CONFAB: Northern senators’ call to ignore report height of ignorance —Southern Senators

Southern Senators’ Forum (SSF) has frowned at the call by their northern counterparts that President Muhammadu Buhari should ignore the 2014 Confab report.

It described the call as “the height of confusion and ignorances” adding that it was “unfortunate.”

NSF chairman, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, had during a retreat of Northern senators in Katsina, described as unfair the demand by SSF that the President should implement the 2014 Confab report he was not part of.

But responding in a statement, the SSF chairman, Senator Hope Uzodinma, wondered if the northern senators had actually studied the communiqué SSF earlier issued on the matter.

He argued that if they had studied the report they would have realized that the Confab report was a paper submitted by eminent Nigerians from all over the country.

“Adamu’s (Chairman of Northern Senators Forum) action and utterance smack of a town Union President who out of zealotry to protect his union and who erroneously sees the President of the country as a member of his union embarks on an indecent haste to speak for the President all in the name of protecting his Town Union.

“The communiqué by Southern Senators Forum merely asked President Buhari to convene a meeting of governors and the leadership of the National and state assemblies to consider the report and forward to the National Assembly for debate.

“I wonder why Adamu should be in a hurry to defend a President who has not complained about the communiqué. Has Adamu forgotten that the President’s party and his party too, the APC, promised to restructure in their manifesto?

“Even Adamu admitted that the 2014 conference report treated restructuring extensively. What is wrong in asking the President whose party promised restructuring to consider sending a restructuring report to the National Assembly?

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“Let me inform my colleague that Southern Senators met in Calabar on a well-planned retreat on how to deepen national unity through devolution of powers.

“It appears that in Adamu’s indecent haste to attack our retreat he ended up holding one that had only sectional interest, and not national interest as a theme, including how to extend the oversight functions of senators to the implementation of the 2018 budget in the Northern states.

“This inability to distinguish between the roles of the legislature from that of the executive is the height of confusion and ignorances and it is truly unfortunate,” the statement read.

 

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