Merit will determine Senate president, not zone  -Akande

A new twist may have been added to the race to pick the President of the Senate, as a former acting national chairman of the APC, Chief Bisi Akande on Tuesday noted that it will not be done through zoning.

Akande while speaking to newsmen in Lagos, explained that zoning is a creation of the PDP, which is alien to the APC, and not recognised by the party’s constitution.

Akande, who is presently a member of the party’s Board of Trustees, said the leadership of the party shot down the idea of zoning when it was brought up by the party’s current National Chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun.

The former governor of Osun State said, “Zoning is very, very strange to the APC. There is no zoning in our constitution. We don’t want to copy the PDP in whatever we are doing. We have the best of brains and culture among our leadership. We want the best for Nigeria. Because of this, we don’t want to entertain zoning

“It is true that sometime after the general election, the (party’s) national chairman wanted to toy with the idea of zoning and unanimously we said no, we don’t want to zone.”

Describing the PDP as a prodigal party, Akande said one of the institutions through which the ruling party frittered the nation’s revenues was the National Assembly.

He said, “We are taking over from a delinquent (PDP) administration and one of the most prodigal institutions of that administration is the National Assembly. The (former) Central Bank Governor said the recurrent expenditure of the National Assembly was N10bn and that it rose to about N150bn.

“Their personal income is prohibitive and secretive. This created the scramble for the leadership of the legislature and we don’t want our party to be involved in the prodigal nature of the National Assembly.

“In order to tone it down, we need to do a lot of compromises and sacrifices and we need to select from among the leaders who are in the Senate that would be able to control the culture of the Assembly according to the policy of our party.”

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