Jostle for Reps Speaker slot, others intensifies

Posted by admin House, Legislature Monday, May 23rd, 2011

THE jostle and lobby for the position of the Speaker of the House of Representatives and other political slots continued at the weekend as various stakeholders, groups and eminent Nigerians spoke on how to resolve the question of which zone gets what.

For example, Governor Theodore Orji of Abia State who spoke on the issue at the Owerri airport while returning from a two-week trip abroad told a large crowd which received him that insinuations in the South-East that the geo-political zone has lost its due share in federal positions despite their overwhelming votes for the PDP were baseless.

He also later told Abians at the Banquet Hall of the Government House, Umuahia, that the zone has been discussing “what we should have with President Goodluck Jonathan.

Jonathan and we are making headway. Things are taking shape. The zone and Abia State will never lag behind. Do not mind what some people are saying.”

Orji, who said the Igbo would be patient with the President, thanked all who gave him and PDP the winning support, promising to reciprocate as “this is pay-back time.” But he urged the people to sustain the state’s “liberation” and not be deceived by what detractors say.

He congratulated his fellow winners in the election, pledging to keep his doors open to losers. “If you have genuine grievances on the election, go to tribunal. There are many frivolous petitions; the tribunal is becoming a place where enemies of the state go”.

The governor, in a statement by his media adviser, Mr. Ike Ben Onyechere, said: “The position of the chairman of the party (PDP), which the Igbo occupied before the elections, shifted to the North because equations changed with the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua such that no zone can retain chairmanship and presidency at the same time. The problem we have had is that we don’t tell ourselves the truth. We believe in pretending to be talking for our people but it all amounts to deceit. And this has rubbed off on Ndigbo generally.

“We agreed to support Jonathan because he was thrown up in divine circumstances. Secondly, he is a ray of hope to the Igbo. These were the primary considerations. Jonathan should be protected by us all particularly by the Igbo. It is too early to start agitating against him. I can vouch for him that he understands Igbo problems and knows how to solve them. We cannot achieve much by antagonising him now.

“Remember that this is a continuation of Yar’Adua’s tenure and the much that changed is the position of the President which automatically switched that of the party chairman to the North. If we get the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), it will ensure faster development of the South East because the SGF rather than the party chairman is closer to decision-making apparatus of the Federal Government.

“Rather than bemoan the present circumstances, we should carefully nurture the idea of producing the President in 2015 which we cannot achieve by making noise. There is no way we can compare Speakership of House of Representatives and that of Deputy Senate President, because the latter is certainly more respectable. We should be wise in tackling Obasanjo in this dispensation before we run into more hitches.

Meanwhile, two organisations, the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC) and the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), have decried alleged “undue and unnecessary pressure being mounted on the House of Representatives by the Executive arm of government and the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to adopt specific candidates as Speaker and Deputy Speaker.”

In a joint statement by Executive Director, PLAC, Clement Nwankwo and CISLAC’s Executive Director, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, the groups said they considered this pressure on the lower chamber of the National Assembly “a threat to our democracy as it compromises the sacrosanct and constitutionally guaranteed principle of separation of powers and defeats the concomitant purpose of checks and balances that it is meant to guarantee.”

Also, International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety) has condemned what it called well-coordinated efforts to scheme out the people of the South-East from occupying some top elective offices at the federal level, especially the offices of the Senate President and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Chairman, BOT, Intersociety, Emeka Umeagbalasi, in a letter addressed to the President Goodluck Jonathan, lamented that sponsored commentaries and newspaper publications have been flooding the public space justifying “this clear act of war of suppression against this important zone.”

The letter titled: “The lopsided zoning of the Senate Presidency and the House Speaker in the seventh National Assembly of Nigeria” noted that “some of these hired writers have even gone beyond the present lopsided arrangements and speculated the allocation of the office of the vice-president to the zone by 2015.”

Nwankwo and Rafsanjani wrote: “We reject outright, this overbearing and injurious interference into what is traditionally the internal business of the Legislature that will further weaken the Legislature, render it ineffective and diminish its capacity to assert itself and hold the Executive accountable for the way and manner the affairs of our great nations will be managed in the next four years.

“We wish to remind the members-elect that the National Assembly, particularly the House of Representatives has faced serious challenges meeting the expectation of Nigerians owing to the manner in which its presiding officers have emerged in the past. This is in addition to the instability and avoidable in-fighting that such antecedents had created.”

Umeagbalasi wrote: “There must be equity in the distribution of the top four elective positions in the country. This is the express meaning of Section 14(3) of the Constitution of Nigeria 1999, as amended. In the present political tenure (2007-2011), the Presidency was zoned to the North-West; Vice Presidency South-South (which later took over the Presidency with North-West assuming the Vice-presidency); Senate Presidency went to the North-Central and the House of Reps Speakership to the South-West.”

-Guardianwp_posts