Mr. Speaker, Sir! Points of Order.

Point of Order 1: If you were quoted correctly, next time, please update this grammatical misnomer, ” I have no choice than to….” The correct usage is “I have no choice but to….”

Point of Order 2: It is a legislative privilege, not a right, for the Speaker to invite a member(s) to approach the Chair. The house instrumentality is not designed for perfunctory interruptions or suppression of member opinions. If the Speaker is concerned that a recognized member on his or her feet on the floor of the house is engaging in some rhetoric or polemic capable of unduly inflaming passion, a point of order will suffice, citing the legislative basis for such Point of Order.

‘Honourable member, please approach the Chair’ cannot, and should not become, a repetitive rehash of a class captain in the primary school asking his classmates to use his or her brain to think. If members are mature and serious (and, we pray they are), we expect them to maintain regular touch with constituents and reflect the dynamics of viewpoints and concerns of their constituents in floor debates. For example, some members might be convinced that ailing Alhaji Yar’Adua should, in fact, have applied to the Saudi monarch for an interim allocation of a ‘West Wing’ equivalent in his sprawling palace (a la Aondoakaa’s politico-legal doctrine ). They should be able to stand up and make their case without having to be made to approach “the Chair” before they barely got off their own stool! If that is a fair reflection of their constituents’ yearnings, so be it. Let them be heard; so that next time Nigerian census is on, we know where to draw the line for counters. That is the beauty of democracy. It was actually intended to be ‘demoncracy’; someone just got smart (like the nocturnal cabal) and dropped the ‘n’ somewhere off the tarmac.

Members should not be routinely interrupted to “approach the Chair” because they hold positions that seemingly run counter to the Speaker’s. Every such interruption may in fact amount to telling hundreds of thousands of Nigerians to “approach the Chair” to launder their opinion. If the Constitution framers intended that as the prescription, they could as well have provisioned for a Speaker-only House of Assembly. Nigerians could use all the monies saved from that; the only drawback was that they would then have to swim or sink depending on whether or not their Speaker subsequently became a turn-coat!

I am not alleging at this point that the Speaker has an agenda, as I have no evidence to that effect; but, he must stop trying so hard to lay a solid foundation for such an allegation. Remember the quacking duck thing? Good!

Mr. Speaker, Sir, approach the People’s Chair; we need to talk! “Listen (whispering) this Chair may still be holding up, but the house roof is already leaking, badly! The people demand that it be fixed, and fixed right away! And, that’s an Order!” (raising the voice to military crescendo)

Mr. Speaker, Sir, I yield the rest of my time to the Honourable member from Nowhere.

Via Vanguard

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