Benue State University, Makurdi

The Legislature and Foreign Policy in Nigeria's Fourth Republic

Atah Pine

Abstract

The legislature is one of the institutional tripods of any modern democracy and it has threesome institutional responsibilities: law making, representation, and oversight. Since the return of democratic governance in Nigeria in 1999, after sixteen years of Machiavellian military praetorianism (1983-1999), the Nigerian legislature has been involved in the execution of these constitutional remits with mixed results. Being an essentially law making institution, theoretically speaking, seldom does the intellectual imagination visualize the role of the legislature in the foreign policy architecture. And yet, the legislature is central in foreign policy making. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to examine the place, role, involvement, and contributions of the legislature to the foreign policy mechanism in Nigeria's fourth republic. The questions to be addresses in the paper are: what is the constitutional responsibility of the legislature in foreign policy making? How did it go about this responsibility? What were/are the contributions/ achievements recorded, the short comings, the prospects, and the future trajectories? In order to provide a perspectival orientation to our interrogations, we adopted the Montesquieuian separation of power and functionalism as the frameworks of analysis (Hussein, 2009). The philosophical presupposition is that though the legislature is institutionally autonomous and functionally differentiated, it is also intricately intermingled with the other organs of government in delivering the public goods in a democracy. Finally, the paper makes recommendations that would enhance and strengthen the institutional mandate of the Nigerian legislature broadly and her contributions to foreign policy making, in particular.

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