OrderPaper Nigeria and its partners have announced 20 members of the 9th National Assembly as semi-finalists for the country’s first-ever Most Valuable Parliamentarian (MVP) Hall of Fame.

In a statement released by the organisation’s Executive Director, Oke Epia in Abuja, OrderPaper said the shortlist comprised 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, thorough and unprecedented data-driven annual performance appraisals of the 469-member ninth national assembly since its first anniversary in 2020, the organisation said it had become appropriate and timely to commence instituting the Most Valuable Parliamentarian (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.

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 is designed to applaud and encourage exemplary leadership by leaders guided by a community of practice in productive partnerships between the Legislature, Civil Society and the citizenry in Nigeria. Designed by OrderPaper Nigeria and implemented in collaboration with renowned Civil Society partners, the MVP Hall of Fame is not driven by any pecuniary motive whatsoever.

“OrderPaper reiterates 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 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.

“Civil society and citizens generally expect the National Assembly to be more open, transparent and accountable so that performance of oversight and representation functions, including the controversial constituency projects scheme, can be subjected to objective appraisals as advised by data. We throw this as a challenge to the incoming 10th assembly, and one basic and necessary step to take in this regard, among others, is making records of attendance in plenary sessions, committee meetings and oversight visits public.”

OrderPaper Nigeria is the country’s premier and pre-eminent policy think-tank and legislative interface bridging the gap between citizens and parliament since 2015″, Oke said in the statement.