By Sam Akanimo
The March 14,2024 suspension of a member of the Delta State House of Assembly, Matthew Omonade, is throwing into the open a potentially dangerous scandal in the House.
This is coming weeks after the fire-spitting Co-ordinator of Niger Delta Peace Coalition (NDPC), Zik Gbemre, opened fire on alleged unwholesome activities of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Delta.
Omonade, who is representing Ughelli North Constituency I, is suspended for 14 days for allegedly irritating the Oborevwori administration.
While a bill said to be presented by the suspended state legislator was yet to see the light of the day, the same bill, now favoured by the Speaker, Emomotimi Guwor, found its way miraculously to the floor of the House as an Executive Bill.
For allegedly daring to question that, Omonade who is the Chairman of the House Committee on Public Petitions, was suspended, for “gross misconduct”.
It is alleged that the suspended lawmaker “willfully and falsely perverted the proceedings of the House on May 8, 2024.”
To justify their actions, the House Leader, Emeka Nwaobi, is citing violation of the standing order and rules of the House.
But, some insiders say Omonade was suspended for challenging the House over his bill that was allegedly plagiarised and for asking that the bill be withdrawn.
Those who tend to know better say he prepared a bill on electricity generation and distribution in Delta and forwarded the same to the speaker to be listed for reading in December 2023.
But, the speaker allegedly declined to play ball. Surprisingly, the bill surfaced on the floor of the House as an executive bill.
Naturally, Omonade protested that the bill he gave to the speaker, and he declined to list, cannot in an American wonder style, transform into an Executive Bill without giving him the credit he deserved.
He then moved that the bill be withdrawn. Rather than acknowledge him, his action was interpreted as a slap on the face of the speaker and the House. As a result, he was suspended for 14 days.
Disturbingly, Omonade is not even speaking out on the scandal. He has chosen to cover up the mess as an “internal matter” of the Delta Assembly that will be resolved soon.
The seeming intellectual property rights scandal in the state House of Assembly, is denting the image of the Oborevwori administration.
Intellectual property rights however, refers to the legal rights given to the inventor or creator to protect his/her invention or creation for a certain period of time.
These legal rights confer an exclusive right to the inventor/creator or his assignee to fully utilise his/her invention/creation for a given period of time. It is very well settled that intellectual property plays a vital role in the modern economy.
In Nigeria, the creator of a copyright work, usually referred to as the “author” of the work, owns the copyright in the work in the first instance.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari, on March 17, 2023 signed the Copyright Bill, 2022 into law. This Act which is known as the Copyright Act of 2023, repeals the Copyright Act of 2004.
Some of the noteworthy provisions in the current legislation include: New ‘digital rights’ of distribution, communication to the public and making available by wire or wireless means, to align with the WIPO Internet Treaties, namely the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT).
Legal protection of technological protection measures, or “TPMs”, which are applied by rights holders to protect digital works from unauthorized use and access, as required by WCT and WPPT.
A new exception to cater for the production and international transfer of specially adapted books for people with blindness or visual impairments, to align with the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind or Visually-Impaired.
New economic and moral rights for performers to find alignment with the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances.
An open “fair dealing” exemption from copyright that, very much like the “fair use” clause in United States law, extends the fair dealing exceptions in the repealed Act with a non-inclusive list of permissible purposes. The “four factor test” from the US “fair use” clause has been adopted to assist Nigerian courts in determining whether a given unauthorised use of a work protected by copyright would qualify as “fair dealing”. Unlike the US “fair use” clause, there are no consumptive uses that are listed as permissible purposes.
New legal remedies are introduced to assist rights holders with the enforcement of their rights in the online environment, some of which may be relied on to compel Internet Service Providers to block user access to infringing content.
This is an important development in the fight against content piracy, which has been a major problem since the dawn of the digital age, especially for Nigeria’s music and film and television production industries.
The Act also protects expressions of folklore, which include folklore, poetry, folk songs and dances, folk arts, drawings, carvings, sculptures, costumes and other works or imitations thereof.
Any party who wishes to make commercial use of expressions of folklore would first need to obtain permission from the relevant indigenous community concerned, and/or the Nigerian Copyright Commission.
A failure to do so could expose the user to criminal sanctions.
In the meantime, Gbemre, who terribly unsettled the PDP for daring to hit hard on the administration of Governor Sheriff Oborevwori, is at it again.
Irked, the ruling party in the Big Heart state returned the salvo,
accusing Gbemre of frequently using Oborevwori, as the object of his butt.
PDP’s State Secretary, Dan Ossai, an engineer, in a statement said the party would not have dignified the unnecessary attack with a response but for the fact that it made reference to the party, which fielded and worked hard during the campaigns leading to Deltans giving their overwhelming votes to its candidate who today is the governor.
“For us in the PDP, we liken Zik Gbemre’s diatribe to the rage of the heathen which the Holy Bible describes clearly in Psalm 2, asking derisively, why are people plotting a vain thing, setting themselves and political kingpins taking counsel together against the Lord and His anointed”, the party said.
Apparently unshaken, Gbemre says the party has outlived its usefulness in Delta, one of the big oil and gas states in the Niger Delta area.
The frontline activist has also opened fire on the one-year Tinubu administration, claiming that Abuja has not been able to tackle the menace of corruption in the country.
According to the NDPC chief, corruption is worse than the leadership challenge of Nigeria.
NDPC is, however, a grassroots-based civic group that is committed to fostering, promoting, propagating and projecting ‘sustainable peace’, law and order, equity, social justice in Nigeria, particularly in the polluted oil and gas region.
For the group under Gbemre’s watch, Nigeria’s problem is not principally leadership since according to it, the proliferating leaders of today were the ordinary people of yesterday.
Continuing, the group says the moment they got ‘elected’ or appointed into public offices, they allegedly developed a voracious appetite to loot and care less about their roles as leaders.
“The entire system is rotten, the private sector inclusive. The supposed leaders of the people derive joy in stealing, in accumulation of illegal wealth, and prefer to obey laws in foreign countries than in their home country”, Gbemre’s NDPC alleged..
The group claims that most of those saying the problem of Nigeria is leadership, are the same folks who when ‘elected’ or programmed into any public office, “resort to raiding the public treasury at any slightest opportunity.
“Nigeria is a country where when fuel dealers in places like Warri, Uyo, Port Harcourt, Yenagoa, Calabar, and all the other cities immediately hear of fuel scarcity in Lagos and Abuja, they respond swiftly by inducing the scarcity of the product in their areas.”
Adding, the group says if a customer does not sit by a vulcaniser, he will fraudulently inject extra charges for his service on the pretext that he discovered other leaking holes.
“Mechanics will steal parts of your car if you don’t sit by them just as rice sellers used to re-bag the commodity into smaller bags. Garri sellers too put papers inside the cup they use in selling the essential commodity
“Corruption is endemic in Nigeria. It is not limited to the looting leaders. In institutions of learning, all types of certificates can be obtained with the right amount of money because all sectors of the country are riddled with corruption.”
However, on the PDP in Delta, Gbemre says the electorate have been experiencing diverse misgovernance since 1999, due to what he describes as the “thieving hegemony” of the party over the state.
According to him, before Oborevwori was installed last May as the governor of state, all the hitherto PDP administrations allegedly displayed ineptitude and lack of capacity to effectively lead the state.
“The tragedy of Delta was worse under two medical doctors who exhibited sheer abuse of power and influence in the office of the governor. There was a desperation by them to sustain power after leaving office.
“Painfully, under Governor Oborevwori today, the tragedy of Delta is that the profiting cabal has drifted into a new dimension of imposing the ignorants at the helm to cover their ineptitude.
“Delta is witnessing imbecilic governance because the blind are willfully made to rule the discerning. Only the hired praise singers will disagree with me.”
Gbemre is arguing that neither the PDP nor the Oborevwori administration has a moral high ground to accuse him of attacking Governor Oborevwori for no just cause.
On the mess in the state House of Assembly, he said, “with the bloated Oborevwori’s cabinet of so many commissioners, special assistants, special advisers and even senior special advisers with duplicated duties, does it mean they are not able to assist the governor with Executive bills?
“So far, the only Executive bill the Oborevwori cabinet has been able to push through is reproducing its predecessor’s budget proposals, changed the title, dates, figures and signature padded with a supplementary allocation before it runs out.”
For Gbemre, there is no justification for the Oborevwori administration to “copy and paste” bills for presentation to the House, moreso a bill that originated from an opposition lawmaker who was not allegedly allowed to claim his glory.
“Can anybody still argue with me when I say the governor, a village champion, is surrounded by dead woods, spent politicians’ sons and charlatans’ daughters, with hardly any administrative tutelage to handle the offices they have been assigned on compassionate engagement?
“The role (allegedly) played by Speaker Guwor further supports the evil cabal’s deliberate imposition of a mediocre government on the people, not just with the governor and his cosmetic aides but also with the state Legislature.
“It is only in Delta that power sharing among ethnic blocs is so abused that a first termer House of Assembly member is made Speaker to preside and apportion roles to ranking second or third termers.
“I think there is no longer any doubt about it. Delta is under the choke of a kindergarten government with a conceited village champion at the helm, period. The ‘attack dogs’ will never agree. This is another food for thought for them”, says the activist.
