TOPSY-TURVY!

Calls For SNC, Invitation To Anarchy – Senate

The Senate on Tuesday said that the calls for a Sovereign National Conference by some Nigerians could lead to anarchy.

It also pledged to provide the required legal framework to ensure the success of the proposed National Constitutional Conference.

The Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, said this when he received the  Senator Femi Okurounmu’s Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue, on behalf of Senate President David Mark, at the new Senate building in Abuja.

He said, “When we hear people talking about Sovereign National Conference, there must be a legal framework for it.

“You don’t wake up one day, when you have a constitutional constituents in place, and begin to say you want a Sovereign National Conference to impose the will of some people on everybody without a legal basis for what they are doing.

“That means we are calling  for anarchy. So, we believe that we can now work together to make this work and at the end, it will not be an effort in futility.”

Ekweremadu said the National Assembly would do everything possible to ensure the amendment of the Section nine of the constitution that would empower the confab to produce a new constitution for Nigerians.

He said, “For us at the National Assembly, the most important job in this exercise is to provide the necessary legal framework that will support whatever the outcome of both your own committee and the committee that will come after it.

“We envisaged that from works that were done over these years that a day such as this would come. We proposed to our colleagues a possible amendment to section nine of the Constitution that would provide a legal basis to a possible new constitution.”

Ekweremadu noted that there was no provisions in the 1999 Constitution  that empowers the National Assembly to produce a new constitution,  hence he said, the best the federal lawmakers had achieved so far was an amendment they carried out in 2010.

He expressed the hope that members of the House of Representatives would also support the initiative in their harmonization, especially now that their work was in progress.

He expressed optimism that the confab committee would create the framework for the constitution conference exercise, to provide intellectual background that “would enable those who will have the conversation to do something that is seamless.”

Okurounmu said the main job of his committee was to consult widely with all Nigerians in respect of the proposed National Confereence particularly on what should be the agenda of the conference.

He said the committee would also decide the size, duration and how membership of the conference should be chosen and what should be the legal basis of the conference and the transmission of its outcome  to Nigerians.

He said the committee had interracted with the people of Plateau and Ondo State as part of the process to converse with Nigerians in two states in each of the six geo political zone of the country.

Culled: PUNCH