a constituency’s quest for the attraction of government’s presence to itself. The success of this will therefore depend on skills and capacity of the representative for the impacting negotiating nuances required to navigate the terrains of the plenary floor and sundry committee rooms.
This, nevertheless, is largely predicated on experience too. This is where the non-limitation of tenure for the legislators finds its utmost value as opportunity the constitution has offered every constituency to explore or ignore at its own peril.
In spite of this reality, it is not unexpected that a school of thought, especially in the camp of evolving fresh ambitions, might argue rightly that two-term obtained in the Executive Arm should suffice for a representative to make his impact. They could as well extend this argument, rightly too, to the value potentially obtainable from injecting fresh ideas into that process of constituency growth and development.
For instance: in a recent article found on a social media and yet holding in argument of some new, albeit in depleting order of the “
No-Third-Term” crusaders, the argument is that the incumbent member of the Lagos State House of Assembly representing Alimosho Constituency 02, Hon Kehinde Olaide Joseph has made his utmost impact and should quit the stage for a fresh idea to come in.
This is not only a sophistry at best. It is as much a blackmail of an opponent when an aspirant’s claque leaves issue-based imperatives to ground its campaign on thrust of emotions. The assay of this defect is especially grounded on the fact that they do not even offer the parameters they may have used to calibrate the optimum of the incumbent as already exhaustively delivered.
This even flies in the face of the incumbent insisting that he still has much to offer and has already demonstrated a pattern of how representation of a constituency should transcend the value purpose of the office with complementary heart of compassion. Or how else should a discernible mind describe the cause of a representative to implement a multi-million naira project of eternal life imparting on his community’s generations out of his private pocket when the state resources to deploy for it would not be forthcoming in due time.
This apart, it should also be more worrisome to the wise ones when their line of argument seems to hold superiority of a “fresh idea” over established experience. How plausible this could sound should fit well into arguing how the value of a teenager's talk on life experience could be superior to that of an elderly.
To speak along this line of experience in parliamentary matters, especially against a fresh idea of one without prior experience or knowledge of practical public administration system, it should begin with the fact that the legislative arm of government is an independent body that sets its own rules of engagement. It includes the ranking of members by term of the number of Assemly session a legislator has gone through. The ranking legislators are believed to have a perk of priviledges to go with their reckoning. This is not peculiar to Nigeria alone. It is the global phenomenon.
This privilege becomes valuable and cuts across all the arms of government in negotiating developmental opportunities by the legislator. That is why many constituencies across the globe, particularly in the Westrn world, would always prefer a very low turnover of their parliamentary representatives. It saves or reduces cost of lobbying significantly as much as it fast tracks pace of development.
All that the public -- politicians and the apolitical alike -- should come to terms with is that no State's Constitution ever evolves from a one-man idea. It is a product of Minting that must have gone through the mill of a collective ideas of a supposed team of the nation's wise men. So in almost all cases, the Constitution cannot be stupid.
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