Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB) has said that it has lodged an appeal against the judgment of an Abuja High Court directing it to pay one of its customers, Dr. Ted Edwards, a sum of N5.2bn.
The bank, through its lawyer, Chief Anthony Idigbe (SAN), is contending that the trial judge, Justice Valentine Ashi, erred in law when he assumed jurisdiction over the case and held the bank liable for breaching a banker-customer relationship and entered judgment against it.
Justice Ashi had, in a judgment on May 18, 2015, ruled in favour of Edwards, who had sued over unauthorized withdrawal of N5.2bn from his GTB account, which the bank claimed it transferred to the Central Bank of Nigeria at the instruction of the Federal Ministry of Finance.
The judge, who dismissed argument by GTB that it acted in obedience to higher authorities, had ordered GTB to refund the N5.2bn into Edwards’ Zenith Bank account with 10 per cent post-judgment interest and another 21 per cent interest from December 12, 2014 when the withdrawal was done till final repayment.
However, GTB which is displeased with Ashi’s judgment, has gone before the Abuja Division of the Court of Appeal seeking to upturn the lower court’s decision.
Apart from seeking an order of the court staying the execution of Ashi’s judgment, GTB is also praying the appellate court to order the return of the case file to the Chief Judge of the Federal Capital Territory for re-assignment to another judge for retrial.
Idigbe, who is contending that Ashi erred in law when he adjudged that Edwards had the no locus standi to institute the suit, wants the appellate court to declare the entire proceedings before the lower court as null and void.
The senior lawyer is also challenging the pronouncement of the lower court that GTB failed to disclose as prima facie case in its defence.
According to Idigbe, Order 21 Rule 3 of the Federal Capital Territory High Court Civil Procedure Rules 2004 stated that where the defendant discloses a defence on the merit to a suit filed under undefended list procedure, leave should be granted to the defendant to file its defence.
He stressed that the court failed to properly evaluate the affidavit evidence placed before it before reaching the conclusion that the appellant’s notice of intention to defend discloses no defence on the merit of the first respondent’s suit.
Furthermore, the bank, which claims that Edward’s funds remained in the custody of the CBN, is also challenging the propriety of the judge’s decision to strike out the other five defendants in the suit while holding it singularly responsible for the judgment debt. [myad]
Nigeria’s biggest mobile phone operator, Mobile Telecommunication, Nigeria (MTN) has threatened to shut down its network due to lingering fuel shortages that have crippled the nation.
The company, the biggest subsidiary of the South Africa-based MTN Group, said it needed a “significant quantity of diesel in the very near future to prevent a shutdown of services across Nigeria.”
It said on its Twitter account @MTNNG: “if diesel supplies are not received within the next 24 hours, the network will be seriously degraded and customers will feel the impact.”
Despite being Africa’s biggest oil producer, Nigeria lacks domestic refineries, forcing crude to be exported and products such as petrol and diesel to be imported.
The MTN’s corporate services executive, Akinwale Goodluck.said that most of the company’s base stations and switches across the country are being powered by diesel which he said is currently running low.
The threat from MTN, which has more than 55-million subscribers, is a sign that businesses are now being hit by the scarcity. [myad]
Nigeria Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has asked Nigerians to rise against oil marketers whom she said have been defrauding them in the name of oil subsidy. She said that the N159 Billion subsidy payment they submitted to the government is suspicious. Speaking to newsmen yesterday at a farewell meeting in Abuja, Okonjo-Iweala made it clear that she would not approve payment of the claims unless verified by the relevant authorities. “Marketers were asking for N159 billion for exchange rate differentials from the outstanding N200 billion. There has been so much fraud and scam so I have refused to sign for that money but have agreed that a committee be set up involving the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to verify marketers’ claims.” ”Marketers just want to make Nigerians suffer,” she said, even as she accused the marketers of blackmailing Nigerians, asking the people to resist. The minister who insisted that the current fuel scarcity has nothing to do with paying the marketers, said: “they are making a lot of money from black market activities. People should rise up against the blackmail of oil marketers. “I will not pay the N159 billion without verification, Nigerians should not allow themselves to be blackmailed.” The minister said there was something curious about the supply of and payment for Premium Motor Spirit (PMS). “I cannot say that the problem is due to not paying marketers, the process of paying marketers is always a rolling process and there has never been a time government reduced its financial obligation to marketers to zero. “In a year where so much effort has been made to pay marketers including prioritizing their payment as subsidy claims in favour of other financial obligation like paying contractors, yet fuel scarcity still persists at this particular point in time suggests that something suspicious is happening.” [myad]
File photo: Financial Minister, Okonjo Iweala presenting Budget to the national Assembly
Nigeria’s total debt as at today stands at $63.7 billion, but it is the totality of all the debts incurred by successive governments since 1960. “No $60 billion was accumulated under the Jonathan administration.” Nigeria minister of finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala made these points clear when she reacted to the statement by Vice President-elect, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, who had earlier said that the Jonathan administration will be leaving a $60 billion debt burden for the in-coming government of Muhammadu Buhari. Okonjo-Iweala said: “current debt stock includes both federal and state governments debts made up of $9.7 billion external debt or 15 per cent of total debt stock and $54 billion or 85 per cent domestic debt stock. “Nigeria is still repaying the multilateral loans it collected on concessionary terms with as long as 40 years maturity periods.” The breakdown of the accumulated domestic stock, according to the minister, is $18.575 billion outstanding by 2007, $17.3 billion accumulated between 2008 and 2011 and $18 billion accumulated between 2012 and 2015. “This is so because of something that happened in 2010 because of the salary increment under Yar’Adua administration which increased civil servants salaries by 53 per cent. “Those bonds have been rolled over and government had to weather the difficulties because resources to fund such increase were not there.” She described Nigeria’s debt to GDP ratio as one of the lowest in the world. On the domestic debt stock, she said 20 per cent is owed by state governments with Lagos state having an external debt burden of N1.169 trillion while the balance of 80 per cent belongs to the federal government. Okonjo-Iweala said she has no regrets in serving the country and declared that anyone called upon to serve Nigeria should consider it a privilege. “Some people criticise from afar but some came home in spite of challenges to serve.” She faulted suggestions that the economy was mismanaged, saying: “the economy is reacting to the forces of demand and supply but there is hope for the country. Only that people will have to make sacrifices. “The out-going government, she said, achieved a lot but she lamented that there are very serious attempts to rewrite history. [myad]
The death toll in China’s latest round of flooding has risen to at least 52, including two schoolchildren aboard a bus carrying more than twice its authorized passenger load that plunged into a pond, authorities said.
At least six other people are missing in floods that have ravaged mountain districts of six provinces and autonomous regions in central and southeastern China. More than a quarter-million people have been moved to temporary shelters, and major damage has been inflicted on buildings and crops.
Apart from the two schoolchildren, 42 others have died due to floods and heavy rains, including 16 in the collapse of a nine-story building in the city of Guiyang following a landslide.
Eight other people were killed in the central province of Hunan when a bus skidded into a guardrail and overturned.
The Guangxi regional government said 21 other kindergarten students were sent to the hospital in the school bus accident on Friday, with three listed in serious condition. The bus was licensed to carry 11 people, but had a total of 26 on board.
The driver, teachers and school administrators have been taken into custody, the government said. Overloaded buses have been involved in accidents killing scores of children in recent years as local schools are closed and consolidated into larger campuses farther away from the children’s village homes.
Seasonal rains cause major flooding around China almost every year. The worst in recent history was in 1998, when 4,150 people died, most of them along the Yangtze River.
The massive Three Gorges Dam has largely contained Yangtze flooding, but the problem persists in other parts of the country. [myad]
Every problem that confronts the in-coming Buhari is huge. The poor state of the economy is a huge problem. Corruption is a huge problem. Indiscipline is a huge problem. Energy is a huge problem. Poor infrastructure is a huge problem. A weak institutional support is a huge problem. Poverty is a huge problem. These cocktail of problems are looking for a solution. Each of them is big enough and complex enough to fully task the in-coming administration. Of all these huge problems, the economy occupies a unique place. It being the pillar of human development, the economy has both the capacity to be a solution to other problems or an added problem to the problems. A vibrant and buoyant economy can release enough fund into the system to tackle energy, poverty and the poor infrastructure. On the other hand, a weak and weakened economy can drag down whatever progress might have been made in these and other areas. We need not waste our sympathy on Buhari. Fate has thrust on his shoulders the huge responsibility of responding sensibly, honestly and with determination to these problems, none of which is new but all of which have conspired to make our country a land of cruel ironies in human progress and development. In a positive sense, how he responds to these and other problems will tell us the quality and the focus of his leadership. The economy might once again prove to be the most complex problem that Buhari and his new administration might face. I had hoped that the outgoing administration would provide the incoming administration with full facts about the true state of the economy. That has not happened and it is not likely to happen before the general assumes office in less than a week as of this writing. For reasons that are difficult to fathom, the Jonathan administration and its economic managers are playing hide and seek with the facts on the real state of our national economy. In 1984, it took Buhari more than six months to see the true picture of how truly poorly the economy was managed. That took something away from the urgency he needed to respond to the problems. The minister of finance and the co-ordinating minister of the economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, tells us the nation that there is nothing to worry about the state of health of the economy. She claims it is in robust health. She wants us to believe that the Jonathan administration would hand over to its successor a sound and well-managed economy. We now know that she is playing politics. Her claims are at variance with the facts seeping through the cracks. The feel good policy of the Jonathan administration had the merit of keeping our hopes afloat on the sea of insincerity. One of Jonathan’s smartest moves was to hand over the management of the economy to Okonjo-Iweala. I am prepared to bet that the president himself does not know the true state of the economy. He relies on what the World Bank says. I suspect this is the real reason his transition team headed by his vice-president, Namadi Sambo, feels reluctant to co-operate with Buhari’s transition programme. Now, we know a little more about the poor state of the economy. The Economist magazine put it rather starkly early in the year: Poverty has increased in the five years of the Jonathan administration. You do not need to be an economist to know that the national economy has been hemorrhaging badly for quite some time now under Jonathan’s watch. One major area of leakage has been the theft of crude oil since 2011. The nation loses an average of N7 billion daily to the oil thieves. The oil theft has been compounded, of course by the volatility in the crude oil market. Money accruing from oil into the national coffers has consequently and systematically dwindled such that state governments take in less and less as their statutory shares from the federation account. The inability of the state governments to pay their civil servants and pensioners is the logical consequence. Of course, we cannot discount corruption and poor financial husbandry as contributory factors to what is happening to finances of the state. I am intrigued that despite the federal government’s reluctance or refusal or both to fully brief the in-coming president, help has come from other informed sources such as the organized private sector and the Lagos Business School. Some grim facts and a bleak picture have emerged from these sources. The vice-president-elect, Professor Yomi Osinbajo, is convinced that the Buhari administration would “inherit the worst economy ever in the history of the nation.” These are some of the bleak facts and figures: 1). The nation’s local and international debts amount to a whopping $60 billion; 2). More than two-thirds of the 36 states owe arrears of salaries and pensions, some for 13 months; 3). About 110 million people in the country live in extreme poverty; 4). The country borrows to fund its recurrent expenditure. Professor Charles Soludo, former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, drew national attention to the hemorrhage of the national economy early this year. In an article he published in the heat of the electioneering campaigns, he argued that the economy was bleeding from “oil theft, unbudgeted oil subsidy payments, customs duty waivers, leakages through the self-financing government parastatals, unremitted sums by NNPC, etc.” The cumulative effect of these, he pointed out “…is that probably more than N30 trillion has been stolen or lost or unaccounted for or simply mismanaged under your (Okono-Iweala’s) watchful eyes in the past four years.” Okonjo-Iweala saw his argument as a personal attack. She promptly recruited hire hacks to attack Soludo and tried to turn his record as governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria on its head. But this was neither about the minister nor the former CBN governor. It was about the poor management of the economy. When Jonathan handed the management of the economy to her and went to sleep, he relied on her reputation as a Harvard-trained economic whizz-kid with a sterling employment record in the World Bank. But the management of the Nigerian economy is a veritable killer of reputations. In her book, Reforming the Unreformable, written after her first stint as minister of finance in the Obasanjo administration, Okonjo-Iweala observed that in the early 2000s, “The nation was riddled with corruption, bloated with debt, battered by economic volatility. The macro-economy was seriously imbalanced. A series of national institutions – the civil service, pensions, customs – were broken. Health care, education, and other basic services were poorly delivered. Infrastructure was in disarray or disrepair. Poverty was rampant and inequality was deep.” What has changed in that bleak picture? Nothing. The picture is even bleaker now. Buhari: “We have seen the debt profile and the performance of the economy. The question is, what can we do about it, especially the urgent ones like social security, lack of fuel in the country and fraud? The billion Naira question. It is the one question the president and his economic team must address urgently and honestly. Buhari did not expect to be saddled with managing poverty. Now, he has to. The challenge of giving hope to 110 extremely poor people invites nightmare even in the daytime. Poverty and poor people are serious problems for leader in an honest pursuit of positive and lasting changes in his country. You see, if Buhari does not take focused steps to get the kingdom of the economy right, the kingdom of good governance, peace and social development would only beckon to us from the distant shores. Perish the thought. [myad]
Jeralean Talley sits at the head table during a celebration of her 115th birthday at the New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church in Inkster, Michigan May 25, 2014. Talley, who turned 115 on Friday, is believed to be the oldest person in the United States and the second-oldest in the world, according to Gerentology Research Group, which validates ages of the world’s longest living people. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook (UNITED STATES – Tags: SOCIETY) – RTR3QTKT
A Detroit-area woman, Jeralean Talley turned 116 yesterday and will celebrate her birthday twice, including a party today at her church, New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist.
Gerontology Research Group considers her to be the oldest person in the world, based on available records, followed by Susannah Jones of Brooklyn, New York, who turns 116 in July.
Talley expressed gratitude to God but could not offer any secret for her long life, but added:”there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Talley bowled until she was 104 and still likes to catch fish. A daughter, Thelma Holloway, narrated how her mother still has a sharp mind.
Talley was born in Montrose, Georgia, in 1899 and moved to Michigan in the 1930s. her husband died in 1988 at the age of 95.
One of her godson, Tyler Kinloch, 21, who fishes with her said: “Her Number one rule is to treat people how you want to be treated, I definitely carry that with me every single day.”
Talley received $116 dollar every year from a local office of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. [myad]
Former Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abubakar has said that the legacy of authoritarian rule and the unfriendly relationship between the executive and the legislature, and between the executive and the political party, has made it impossible for democracy to take proper root in Nigeria “As leaders, we have not always taken adequate steps to deepen and secure our democracy. The vestiges of intolerance of opposition and criticism remain quite strong.” In a lecture he delivered at the pre-Inauguration Retreat for All Progressives Congress (APC) Senators-Elect, at Ibeto Hotel, Abuja today, Atiku admitted that democracy is still young in the country, but that leaders have failed to understand that the level of relationship between political party, the Legislature and Executive is critical for the success of any democratic government and the development of the society. “Yet it is a relationship that is fraught with uncertainties, tensions, mistrust,conflicts, and struggles. “Our democracy is rather young. Thus we are still grappling with the challenges of defining the contours and boundaries of our various democratic institutions, including the Legislature, Executive and the political party. “Our party, the APC is also still young and, like the other parties, still contending with issues of party building, party structures, internal democracy and the nature of the relationship between Party and the government, including the Legislature and the Executive. “Each still struggles to understand its roles, powers, and limits, while engaged with the others. The challenges posed by the complexity of the relationship among these institutions and the individuals implicated in them can sometimes be serious enough to affect governance and threaten the stability of the polity.” Atiku also took a look at the structure of the Nigerian economy, with the state as the most important source of economic opportunity, adding that such arrangement intensified the struggle for state power and helped to shape the relationship between parties and members, among parties and among the various arms of government. According to him, access to state patronage and threats of reprisals by the coercive agencies of the state are often used to keep political actors in line. Full text of the lecture titled: “The Party, Legislature and Executive in Nigeria’s Democratic Consolidation” is hereby reproduced:
I am excited to be here to share with you my thoughts on the relationships among the political Party, the Legislature and the Executive in a democracy. I thank our great party, the APC, for organizing this retreat and for giving me this opportunity. Let me start by heartily congratulating you, our senators-elect, on your electoral victory after what were obviously very tough campaigns. Although the electoral battles were difficult, may I suggest that the real battle is only about to begin: the battle to change Nigeria, to give our people a genuine shot at living their dreams. We have a lot of work to do and we must start immediately. As legislators you will be working with the Executive arm of the government to deliver on the policies and programmes that we promised the people of our country. In making those promises we were drawing broadly form the policy platform of our political party. Thus it is obvious that,in the process of governance,there are linkages between the Party and elected officials, including those in the Legislature and the Executive. And do not forget the judiciary because whatever you do in the exercise of your constitutional mandate must be within the ambit of the law, and it is the judiciary which has the responsibility to interpret the law. How the political party, the Legislature and Executive relate with one another is critical for the success of any democratic government and the development of the society. Yet it is a relationship that is fraught with uncertainties, tensions, mistrust,conflicts, and struggles. Our democracy is rather young. Thus we are still grappling with the challenges of defining the contours and boundaries of our various democratic institutions, including the Legislature, Executive and the political party. Our party, the APC is also still young and, like the other parties, still contending with issues of party building, party structures, internal democracy and the nature of the relationship between Party and the government, including the Legislature and the Executive. Each still struggles to understand its roles, powers, and limits, while engaged with the others. The challenges posed by the complexity of the relationship among these institutions and the individuals implicated in them can sometimes be serious enough to affect governance and threaten the stability of the polity. That our democracy is still young is not the whole story however. As leaders, we have not always taken adequate steps to deepen and secure our democracy. The legacy of authoritarian rule has not helped matters.Therefore, the vestiges of intolerance of opposition and criticism remain quite strong. Also the structure of the Nigerian economy, with the state as the most important source of economic opportunity, intensifies the struggle for state power and helps to shape the relationship between parties and members, among parties and among the various arms of government. Access to state patronage and threats of reprisals by the coercive agencies of the state are often used to keep political actors in line. In this presentation I have decided to lump together the Party, the Legislature and the Executive because they are interrelated. The Legislature and the Executive are by-products of the Party and, by extension, products of the people in a presidential system of government. I shall be making three arguments. 1. That in order for us to succeed as a party in government and for our democracy to endure, the Party, the Legislature and the Executive must work in concert rather than see one another as a competitor or rival. 2. That lawmaking for the overall good of our country requires that the Legislature, including the Senate, has the autonomy to discharge its legislative and oversight functions 3. For these to happen and be sustained, internal party democracy and electoral reforms are necessary to ensure that the people’s will always finds expression in governance. The Party, The Legislature and The Executive The political party is the vehicle for the struggle for power in a democracy. Those who seek to serve their people through political office typically do so through the instrumentality of the political party. Ideally the political party is made up of individuals who share common ideas and beliefs about how society should be governed and seek power to actualize same. The Party provides for members the space for the articulation of ideas and visions for the governance of society. The Party is a vehicle for citizen participation in the political process, the organizing centre of discourse, debates, and contentions and consensus moulding for key policies. Thus the Party is critical for democratic governance. Through its mechanisms for member interaction, debates, contests and even discipline, the political party tries to get its interests represented in the Legislature. Internal democracy in the political party is, therefore, important to allow for free expressions by all members and for various tendencies to find space for expression. It is clear, therefore, that parties often contain individuals and groups with varying tendencies, ideas, interests and aspirations. In our multi-ethnic, multi-religious country these sometimes take on ethnic, religious, and regional dimensions as well. This is why I have, for a long time, been a strong advocate of a two-party system for Nigeria. A two-party system would help to narrow differences among parties as a great deal of differences would already be sorted out within each party. Thanks to the sacrifices and hardwork of the leadership of what is today the APC, Nigeria has become, at least for the time-being, a de facto two-party state, with the APC soon to be the governing party and the PDP the main opposition party, and very likely a formidable one. Through legislation, political leaders seek to give legal backing to their vision of society, their programmes and policies. The legislative process, which our senators-elect will be engaged in, allows the vision, programmes and policies of one party, group or individual to contest against those of others. The oversight function of the Legislature is another avenue for parties to ensure that their vision of society, as expressed in legislation, is adhered to by those charged with implementing same. As senators you have another important role, that of confirming some statutory appointments that the president would propose. There are inherent tensions in the relationships among the Party, the Executive and the Legislature. The governing party, after elections, typically expects the Legislature and the Executive to carry out their duties in accordance with the dictates of the Party (or party leaders). These range from appointments, and patronage to the implementation of government programmes. But the Legislature and the Executive typically prefer to be allowed to do their jobs unhindered. While the Party often insists on party supremacy, ideological purity and reward for members, the Executive tends to prefer a free hand in implementing policies and programmes and sometimes sees the Party and Legislature as meddlers.The Executive sometimes claims to be the one that really faces the challenge of governing. The Legislature, on its part, sometimes sees the Executive as high handed and dictatorial and the Party as meddling and unappreciative of the need for compromises as well as the pressures on individual members from their constituents. Legislative Autonomy In our presidential system of government, the different arms have specific functions assigned to them by the constitution. And the autonomy of the three arms is deemed important for checks and balances and accountability. It would be inappropriate, for instance, for the Executive and Judiciary, which have the responsibilities to execute and interpret the laws respectively, to unduly interfere in the manner in which the laws are made. That is why some independence of the law-making arm is essential. That autonomy allows legislators to carefully consider bills and proposals for the overall interest of the society or segments thereof. It allows the Legislature to carry out its oversight functions and to adequately represent the people. In reality, however, the control of state resources, including the instruments of coercion, by the Executive tends to make it the most powerful of the arms of government as well as the political party that assisted it to power. Thus the Executive often tries to erode the autonomy of the Legislature in carrying out its functions and to control or marginalize the Party. As legislators you should guard the autonomy of the Legislature for the interest of our democracy and our country. That means that the Legislature should not be a mere rubber stamp for the wishes and desires of the Executive. It also means the Legislature must be able to acquire from the Executive all the information necessary for its legislative or oversight functions. It means the members of the Legislature cannot be harassed or intimidated by agents of the Executive arm in order to influence how they perform their functions. Legislative autonomy also means that the judiciary should not be allowed to use frivolous injunctions or other legal technicalities to try to undermine the work of the Legislature. But, as legislators, you have to carry out these functions within the context of the party’sprogrammes, the plans of the Executive and the resources available. Legislative autonomy is not a licence to ignore or deliberately pick fights with the Executive. Making laws that are unreasonable or which cannot be implemented helps no one. An instance from our contemporary history is the persistent struggles between the federal Executive and the National Assembly over appropriation of funds. The Executive tends to expect the National Assembly to simply ratify its spending proposals while the National Assembly, in trying to assert its constitutional responsibility and autonomy, sometimes tries to truncate the Executive’s spending plans (often increasing the budgetary outlay year in year out). The Legislature should not see itself as an adversary or competitor to the Executive or try to use its authority to appropriate and carry out oversight to harass or intimidate members of the Executive arm. And it is certainly not a licence for legislators to abandon the Party that brought them to power. It is also important for the Legislature and the Party to understand that the Legislature is not an extension of the governing party. Rather it is the Legislature of the whole country. Thus the opposition parties will have their say and sometimes compromises with the opposition are required to pass important bills and for other legislative work to be accomplished. Problems are bound to arise when the governing party assumes or insists that the Legislature must sign off on all its demands. Both the members of the governing party as well as the opposition parties represent constituents who may have peculiar needs and demands that are not obvious to the national or state leadership of their parties. Parties have to take these into account. I believe that our people would be served better if the Party, the Legislature, and the Executive are guided by the national interest. Legislators are closer to the grassroots and are a sounding board for policies and programmes and peoples’ desires and priorities. They capture the peculiarities and specific needs and challenges of our various localities. A President, for instance, has the whole country as constituency, and should focus more on the big picture while the Legislature brings together people representing particularities. Compromises are key to serving the national interest and avoiding gridlock. It is critical for the Executive to demonstrate an understanding that the Legislature is an institution of state different from the governing party or sitting government. The Executive, therefore, needs to respect and abide by the authority conferred on the Legislature by the constitution. Clearly the national interest requires the Legislature to appreciate the constitutional role and authority of the Executive rather than see it as an adversarial subordinate. The national interest, as the overriding interest, will ensure respect for healthy independence of each arm. It is important that the Legislature, the Executive and the Party work in concert with one another. Creating multiple avenues and occasions for interaction among leaders of the three organs will help. It is reassuring to note that these challenges are not peculiar to young democracies, as we can see from the long-running battles between the White House and the US Congress. Internal Democracy My dear friends, let me suggest that the critical element in ensuring the most fruitful relationship among Party, Legislature and Executive is internal democracy in political parties, free, fair, and credible elections, and a democratic culture in the wider society. These are what will ensure that parties actually represent the interests of members and by extension the wider Nigerian public, and that the government that emerges from elections truly represent that wider public. Internal party democracy ensures that party members get to choose the party leaders and their candidates for elections. Those elected would, therefore, be the true representatives of the people, who would also hold them accountable. Ladies and gentlemen, a great deal of the credit for the relative success of our 2015 general elections has deservedly gone to the commitment and integrity of the leadership of the INEC and the use of technology. However these should not be taken for granted. The sustenance of our democracy is too important to be hinged on the chance of a determined and resolute INEC leadership. Thus we need to return to our unfinished business of electoral reforms, including improvements in internal party democracy. As the current fate of the PDP shows, electoral reforms and internal party democracy are in the interest of all, including the governing party. Once more, I congratulate our senators-elect on their electoral victory. And I thank our great party again for inviting me to share these thoughts with you. I wish you fruitful deliberations. I thank you for your attention. [myad]
The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief John Oyegun has said that the incoming federal government headed by President- elect, Muhammadu Buhari will need a whopping N4.1 Trillion to pay outstanding salaries of workers at the federal and state levels as well as offset petrol subsidy payments and to service debts incurred by the outgoing administration of President Goodluck Jonathan.
Oyegun, who spoke today at a two-day retreat for All Progressives Congress (APC) Senators-elect in Abuja, lamented about the bad state of the economy, even as he appealed to Nigerians to show understanding since the expected change in the state of things would not happen overnight.
Oyegun said that there is no magic wand to make the economy better overnight against the realities on the ground, adding that reviving the economy will be a long and tortuous process.
“Make no mistake about it, the days ahead will be tough, and this is not crying wolf. From the first day of this government, a total of 4.1 trillion Naira will be required for sundry expenses, including oil subsidy payment, arrears of salaries at federal and state levels and debt servicing, just to mention a few.”
Oyegun, however gave an assurance that with an APC government, things would surely get better.
“Bold decisions will need to be taken, and this can only be possible if there is a synergy among our party, the National Assembly and the President. We know you will not fail us, and you will not fail Nigerians.
“Put this against the background of the falling oil prices, the unprecedented 60-billion-dollar debt which the outgoing government has left for the incoming one, the largely depleted Excess Crude Account (ECA), the 60 billion dollars that have been lost in the last four years to crude oil theft (and which are perhaps still being lost as we speak), the need to rapidly create jobs for our teeming army of unemployed youths, enhance the security of the citizenry and improve the economy, and you will begin to understand the enormity of the challenges ahead.” [myad]
Senator Ahmed Lawan and Senator George Akume have now agreed to work together against Senator Saraki for the Presidency of the incoming 8th National Assembly. This is even as Senator Bukola Saraki is enjoying the support of 35 Senators for the coveted post.
Under the latest deal struck during the retreat organised for senators-elect by All Progressives Congress (APC), Senator Lawan is being supported for Senate President with Akume stepping down for him and run for the position of Deputy Senate President.
The new consensus arrangement was brokered by some APC senators under the aegis of ‘Senate Unity Forum’ comprising senators-elect from various zones of the country.
They declared: “we, the Senate Unity Forum comprising senators- elect from various states and various zones of Nigeria, have met, held extensive discussions and resolved to support Senator Ahmed Lawan as Senate President and Senator George Akume as the Deputy Senate President of the 8th Senate.”
According to the newly elected Senator from Benue state, Senator Barnabas Gemade who read out the statement on behalf of the pro-Lawan group at the Ibeto Hotel lobby in Abuja, decision was made in the collective best interest of the party and the country.
However, not long after declaring their position, the pro-Saraki group of senators led by Senator Dino Malaye addressed Journalists at the hotel, dismissing the Lawan’s group as a minority position.
Senator Melaye who stormed the hotel, venue of the retreat being held for APC Senators with 24 senators, told Journalists that 35 out of the 59 senators elected on the APC platform have decided to endorse the candidacy of Senator Bukola Saraki for the office of the senate presidency.
He read out a statement titled: “Resolution of the adoption of Saraki as sole candidate for the office of the senate president of the 8th Assembly by 35 senators.” [myad]
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