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The committee system is an organizing strategy of the legislature to keep itself abreast with the tasks of legislation and governance. The increasing expansion of modern governments as well as their sophistication demands a composite deployment of necessary expertise to address governance issues. Committee system is the institutionalized policy of dividing legislative assembly into smaller groups both for the purpose of effectiveness and for appropriating the expertise of members in the examination of issues under the purview and competence of the legislatures.

In contemporary setting, a significant part of legislative work is now conducted in committees rather than in the parent chamber (Yamamoto 2007; Olson 2015).

Committees afford the legislature a bouquet of advantages namely, opportunity for a more detailed examination of issues; development of specific expertise by members of the committees, facilitation of timeous performance of the diverse aspects of its work; expert handling of issues and broad-based consultation of stakeholders and other vested interest groups on issues.

Every legislature evolves its own committee system, taking into account the peculiarities of its internal socio-economic and political dynamics. Essentially, certain guidelines appear to inform and shape the formation of committees. Igwe (2002, p. 75) avers that “committees are of different but related types, differentiated according to, among others, their duration, such as ad hoc, standing, sessional, and annual committees”. No matter the nature of committees set up by the legislature, they essentially act as “a filtering device and a legislative stethoscope by which policy proposal and other related activities are not only scrutinized but also utilized to access (sic)  the desirability, feasibility, sustainability, and healthiness of governmental policies” (Fashagba 2009a, p. 429–430).

Apart from the constituency services and representative functions of the legisla-tors, the aspects where the committee system has proved indispensable are in mak-ing legislations and exercismak-ing oversight functions on ministries, extra- ministerial departments and agencies (MDAs). Both the Nigerian Senate and the HoR have committees on all the institutions of government. Oversight requirements confer on committees a legal ground to assess the operations of various governmental institu-tions. Thus, oversight is the actual exercise of surveillance powers by the legislature through legislative committees to ensure that all governmental activities are carried out as stipulated in the laws (Fashagba 2009b; Kazeem 2013). Table 1 below sum-marizes the key objectives as well as the strategies that legislative committees often deploy to actualize the oversight mandate of the National Assembly.

Although oversight functions are designed to further the mandate of the legisla-ture, especially in ensuring the accountability of the government to the people, they have been strategically converted to a platform for neo-patrimonialism. In other words, members of legislative committees, by virtue, of their privileged relationship with these governmental offices created a complex web of patronage system (Lewis 2009). This relationship is what underpins the corruption-related cases linked to the National Assembly. Figure 1 below presents a diagrammatic illustration of the key functions of legislative committees in the National Assembly

Nigeria’s National Assembly has constitutional authority over public funds, in terms of budgeting them for national expenditure, and ensuring that they are utilized as contained in the budget and as approved by it (see Sections 80 and 81,  The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999). It is in this respect that leg-islative committees have been quite active. The mindset of an average member of Nigeria’s ruling elite is that government is a route to personal wealth. For this reason, therefore, running for elections in the country is akin to going to battle as no stone is left unturned by contestants to achieve electoral victory. Thus,  political competition in Nigeria is more or less a grim battle, a do-or-die affair in which

win-Table 1 Nature of oversight functions of the national assembly Instrument of

oversight functions Key objectives of oversight functions

Strategies for achieving oversight benchmarks

Various

committees of the National Assembly

• Ascertain that executive policies reflect public interest

• Ensure executive compliance with the law

• Improve the efficiency, economy, and effectiveness of governmental operations

• Detect and prevent poor administration, waste, abuse, arbitrariness, illegal and unconstitutional conduct • Protect the rights of citizens • Collate necessary information to

be used in enlightening both the government and the public • Evaluate the execution and

performance of the National Budget

• Committee inquiries and investigative hearings • Physical site or location visits • reviewing or confirming

executive appointments • questioning senior government

officials (including ministers) • Commissioning independent

studies;

• Information-sharing with relevant national and

international non-governmental organizations

Source: Extracted from various sources (NDI (National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) 1996; Fashagba 2009a, b; Kazeem 2013; Nwagwu 2014)

Key Tasks of Committees Administrative Review

*Receive briefs from Ministries, Departments & Agencies (MDAs)

and review & evaluate same

*Pay visits to MDAs & inspect projects Appraise policy problems

*Evaluate budget performance of MDAs and release relevant

Resolutions

Investigations

*Public/Investigative hearings

*Receive and deal with public petitions

*Undertake screening of nominees to confirm suitability

and confirm or disqualify nominees

*Invite public functionaries and interview them on pertinent

issues Appropriation

*Consider government’s budgetary proposals

*Pass the budgets after consideration

*Monitor budget implementation

Legislation

*Consider bills

*Report bills to the House

*Take bill Referrals

*Organize interactive meetings to stenghthen bills

Source: Various National Assembly documents

Fig. 1 Key tasks of the legislative committees in Nigeria’s National Assembly

ning is all important (Ake 1981; Owen and Usman 2015). Thus, getting elected into the National Assembly appears to be the first step in the chain of the accumulation process. What facilitates access to the national pie is the membership of committees.

Table 2 captures the nature and attributes of the committee system operational in Nigeria’s National Assembly.

The relevance of legislative committees in the accumulation process is under-lined by the inter-party rivalries and alliances in the distribution of their member-ships. In allocating membership and leadership positions, considerations are paid to loyalists, returning members, political party lines and geopolitical divides. The need for the accommodation of diverse interests as well as the compensation of support-ers has led the leadsupport-erships of Nigeria’s National Assembly to constantly expand the number of committees. In expanding the number of their committees, the leader-ships of the National Assembly operated within the ambit of their constitutional rights to set up as many committees as are necessary to carry out their functions (see Section 62, The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999). The commit-tees perform oversight functions with regard to their designated areas of jurisdiction.

In the Second Republic, the inability of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) to garner the majority in the National Assembly led to an understanding between it and the Nigerian People’s Party (NPP). The outcome of that understanding was the retention of the office of Senate President by the NPN and the ceding of the post of Speaker to the NPP.  This understanding also reflected in the composition of committees in both chambers. The achievement of majority in both chambers of the

Table 2 Nature and attributes of Nigeria’s Committee System Key indicator Attribute

Number of committees

Not fixed or static. Section 62(1) of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution, as amended empowers the National Assembly to set up as many committees as will ensure optimal functionality. The number of committees varies from one legislative assembly to another Jurisdiction of

committees

Fixed and as outlined by their terms of reference

Tenure of committees Discretionary. The committees can be reconstituted without prior notice Chairmanship Based on party affiliation, personal influence and connection and

seniority

Membership The constitution grants the National Assembly the powers to determine membership strength of committees and terms of office in Section 62(2). However, the composition of committees usually reflects the relative strengths of the different parties represented in the full legislature

Scope of activity Legislation, administrative reviews and investigations/oversight functions

Relevance/place in the stages of legislative procedure

Initial stage; committee stage & bill referrals

Source: Reconstructed from various documents of the National Assembly

National Assembly by the PDP between 1999 and 2015 reconfigured the nature of political permutations. The basis of alliance shifted from forging party-based coalitions to achieve majoritarian status to the individualization of alliances by contestants to achieve ascendance to principal offices in the National Assembly.

This individualization of alliances first started with the “capturing” of the chieftains and stalwarts within the party, especially the presidency by contestants and making them adopt them as sole candidates. Thus, in 1999, the presidency and the party projected the duo of Senator Evan Enwerem and Hon. Salisu Ibrahim Buhari, for the headship of the Senate and the HoR respectively. Both of them won but were soon swept away by scandals; for Buhari, he resigned after a media accusation of falsification of age and educational qualification was proved. And for Enwerem, he was impeached on the grounds of unanswered questions surrounding his integrity as well as accusations of gross incompetence. The political tinkering, which was aimed at securing the independence of the senate through the election of Senator Chuba Okadigbo fell flat as the presidency instigated and supervised his downfall.

Most of the scandals involving the National Assembly originated from the opera-tions of its committees. For instance, in 2003, the former Federal Capital Territory Minister, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai accused some senators of demanding N54 million to clear him for a ministerial position. Also, the Senate Committee on National Communications Commission (NCC) was dissolved by the Senate President for corruption (Ayorinde 2012). In the same vein, the House Committee on Capital Market was embroiled in scandal involving “allegations of bribery, conflict of inter-ests and bias” in the conduct of its oversight functions (Ayorinde 2012). Allegations of financial misdeeds and bribery scandal cost the then senate president, Adolphus Wabara his position in April 2005. The list is legion. Often, the underlying motives for such exposés were not so much a manifestation of the determination of the administration to stamp out corruption than as a strategy to overcome the National Assembly and convert it to a rubber stamp entity of the executive. As observed by Lewis (2009, p. 193), “from the outset of the Fourth Republic, legislators seemed intent on asserting their prerogatives and resisting the arbitrary dominance of the president”. But the tremendous resources at the disposal of the presidency made fighting it a lost battle. This was because even the patronages which flowed from committee-involvement of legislators were regulated by the executive.

The Nigerian legislature has served as a major channel of political recruitment and leadership development as well as a reserve bench that recycles leaders and ensures their continued relevance in the polity (Ihedioha 2012). Thus, some members of Nigeria’s National Assembly are there to remain in the front row of political relevance. In order words, they got into the National Assembly because of the absence of certain kinds of opportunities in the patronage system. Thus, the National Assembly serves as a stop-gap measure for most of them, either before ascending to executive positions or after serving at the executive level. Table 3 captures the variants of committees in the National Assembly.

The committee system and the composition of its membership are at the heart of legislative politics in Nigeria. The successive leaderships of the National Assembly have used the composition of committees as their own stick and carrot strategy to

beat legislators into line. Within the elite circles, all ministries and governmental agencies are not equal in their capacity as sources of accumulation; certain ministries and agencies are regarded as more lucrative than others based on their budgetary allocations and their ability to generate income. So, very loyal members, and others who are strategically important in sustaining the administrations of the chambers, are compensated with multiple membership of these committees. Lewis (2009) observes that while few legislators in the fourth and fifth legislative assemblies—1999–2003 and 2003–2007 respectively belonged to more than two committees, many legislators in the sixth legislative assembly—2007–2011) were involved in as many as a dozen committees. This was possible because the leaderships of both chambers created more committees. Interestingly, the expansion of committees has served the useful purpose of creating stability in the National Assembly as feelings of marginalization due to non-appointment to leadership positions in the committees have been greatly assuaged. This trend appeared to have started with Dimeji Bankole, who on assumption of office as Speaker after the ousting of Patricia Etteh, created additional 12 new House committees to cater for the masterminds of the impeachment of Etteh.

Subsequently, leaderships of the National Assembly have been using this strategy to cater to the varied power constituencies in the National Assembly and, thus, cling to

Table 3 Types and nature of committees in Nigeria’s National Assembly

Type Nature of committee

Statutory committees

These are committees provided for in the Constitution. An example is the Joint Finance Committee stipulated in section 62(3) of the Nigerian Constitution

Standing committees

These are committees appointed by the National Assembly to aid it in its day-to-day functions. Standing committees operate according to their terms of reference and perform all their functions on behalf of the National Assembly

Ad hoc committees

They are set up for specific purposes and for a specified duration. The completion of their designated tasks may bring it to an end

Joint committees There are two variants of joint committees. They could be committees established to harmonize the divergent positions of both chambers on bills.

Under this scenario, they could be either a combination of two or more similar committees from the two chambers. The second variant is the combination of similar committees from one Chamber to deal with issues that fall within their jurisdictions

Subcommittees These are specialized committees set up to perform some special tasks that may not be under the purview of a committee or to take a load off a standing committee

Conference committee

This is a kind of special committee convened to resolve differences in the wording of a bill if the two chambers are in disagreement on specific provisions in a bill. The conference committee consists of members of both chambers appointed by their principals

Committee of the Whole

This is the conversion of the legislature into a committee. It dispenses with its rigid rules as it operates like any other committee and under an elected chairman different from the Speaker or the Senate President

Source: Various National Assembly documents

power. The number of committees has made it possible for every senator to be either a committee chairman or vice-chairman and for every other House member to be the same (Erunke and Ndiribe 2013).