Do you feel the same way as I do when I hear some of our enlightened compatriots talk about “Opposition Parties” and “Dividends of Democracy” in our present political dispensation?
In the American-style Presidential System which we claim to practise, the Congress is the constant monitor and interrogator of the Executive – the “Opposition” if that is the word we prefer or understand.
The House of Representatives and the Senate constitute the CONGRESS in the U.S. or what we call the NATIONAL ASSEMBLY in Nigeria.
In the US, the most powerful person in the Congress is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, not the Senate President as in Nigeria. Indeed, the US Vice President is, by custom, the nominal President of their Senate! If, for any reason, there is a tie in any vote over a crucial issue in the US Senate, the Vice President of the country shows up in his capacity as the Senate President, to cast his vote to break the tie!
The House of Representatives in America is the truer reflection of the majority of the populace, as is the case in our system and the United Kingdom where they proudly answer the “Commons.” The House of Lords is their distant equivalent to our Senate.
In both of those more mature parliamentary systems, the Lords and Senators are meant to act as moderators and the Braking System to the younger ‘hot heads’ in their Lower House (our so-called Green Chamber) in their primary duty of law making.
Even in the very serious matter of trying to impeach a President, it is the House of Representatives that lays charges and eventually votes. Then the Senate will do a review. It is there that the fate of the President is determined.
Before I digress from the subject of “Opposition” which many, including the political parties, appropriate to the party that doesn’t produce the President, let it be known that there isn’t anything like the Opposition Party in the Presidential System if properly understood and practised.
It is, in our case, the National Assembly that could be remotely described as the Opposition if we still feel the need to use the word.
It is in the Westminster parliamentary system that the Royal Opposition exists officially. Over there in London, the Leader of Opposition in Parliament is the Shadow Prime Minister with his full complement of Shadow Ministers who can actually remove the Prime Minister and his Cabinet and take over as “Minority Government.”
This, as we were taught in Government classes in our days, can happen when the Government’s Budget Proposal is rejected on the floor of the House of Commons. This can occur when some MPs of the Government Party, usually in the majority, join the Opposition members in a vote against the government!
Here in Nigeria, the PDP calls itself the Opposition Party and the media agrees and promotes it as “Main Opposition Party.” This is patently incorrect as our system makes no provision for an officially-recognized Opposition.
On the issue of Democracy Dividend, many commentators have pointed out that what we, in Nigeria, refer to as Democracy Dividends – good roads, regular power supply, potable water, attainable health facilities etc – are NOT Democracy Dividends.
Those who studied in or travelled to non-democratic nations of the former USSR and China of Mao Tse Tung of those days will agree that these amenities were made available by those regimes, with free education to boot. But those governments in Moscow and Peking made no pretense of being democratic in the manner we know and try to practise it even though they still talked of “democratic centralism” in their implied approbation of the concept of Democracy.
In other words, infrastructural and welfare provisions for citizens are fundamental duties of government worldwide, whether or not those governments are democratic.
Our politicians and the media should make extra effort to understand the system of government we have adopted and help to educate the citizenry accordingly.
For starters, the Nigeria Union of Journalists, NUJ, can approach both the United States Embassy and British High Commission in Nigeria to send competent officials as resource persons to seminars and workshops on the workings of their respective governance systems. We can then compare, contrast and fully articulate the Nigerian model which we have voluntarily adopted.
The outcome of such an exercise might even help in reforming and improving our system. For now, we appear to be operating a system we don’t fully understand or care to interrogate.
Nnamdi Nwigwe is a veteran journalist based in Owerri, Southeast Nigeria.
