Lagos — The dispute between the Senate and House of Representatives over the venue for a joint session to receive President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua's 2010 budget estimate is yet another of Nigeria's throwbacks to an unsettled rivalry among legislators of the two chambers that began to manifest since after the sudden change of leadership in the Lower Chamber.

There was never much chance the House of Representatives would accept the Senate decision to change the traditional venue of their joint sessions for the presentation of annual budgets by the president. Early in the year, an intractable disagreement between the two chambers of the bicameral legislature over headship of the National Assembly Joint Committee on Constitution Review (JCCR) seriously threatened the process of a badly needed constitutional amendment. Since after that incident, it appears, each of the chambers developed the appropriate expression to wear on occasions that require their joint meeting. President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua's presentation of the 2010 budget was an occasion for them to demonstrate their battle wits.

Yar'Adua had been scheduled to address a joint session of the National Assembly at 11 am Thursday to present the 2010 budget before the federal legislature. He had written separate letters to the Senate and House of Representatives to prepare them for the joint session. But the budget presentation was stalled by the insistence of Senate President David Mark that the session this time would hold in the Senate chamber - not the House of Representatives traditional venue for such meetings. The Senate said its 251-seat chamber was spacious enough for the country's 109 senators and 360 House members to sit and receive Yar'Adua's budget. In response, the House of Representatives rejected the Senate's attempt to make its chamber venue for the joint session, saying the House's apparently more spacious chamber is a better venue for the meeting.

The face-off has caused the president to put off the budget presentation, a situation analysts fear may delay the passage of the 2010 budget.

For the second time in one year, a supremacy fight between the two legislative cousins in the institution that should constitute society's bulwark against bad governance is threatening the success of a critical national issue brought up to further the course of good government.

Many see the present squabble as just another manifestation of a personality clash between the leaderships of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Though, the entire federal legislature has been blamed for this bickering over seniority, the House of Representatives seems to carry the greatest blame.

Section 53 (2) of the 1999 Constitution states, "At any joint sitting of the Senate and the House of Representatives:

"(a) the President of Senate shall preside, and in his absence, the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall preside; and

"(b) in the absence of the persons mentioned in paragraph (a) of this subsection, the Deputy President of the Senate shall preside, and in his absence, the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives shall preside."

Subsection (3) states, "In the absence of the persons mentioned in the forgoing provisions of this section, such member of the Senate or the House of Representatives or of the joint sitting, as the case may be, may elect for that purpose shall preside."

The constitution also provides that the budget should be presented separately to the two chambers. According to section 81 (1) of the 1999 Constitution, "The president shall cause to be prepared and laid before each house of the National Assembly at any time in each financial year, estimates of the revenues and expenditure of the Federation for the next following financial year."

But by some mutual understanding, the budget has been presented in a joint session of the National Assembly and in the chambers of the House of Representatives since the inception of the Fourth Republic. Though, logically, being the constitutional chairman of the National Assembly, analysts believe the Senate President has the freedom to decide where a joint sitting of the legislature should hold.

Chairman of Senate Committee on Information and Media, Senator Ayogu Eze, told journalists in Abuja, "The issue of venue is not a big deal because it is the prerogative of the chairman of the National Assembly to decide the venue. He can even decide that we go to the banquet hall of the House of Representatives to hold it."

Lagos-based lawyer, Chief Mike Ozekhome, agrees. He blames the House of Representatives for starting an unnecessary seniority crisis when the constitution is clear on which chamber of the National Assembly is the senior.

He explains, "The president of the Senate is the chairman at a joint sitting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. It is like that in the constitution. In matters of appointment of ambassadors, ministers, chairmen and members of federal government parastatals, only the Senate has to screen those appointees. The job is not given to members of the House of Representatives.

"In terms of qualification to be a member of the Senate or House of Representatives, for the Senate, you must be 35 years old, for a member of the House of Representatives, you must be 30 years old. This means that even the constitution envisions a Senate that is more matured, made up of elderly people, philosophers, and statesmen.

"It is also clear, when you look at the present Senate, there are at least eight members that were either former governors or former ministers or former members of the House of Representatives. In fact, a member of the House of Representatives aspires to be a senator; no senator aspires to be a member of the House of Representatives. A governor or a minister aspires to be a senator, no governor or minister aspires to be a member of the House of Representatives. It is also clear, both in terms of constitutional provision and tradition, that the Senate is the elder brother of the House of Representatives in Nigeria's bicameral assembly.

"So it follows, as the night follows the day, that if the President of the Senate has to preside over a sitting, he also should be able to determine the venue."

The seniority squabbles between the National Assembly chambers became public since January 16, during a retreat of the JCCR in Minna, when 44 members of the Lower Chamber walked out of the constitution review process because the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives was not made a co-chairman of the committee with the Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu.

Attempts to reconcile the two houses have failed and both have since embarked on separate constitutional amendment processes. With this, many fear the country's legislative houses may never have the vital meeting ground needed to achieve the amendment that the citizens desire so much.

There are insinuations that the circumstances in the House of Representatives few months after the general elections in 2007, which resulted in the removal of then Speaker Patricia Etteh and her replacement by Dimeji Bankole, a situation the Senate was obviously not favourably disposed to, lay behind the bickering over supremacy between the Senate and the House.

Though, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which has about 88 senators - of the 109 - and over 200 representatives - of the 360 - that is over a third of members of the National Assembly, has intervened to try to resolved the problem, observers blame the seniority crisis on the weakness of the ruling party's structure.

In the Second Republic, there was a convention of weekly caucus meetings of such principal officials of government and the then ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) as the President of the country, the Vice President, President of the Senate, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and chairman and secretary of the party. Analysts believe such arrangement helped to prevent the kind of internal strife that has become a recurrent decimal in the Fourth Republic and that the current PDP structure is too weak to support the arrangement.

Both Yar'Adua and PDP are making efforts to resolve the face-off between the Senate and the House of Representatives. But there are fears such efforts may achieve little and the present crisis would delay passage of the 2010 budget, with negative consequences for the country.

"The crisis puts us in a lose-lose situation. The Nigerian masses are the losers. We are talking about a serious issue like budget presentation. They cannot even sit to look at the budget, not to talk of discussing the budget. I can bet that by March or April next year this budget would not be passed. And that leads to distortions in the economy. Nigerians are the worse for it," says Ozekhome.