A Civil Society Organisation, OrderPaper Nigeria and its partners have announced the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, and 19 other members of the Ninth National Assembly as Semi-Finalists for the country’s first-ever Most Valuable Parliamentarian (MVP) Hall of Fame.
In a statement in Abuja, the Executive Director of the organisation, Oke Epia, said the shortlist comprises a female Senator, two Principal Officers, two Presiding Officers and ten first-term lawmakers across party lines from both the Senate and House of Representatives.
The MVP Hall of Fame initiative, which is in furtherance of OrderPaper’s contributions to legislative strengthening and promotion of improved service delivery in the National Assembly, aims at identifying and sustaining a distinct class of legislators who are performance-driven, excellence-inspired, and public-spirited.
According to the statement, having undertaken an independent, unprecedented data-driven annual performance appraisal of the 469-member ninth National Assembly since its first anniversary in 2020, the organisation deemed it appropriate and timely to commence instituting the MVP Hall of Fame.
The annual appraisals focused exclusively on the core legislative function of law-making, and consideration for the MVP nomination and subsequent shortlisting essentially applied the criteria of Value, Impact, and Productivity in rating the contributions of those shortlisted.
OrderPaper said while value speaks to the correlation of a bill’s advancement of the governance objective of the federal government, impact relates to the empirical contribution of a bill to the enhancement of the lives and living conditions of citizens; as productivity applies to the stage of progression of a bill to measure the diligence, dedication and hard work put into its processing by its sponsor.
It reiterated that while it acknowledges that “bills processing is not the only function of legislators, it is undoubtedly the most important; and measurement of performance on that score is based strictly on the sanctity of incontrovertible data, unlike performance measured against representation and oversight, which are the other statutory functions of legislators”.
“Performance appraisals based on bills processing is therefore the most veritable, viable and verifiable in measuring performance at this late renascent stage of Nigeria’s parliamentary practice,” said Mr Epia, adding that “this is why not even one of the 469-member federal parliament has been able to make any valid contestation of our performance appraisals published in the last three years.”
