Election Re-ordering: Senate opens up on alleged Plot against Buhari

By Adoga Michael Oyi

The Senate has reiterated that the alteration of the 2019 election sequence starting from next year, was not targeted at President Muhammadu Buhari.

The Nigerian senate has been accused by several quarters of changing the election sequence in order to prevent President Buhari from returning to power in 2019.

However, Senator Sabi Abdullahi (APC, Niger North) had this to say to vanguard about the ‘plot’ and the walkout by a handful of senators who did not agree with the amendment ;
“That is their view. I have never been part of anybody sitting down to say that we should do this because we are targeting the President. So, I don’t know what they are talking about
Maybe they have information that I don’t have but I don’t think it is about that because basically for us in the Senate, we passed our version of the Electoral Act Amendment a year ago and we wanted the House of Representatives to concur, they said no because they also had their own in the works.

So in circumstances like that, we had to wait for them to finish. When they finished, one of the major differences was the sequence of the election. Like I said, fortunately, or unfortunately, whichever way you look at it, by our legislative procedure, the moment we come together, there is concurrence or conference, which are two different things.

Concurrence means they don’t have a similar bill with us but they have done so much legislative work and we are bound by legislative reciprocity to accept that our colleagues at the other side have done a thorough job and we should accept it except if we see one or two things then we may decide to say no.

So, we have a way of harmonizing that and we concur with those minor amendments. But in this case, they passed their own bill, and we passed our own. The next thing is to have a joint conference committee chaired by a Senator and this was what happened.

By our rule, where they have proposed a clause, which is not in our own or we propose a clause which they do not have, we cannot talk about a merger or try to marry the two, we have to talk about adoption.If you look at the report that is exactly what happened. Naturally, I think this was not part of what we discussed in the Senate but by procedure, we harmonised two bills in a joint sitting.
I thinking that some of the people making those complaints, perhaps, do not have deep knowledge of the procedure.”