Lagos — Last week I was in Lokoja, the Kogi State capital, to take part in an interactive forum between members of the Kogi State House of Assembly and civil society organizations in the state. Organized by the Civil Society Centre for Legislative Advocacy (CISCAL), it was meant to provide an opportunity for improved understanding and interaction between the two.

The executive Director of CISCAL set the ball rolling by declaring that the overall goal of the programme was to increase participation of the citizens at all levels of governance by providing a sustained channel of interaction between the two. CISCAL had done this type of interactive forums earlier in three other states, namely Jigawa, Niger and Nassarawa. It is now taking another round of three states: Kogi, Plateau and Benue. The Lokoja event was the first of the three new rounds.

Sitting at the open bar of the Confluence Hotel Lokoja, the venue of the event, facing a segment of the River Niger, I could not but reflect on the lack of legislative oversight that has allowed this state-owned hotel that has all the potentials for a preferred tourism destination site in the country to be so run down that no responsible citizen of Lokoja would like to host his or her guests there.

In all these events I have come up with four impressions about the functioning of the legislative arm of governance at the state level. First, unlike at the Federal level where many civil society organizations have developed a strong rapport and working mechanism with the National Assembly, at the state level there appears to be a wide gulf between the two. At these interactive meetings, while civil society activists complained that their state legislatures were not accessible, the legislators complained that there were no serious civil society organizations in their states. Such cross-complaints may be due to the fact that civil society organizations in Abuja are more experienced in legislative matters, better connected, have good media networking and greater access to donor agencies that could fund and support initiatives to bring together members of the National Assembly and civil society organizations. There is of course the fact too that members of state Houses of Assembly are relatively less experienced and exposed than their National Assembly counterparts, and therefore less prepared to work with civil society groups, whom they regard both with suspicion and fear.

Second, there appear also to be a wide gulf between the powers of the State Houses of Assembly and the actual exercise of those powers. Part of the reason for this is that many of the state Assemblies are not operating autonomously, free from executive control. In many states, there is no State Assembly Service Commission, thus the legislators have no control of their finances. This is why members of the State Houses do not have legislative aides and personal staff.

Third, there seems to be poor understanding of the functions of the legislative houses by the ordinary citizens. Many people think that it is the responsibility of their legislators to build schools, hospitals, etc. Thus when they do not build these, they are rated very low in their communities, even when they give sterling contributions inthe legislative chambers.

The fourth is the almost total absence of normal legislative processes and procedure of robust debates. Bills are passed without debate, once they are from the executives. There are hardly public hearings on important bills as required in normal legislative processes. Even in matters of appropriation bills, they are usually returned to the governors as they were sent to the houses. We cannot talk about democracy if the legislators cannot operate autonomously as a critical and intelligent segment of governance.

In the last couple of years, we have seen how these state houses have been reduced to mere rubber stamps by their governors. In Bauchi State, we are witnessing the absurdity where legislators have signed for the impeachment of the State Deputy Governor even before they could articulate the offences, much less proving the alleged impeachable offences. This has been done because the Governor insists that the Deputy Governor must go for refusing to mortgage his political independence by decamping from the ANPP, on whose ticket they were elected, to the PDP, to safeguard the second term ambition of the Governor.

Good as the efforts of CISLAC are, episodic pilot capacity-building for legislators will not change the situation much because state legislators are structurally disempowered in comparison to the governors, through the enormous powers and control of resources that governors have and the flawed electoral processes that produce them. What is needed is the deconstruction of the overbearing hold that state governors have on their Houses of Assembly. This measure can rescue the autonomy of the state legislatures, and therefore assure a modicum of observance of the principle of separation of powers, if two paths are followed.

The first is to engineer a process at the grassroots level that will make voters to demand that state legislators act to retrieve their autonomy from governors so that they can independently exercise the powers that the constitution provides for them. This process should be championed by civil society organizations which are committed to the deepening and consolidation of democracy in the country. This is where the efforts of such organizations as CISLAC should dovetail into. It is not just enough to let legislators know the powers they have, or enough to even acquire the appropriate working knowledge and skills of legislative process. The people also, on whose behalf the legislators sit in the legislative chambers, should be empowered to insist that the legislature must work.

This requires making citizens to understand that the functions of the legislators is not to build roads or hospitals for the constituencies but to ensure that the executive does build these facilities. While the legislature is constitutionally empowered to perform an oversight function with respect to the executive, the citizens must understand they in turn have to perform an overall oversight functions on both the executives and the legislature.

The second is through the ongoing efforts at constitutional/electoral reform that will ensure that politicians assume political office only through the instrumentality of genuine popular votes. We need to have credible elections that will make those elected to act as true representatives of their electorate. This way, they will act on the basis of the collective interest of the voters and not as willing tools of some dubious godfathers.