Legislative Experience Does Not Matter When Choosing House of Assembly Speaker

Hon. Gbolahan Yishawu, the representative of Eti Osa Constituency 2 at the Lagos State House of Assembly is one of the lawmakers currently jostling for the seat of the Speaker in the next session which commences in June this year.

Criticized as desperate for the seat and not having the required knowledge for the office in spite of his intelligence, Yishawu maintains, in this interview with naij.com, that to become a Speaker does not require much experience.

 Q: How would you describe the last election?

The election was hard fought; I want to thank the people of Eti Osa Constituency 2, who have once again given me the mandate to represent them. I think only one principal officer of the House, who is the Deputy Chief Whip in person of Hon. Rotimi Abiru is returning among the others. But, for me, I think the leadership of the House is an administrative leadership. The House of Assembly runs as a rich Assembly and we as members are embedded in the House and we know what we want. What I would be concerned about is the entry of the new members; it is not as bad as 80 or 90 percent members of the House being new. I think the people that are coming into the House have proven their worth, they have a lot of values, they are intelligent and I think they have a lot of political values. We have lawyers and other professionals amongst them and they would be equal to any of us that have served one term, two terms or even more.

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Q: How about the loss of some seats to the Peoples Democratic Party?

For us it is bad that we lost eight seats to the PDP and we are going to see how we would address that. As a political party, you won’t even want to lose a single seat. It is very unfortunate; we have seen the reason why it happened and we would address the reason in the future. By and large, we are waxing stronger. Really, we are going to miss our Deputy Speaker (Taiwo Kolawole). We call him the Methuselah of the House, we have all concluded that he was going to win, I don’t know what happened. He is quite experienced, but I think the House is going to move on, the House is an institution. We will miss him and I think it was the late Tai Solarin that said we are all dispensable. He said that if you feel you are indispensable, dip your hands inside water and that the hole you have in the water is how much you would be missed. We would miss him, but the House would still function.

He is the most experienced hand in the House, but the current Speaker became the Speaker even, when the current Deputy Speaker was the most experienced person in the House. So, for me, when it comes to the principal officer of the House, it is about servant speakership, servant leadership. You are a moderator, you are a manager of the people, the experience is needed more on the floor of the House and at plenary when we are making laws. Even, when we are making laws, the Deputy Speaker cannot be a member of any committee, thank God he has passed this knowledge to some of us and like in natural human setting, we would pass it to others. Yes, we will miss him because he is a good friend and I am sure our friendship would continue after office as the case may be. We would miss him, but I can assure you that the 8th Assembly would function very well and I am sure he would also appreciate the fact that it would function very well from the knowledge that he has been able to impact to us.

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Q: Some of you have started lobbying for the position of the Speaker of the Assembly. Is this okay or it is better to wait on the party?

There is nothing wrong in lobbying, I read where someone said that I am ambitious, there is nothing wrong in being ambitious. People can dream.

 

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