Presidency, Reps on a collision course again

Posted by admin Goodluck Jonathan (2010-present), Presidency Sunday, July 10th, 2011

THE House of Representatives is heading on another collision course with the presidency on zoning of its principal offices, as the leadership prepares to release the list of principal officials and heads of different House committees this week, the Nigerian Tribune can report.

The most controversial among the principal offices being contested was that of the House Leader, which the leadership had zoned to the South-West, in a move to pacify the zone for losing the seat of the speaker to another zone.

The contest for the office sparked off the controversy with alleged attempts by two top government fun-ctionaries to impress it on the leadership to elect the choice of the president, Honourable Mulikat Ade-ola-Akande, as the House Leader, a request said to have been stiffly turned down by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) House caucus.

In turning down the request from the president’s men, the PDP caucus, according to members who spoke with the Nigerian Tribune, reasoned that such a sensitive position could not be entrusted to a woman, even as the interest by the presidency in the candidate was generally viewed as suspect by members.

It was on this basis the House leadership repor-tedly resolved to allow democratic processes to determine the emergence of its set of leaders in the manner the Speaker, Honourable Aminu Tambu-wal, emerged.

Three candidates had emerged for the post of the House Leader. They are Honourable Adeola-Akande, Honourable Muraina Ajibola and Honourable Kareem Taju-deen Abisodun.

Honourable Ajibola stood the chance to clinch the post, having mustered sympathy from many of his colleagues, who felt he was short-changed during the election of speaker, since he was the initial choice of the PDP and the presidency.

It was discovered that one of the reasons Adeola-Akande was not voted for as speaker was her taciturn nature, a key factor militating against her candidature.

Notwithstanding, the PDP caucus had resolved to give the presidency a soft landing, by holding a meeting today, where all the contestants would be screened and made to face a transparent election.

The national head-quarters of the PDP, the Nigerian Tribune obser-ved, appeared to have tactfully shunned attempts to influence the election of House principal officers, to avoid suffering another round of humiliation caused by the manner the House jettisoned the zoning formula of the party to elect Honourable Tambuwal as speaker.

The South-West caucus of PDP, it was learnt, had also distanced itself from the election of House principal officers, against the backdrop of the discordant tunes that trailed its initial attempts to midwife the emergence of a candidate from the zone as speaker on the basis of zoning formula.

Meanwhile, a fresh crisis has hit the PDP over its new zoning formula, as the South-East is insisting that the post of the national chairman of the party should remain in the zone till November, when new officers would be elected.

The leadership of the party had met at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, at the weekend and directed that the national secretary, Alhaji Kawu Baraje, from the North-Central should take over as the new acting national chairman, while his deputy, Dr Babayo, would be the acting national secretary till the national convention of the party in November.

It was gathered that the arrangement had not gone down well with the party members from the South-East zone and were now warming up for court action to redress what they described as an “insult and open day light robbery.”

This is coming just as the outgone acting national chairman, Dr Haliru Bello, would hand over the mantle of leadership to Alhaji Baraje on the acting capacity, having been sworn in as a minister on Saturday.

With this development, the party’s national working committee (NWC) now has eight members, as against the original 12.

-Tribunewp_posts