Omo-Agege, Gbajabiamila, others make valuable parliamentarians hall of fame list

By Musa Baba Adamu

OrderPaper Nigeria and its partners have announced twenty 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 by its Executive Director, Oke Epia, OrderPaper 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.
The statement said having undertaken an independent, thorough and unprecedented data-driven annual performance appraisals of the 469-member ninth National Assembly since its first anniversary in 2020, the organisation says it deemed it appropriate to commence instituting the Most Valuable Parliamentarian (MVP) Hall of Fame.
It said 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.
It 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; and 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 recalled that following the midterm appraisals, 55 members of the National Assembly were nominated for possible induction and consequently conferred with certificates of recognition at a prestigious Evening of Sparkles held at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel in Abuja in July 2022.
It said only 20 of these nominees have now made the semi-final shortlist and would be subjected to a rigorous points-based scoring system to arrive as the eventual inductees into the Hall of Fame.
“The semi-final shortlist was determined at the completion of the third-year appraisal, and the eventual inductees would emerge following further assessments in the last year of the four-year tenure.
“This last and final assessment to determine the Most Valuable Parliamentarians of the Ninth National Assembly would be assisted in terms of oversight by an MVP Panel of Experts (MPEs) drawn from parliamentary think tanks, the academia, media, civil society, and the private sector.”