Impeachment: Absolute power in the hands of the legislature .

THE House of Representatives is considering a bill that will vest responsibility for impeaching the president exclusively in the National Assembly. The legislators want to replicate the powers available to the United States Congress in this regard by shrinking the role of the Chief Justice of Nigeria in the impeachment process. The proposed bill will abolish the constitutional stipulation that empowers the Chief Justice to pass the impeachment charges from the National Assembly to a seven-person panel whose decision shall be final. In its place, it will require that the Chief Justice would preside at the session of the Senate that will convict the president on the charges that the House of Representatives has impeached him on.

This move, yet another instance of legislative aggrandisement, has little merit. Nigerians have been manifesting a growing demand for accountability, but the current impeachment process is not perceived as a barrier to this demand. Therefore, a review of the impeachment process is not a national priority, especially when it is not broken. To anchor a major change in the law on the need to copy the American impeachment model is to take a fallacy to a ridiculous extent. A more useful act of imitation will be for our legislators to ape the transparency in what American lawmakers earn.

The provisions of the 1999 Constitution recognise that impeachment is a serious process. By making the Chief Justice responsible for selecting a panel to investigate the charges made against a sitting president by the National Assembly, it ensures that those charges are subjected to credible scrutiny, and frees the National Assembly from playing the incongruous and unfair role of accuser and judge. The current process is evidently fairer than the new proposal which, while pretending to retain the involvement of the judiciary in the impeachment process, limits that involvement to tokenism.

We agree with the observation of some honourable members that the proposed bill suffers from poor timing. But that is a relatively puny part of its defects. It should be rejected for exaggerating the maturity of the National Assembly to solely and credibly bear responsibility for impeachment. Should it become law within our current political culture, this new impeachment bill will severely curtail good governance and the separation of powers. It would transform the president and the governors into puppets of the legislature, and subvert the norms of accountability.

And it would doom especially those presidents and governors whose parties don’t control the legislature. Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa’s PRP government in Kaduna State was frustrated at every turn by the NPN-dominated legislature which subsequently impeached him. The transparency of our elections would not be enhanced if it becomes an imperative to survival for every president/governor to deliver a majority legislature.

Experience since 1999 has shown that it is indeed possible to subvert an impeachment process when the chief justice fails to select a disinterested panel. Recall the Fayose impeachment when the panel’s verdict was discarded by the Ekiti State House of Assembly which insisted that the governor stood impeached. Reforming the law to take care of weaknesses such as this is welcome. But the removal of a president is such a monumental affair that it must accord with due process, including the protection availed to all citizens against having the accuser as judge. The House of Representatives should shelve this needless amendment promptly, because it is a solution looking for a problem, and problems aplenty would it create. In the unlikely event that the House passes it, the Senate should simply bin it!