Chidi Samuel|Ekiti state governor and chairman, Nigeria’s governor’s forum, Kayode Fayemi, has called for the scrapping of the country’s upper legislative chamber, the Senate.
The national assembly presently consists of a senate with 109 members and the house of representatives with 360 members.
But speaking at the just concluded 25th edition of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group conference, Fayemi advocated that the country should look into the size and cost of governance.
Fayemi said, “We do need to look at the size of government in Nigeria and I am an advocate of a unicameral legislature. What we really need is the house of representatives because that is what represents.”
“You have three senators from little Ekiti and you have three senators from Lagos state. It’s a no-brainer that it’s unequal, I guess the principle is not proportionality but that if you are a state, you get it automatically but I think that we can do away with that. There are several things that we can do away within the government.
“The Oronsaye report that proposed mergers of several MDAs that are doing the same thing is something that the government should pay serious attention to and reduce the resources being expended on them.”
The Ekiti state governor, however defended the expenditure of security vote by governors stating that exists all over the world in various forms.
He said, “Security vote exists in various forms and not just in Nigeria. They may not call it security vote, they may call it contingency vote.
“The important thing is the government utilises a wide range of mechanism to guarantee security in a state and it is not just ammunition and weapons that I am talking about. Even keeping the touts in check is a security challenge in many states and managing that process may cost you money that you cannot necessarily show the auditors.
“The other element which states don’t get credit for is what we do for the federal police. Nigeria is the only federation in the world that I know runs a centralised police force. You have federal police that is not being funded properly by the federal government so the responsibility for funding those guys that are posted to your state is on the state. You buy uniforms, ammunition, pay allowances, do life insurance, buy vehicles; that is not provided for and that is security vote because we are expected to protect the citizens.
“Let me also say this, you will not hear it out there from anybody. When people are kidnapped and their relatives are harassing the governor or security institutions to track down the victims.
“We track them down, we know where they are. What you hear us say outside is that we don’t pay ransom and we stick by that. We don’t pay ransom, we don’t bribe kidnappers but we get those people released.
“I will not go into the ugly details but we spend money in ensuring that we get abductees and victims out of harm’s way because ultimately that is what the victim wants us to do. The parents don’t want to hear the story that we don’t pay a ransom. You just have to whatever you have to do to ensure that we get our citizens out of danger.”
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