When the Minority Leader of the Nigerian House of Representatives Honourable Femi Gbajabiamila (ACN) gave the warning that “if by September 18th, the budget performance has not improved to 100% we shall begin to invoke and draw up articles of impeachment against Mr. President”, I chuckled under my breath and called it what it was. It was an empty boast that could not possibly materialise given the number of factors on the ground.

First and foremost is the question of whether the president is guilty. Is he guilty enough to warrant the invocation of the Constitution’s Section 143 (1) which states that the president or the vice president may be impeached whenever “a notice of any allegation in writing signed by not less than one-third of members of the National Assembly is presented to the  Senate stating that the President was guilty of gross misconduct”? Is this really the issue?

I tried instead to find out what the honourable members would really be so piqued over that an impeachment threat became necessary. Gbajabiamila was quick to site Section 143 (1) of the Nigerian Constitution, to charge that the president’s “failure” to implement the budget amounted to “gross misconduct”.


It is necessary to take a simplistic view of it and put to lie the grand standing of the members of the House of Representatives, some of whose so-called oversight functions have turned out to be the means for alleged corrupt enrichment. Some of them are so discredited in their totality that it will take some cleansing before any holier-than-thou ploy works, and I dare say, that Nigerians are worried, that this may end up a storm that will be cleared by pecuniary compromise.

If the budget was passed in April, then implementation of capital projects may have begun in June or July. Thus we can safely argue that the budget is really only three months old. Minister of Finance and Coordinator of the Economy Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has tried to explain away the misunderstanding, and I can feel her frustration. It is a plus to have achieved even 36 per cent implementation in the months since the budget that was passed late in April. It seems the legislators dispute the minister’s figure of 56 per cent but it is really the difference between half-full and half empty.

No constitution is fashioned to make the executive tread carefully as if on egg shells in order to carry out his functions. The checks and balances proposed are meant for the operators to behave (and if need be drink) responsibly from the limits of the nation’s public tolerance of malaise, waste and decadence.


Then one may ask – can the threat fly? Where in the world’s democracies does a minority leader in a House dominated by 75 per cent members of the ruling party propose a motion as serious as even initiating an impeachment process? Worse still, can you even achieve that on charges you are hard put to substantiate – charges that the president can easily and quickly clarify?

The People’s Democratic Party controls 75 per cent of the House (and the members in the eye of our corrupt storm are from the party). The jitters visible at the Presidency are therefore hardly understandable, if Okonjo-Iweala is at such pains to explain how preposterous the demand from the House is.

In Nigeria the office holder easily becomes the proverbial dumb camel, dragged to a hole just because a hedge-hog gave pull to the reins. The mad House could dispose of an impeachment process before you can spell Goodluck Jonathan. But why is this so?

This is so because of the fraudulent practice of our democracy, in which a faulty home grown system compromises the best and uplifts the mediocre, bereft of any sense of patriotism, and it is evident at nearly all levels. This is so because of our acceptance of absurdities in the operation of the Constitution. Such absurdities as the legislators legalising outlandish incomes for themselves and costing the nation 25 per cent of its overheads should not have been allowed. Not done, we still have more absurdities as legislators apportioning constituency projects outside the budgetary purview of the executive were in the real sense intolerable in a transparent democracy, and should not have been permitted, and is today the weak and sensitive underbelly of our democracy. Some of the absurdities manifest onwards, beyond the fleecing of ministries and departments through oversight processes that are in truth a charade. We thus have a culture of political abnormalities that are in truth criminal in civilised societies.

It has become habitual for blackmail instead of mutual understanding to determine the relations between the Legislature and the Executive at all tiers in Nigerian politics. In 2009, the late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua faced similar crisis, with the House of Representatives at the time, threatening to rekindle the flame of impeachment over his alleged failure to fully implement the 2009 budget. The polity overheated instantly as has happened in this case.

Members were then unanimous that the claims by the Federal Government that the 2009 Appropriation Act could not be fully implemented on account of dwindling revenue. Yet when the members piped down, it was because President Yar’adua decided to call the bluff and refused to answer the charges through clandestine compromises. President Obasanjo before Yar’adua had related with the Legislature in a cat and mouse game that in the end peaked in the scuttling of Atiku Abubakar’s ambition and the failure of the third term gambit.


The impeachment threat is a totally unnecessary diversion from the pressing issues of stabilising the polity itself, restoring peace and security, and concentrating on the development of the country’s economy with the great promise this holds. Even if it were for the purpose of due diligence, it begs the issue to bounce to the extreme of threatening the president with impeachment on the questionable charge of non-implementation of the budget. We need to learn from the Western countries whose models we are copying. The issues that bind and divide are more patriotic than primordial.

http://www.dailytrust.com.ng/index.php/daily-columns/173161-impeachment-threat-just-a-threat

The National assembly members should first of all put their house in order before their voice can be heard and respected as laww makers, becouse there are a thieves looters and currupt many among them whivh shouldn't be.