Reminiscing on the lives and times of the late Senator Chuba Okadigbo who died exactly one year ago last Thursday, Senate President Adolphus Wabara was effusive in praising the second president of the Senate of the fourth National Assembly for his charisma.
Chief Wabara remembered him as “a charismatic and colourful leader, as well as a consummate and passionate politician who was a gifted orator.”
With Dr. Okadigbo permanently removed as an active player in the Nigerian political scene, it is, however, doubtable that either him or the majority of his followers would like him remembered only in the sense of the ephemeral as Wabara emphasised last Thursday.
Besides the charisma he generally showed anywhere he showed up, the sagacity he brought to his leadership of the Senate and the wit he demonstrated in hounding his foes, Dr. Okadigbo would also be remembered for his fierce belief in the independence of the legislative arm of government.
It is arguable that Senator Wabara may have overlooked this point in the late Okadigbo’s record for the simple reason that all the good works that he (Wabara) is doing, is simply bogged down by the obvious impression of his lack of independence from the executive!
Interestingly, the inclination or otherwise to legislative independence has indeed been a pivotal factor in defining the health of the relationship between the National Assembly and the executive since the advent of the Fourth Republic.
As Senate President, Dr. Okadigbo not only expressed legislative independence, he demonstrated to all, the essence of separation of powers in a presidential democracy.
Addressing a conference of clerks of legislative Houses in the country barely two weeks after his election as Senate President, Dr. Okadigbo gave an indication of his proclivity.
“...while cooperating with the executive for the sustenance of our nascent democracy, the legislature will retain its autonomy,” Okadigbo said at the conference on November 2, 1999 in Abuja.
There was little doubt that it was this inclination that worked against him in his first bid in June 1999 to become the Senate President at the inauguration of the first National Assembly of the Fourth Republic.
Working on the premise that the election of Senate President would be immune from the interference of other arms of government, Senator-elect, Okadigbo, had in the months before the inauguration of the first Senate, made it a point of duty to visit every one of his colleague senators-elect in their constituencies to solicit their votes for the election.
No one contends today that there was any serious opposition to Okadigbo’s quest as the military prepared to hand over to the new democratic players. Well, definitely not from within the PDP, the party that won 65 of the 109 Senate seats in the senatorial elections.
President-elect, Olusegun Obasanjo, perhaps under the sway of some narrow-minded hangers on was believed to have worked against Okadigbo on the premise that the latter would not easily succumb to his aspirations.
Though with the solid support of 59 of the 65 Senators of the majority PDP, Okadigbo lost the contest to Evan (s) Enwerem, a foundation member of the then APP who incidentally joined the PDP just two weeks to the senatorial election.
Enwerem in deeds and in every action, demonstrated to all that he was an agent of the presidency in the Senate.
Senators who spoke inelegantly about the President received the opprobrium of Senator Enwerem as Senate President.
In the evening of November 18, 1999 while in the course of one of his regular acts of homage to his masters, that is going to see off the President at the airport on his way to a foreign trip, the Senate, by more than 90 votes, removed Senator Enwerem as Senate President.
Okadigbo immediately replaced him by a unanimous vote in the only election to the office of Senate President that the presidency did not weigh in as a factor since the beginning of the Fourth Republic.
The election of Senator Okadigbo as Senate President on November 18, 1999, immediately changed the tenor of the relationship between the legislature and the executive branches of government.
It was two weeks after his election, he told the clerks of Nigerian legislatures that the legislative branches of government must assert independence even while working towards a common focus of improving the lots of the citizenry.
Not long after, he trampled on the feet of the executive when he publicly condemned the President’s sanction in dispatching the military on an invasion mission to Odi, in Rivers State.
It was not as if Senator Okadigbo deliberately set out to rubbish the institution of the presidency, but the seeming antagonism of the executive and his popular inclination to independence, appeared to set him on perpetual conflict with that arm of government.
While the presidency seemed withdrawn to the perpetual exuberance of the House of Representatives, it was totally discomfited that the Senate, which should play a more matured role in calming the younger Representatives, seemed to be following that path.
It was particularly offensive to the presidency that the two chambers of the National Assembly would cease upon one of the president’s legislative initiatives to hound him.
Following his early diagnosis of the Niger-Delta problem, President Obasanjo had within weeks of his first inauguration, dispatched a bill setting up the Niger-Delta Development Commission (NDDC). The commission was conceived to help redress the development disadvantages of the oil rich Niger-Delta region.
The two chambers, against the objections of the President, made amendments to some clauses on the funding of the commission, actions that made the President to veto the bill.
The two chambers, by overriding majorities, however, overrode the presidential veto.
Okadigbo and the younger Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Ghali Na‘Abba were fingered as the ringleaders in the effort to bruise the president’s ego.
There were other points of friction such as the executive’s initial refusal to subject its financial activities to the endorsement of the National Assembly and the unilateral declaration of May 29 as “Democracy Day.”
In keeping to his word, Senator Okadigbo boycotted the first democracy day celebrated by the executive arm of government.
Forthright as he was in asserting the independence of the legislature, Okadigbo, however, had his own weaknesses, some of which were actually regarded as qualities by some of his devotees.
Okadigbo did not suffer his enemies gladly.
On one sitting day in 2000, he picked on one of his foremost opponents in the Senate, a Yoruba Senator dressed in a simple French suit.
Speaking from his seat on the podium, Senator Okadigbo asked the Senator to stand up and asked him with derision “Is that the way a Senator should dress,” before telling him to sit down.
The experience was inevitably a psychological effort to beat down his opponent.
There were other actions of perceived arrogance such as the alleged rule that Senators should fill forms before seeing the Senate President.
In an interview with Today newspaper in April, 2000, Senator Abubakar Sodangi, then the chairman of the Senate Committee on Human Rights, asserted as much, as he accused the Senate President of turning the Senate into a military barracks and even refusing to acknowledge greetings from some of his colleagues.
At that point, the opposition to Okadigbo had crystallised into the formation of a standing opposition supposedly financed by those who had the primary motive of seeing off what they regarded as an arrogant leader.
Inevitably, filthy lucre also became an issue as Senators with grievances over the award of National Assembly contracts joined the crusade to unseat Okadigbo.
In the end, and sadly for him, Okadigbo was sacked after a well choreographed witch-hunt officially termed as a Senate investigation into the award of Senate contracts.
He went down fighting to the end, and in the face of overwhelming pressure, refused to buckle as he would say, to the forces of “primordial oppression.”
A year after his death and four years after the Okadigbo era in the Senate, it is worthy to note the impact of his successes and failures on those that followed him.
The first crisis of the Wabara era to some extent mirrored some of the failings that Okadigbo was accused of. Allegations of haughtiness made by some serving Senators last May against Senator Wabara trailed Okadigbo all through his tenure in the Senate.
It is, however, remarkable to note that following the May 2004 crisis that Senator Wabara has to some extent thrown away such conduct and is now with some few exceptions, known to relate well with all his colleagues. He is known to visit colleagues in their houses and to attend most public functions organised by or in honour of colleagues.
Such actions, some of which were passed over by Senator Okadigbo, would indeed do the present leadership well. Senator Anyim Pius Anyim who followed Senator Okadigbo subjected himself sometimes to indignity to appease some of his colleagues, a factor that established him even against the torrents of the executive when it came.
So in seeing Senator Okadigbo as a charismatic politician and a gifted orator, Senator Wabara indeed, was saying the obvious known to all. Many Nigerians, however, see him in more broader terms and indeed recall his fastidious inclination to the separation of powers.
In the face of the seeming conspiracy between the executive and legislative branches of government in the application of certain government policies, many indeed wish for the heady days of the Oyi. Those days may have yielded nothing in terms of substance, as Wabara’s era has the potential to offer. But those days were, nevertheless, reassuring.
And when interfaced with the shame displayed by the Senate in hastily passing the labour bill, as well as the bare-faced tactlessness of the executive in increasing the pump-head price of PMS, Okadigbo, in all fairness, would have shepherded the Senate in a more dignifying manner - at least on the side of the masses.
