Source: Leadership
When the Senate resumed from its three-week second legislative year seasonal break on June 25,
a "bills progression chart" released by Senator Ita Enang, chairman of its Committee on Rules and Business,
showed that 24 of the pending bills will be given priority consideration within the next five weeks.
As at the time it embarked on its annual seven-week vacation, only one - the Constitution Alteration Bill -
received a somewhat scant but controversial passage. The Senate will not sit until September 24.
These prolonged and unjustified vacations stand logic on its head.
These are the highest paid lawmakers in the world - their salaries and allowances are verifiably
higher than that of the United States president and the prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Yet, in 2012, the Senate held plenary sessions 100 times in as many days and spent a total of
158 days on holiday. Section 63 of the constitution requires the Senate to sit for at least 181 days in a year.
The Senate operates a legislative calendar that runs from June, and sits in plenary only on
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays while committees hold sessions throughout the week.
They hardly hold the latter on Mondays and Fridays.The quality of debate and debauchery in
the Seventh Senate has become hair-raising. In the last two years, about 160 bills,
many of them in various stages of legislative consideration, were tabled in the "senior" legislative chamber.
Among them are 16 executive bills; the rest are members' bills. Out of these, 17 bills were passed,
14 were read a second time and referred to relevant committees while two were rejected.
It is saddening to note that when President Goodluck Jonathan sent the third 2013
Budget Amendment Bill to the Senate, they discountenanced the "voluminous" bill and
deferred its consideration till the end of September when they will have returned
from their respective globe-trotting private vacations.
This is tendentious, self-serving and provocative in a period of emergency when the finance minister
said government may not pay workers if the revised budget was not passed by September.
Since its introduction in 2008 by President Umaru Yar'Adua, the PIB has remained contentious,
yet all agree that it is crucial to the nation's economic mainstay - oil and gas - but
the Senate has nonetheless been fidgeting, making motions without movement of the nation's
controversial cash cow because of stiff resistance from vested interests. This is both callous and unpatriotic.
We wonder why the Senate continues to ditch its fundamental objectives and dish out corruption and indolence.
To check the excesses of the executive arm and ensure checks and balances has become a popularity contest
between these two arms. Bickering rather than logic underline their engagements.
Probes and investigations of alleged scams and counter-accusation of arm-twisting tactics
in their oversight assignments dominated the past two years.
To date, the upper house's only achievement is its postulation to send homosegxwals to
14years in prison or stoning to death in states where Sharia law is practised.
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