The All Progressives Congress committee on restructuring on Thursday presented its report to the national chairman of the party, John Odigie-Oyegun, with the committee making several recommendations it said were based on opinions of Nigerians.
Some of the key recommendations are resource control, making local government an affair of states, constitutional amendment to allow merger of states, state police, state court of appeal and independent candidacy.
The committee, headed by Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El- Rufai, was set up in August 2017 to formulate the position of the party on true federalism, which clamour gained currency over a year ago.
The committee initially had 10 members but this was later expanded to 23 members.
According to its mandate, the committee was to distill the true intent and definition of true federalism as promised by the party during the last electioneering campaign, and to take a studied look on the report of the various national conferences, especially that of 2014; and come up with recommendations.
Submitting the report at the party’s secretariat, Mr. El-Rufai said 8,014 people were engaged in the process of their research and that Nigerians indicated interest in 24 issues.
Out of these 24 items, the committee made recommendation on 13 in its report, which has four volumes.
“After four months of rigorous research, we are pleased to inform the chairman we have completed our assignment and are here to present our report. Our report is in four volumes,” the committee chairman said.
“The report is in four volumes with Volume One containing background information of the research and recommendations; Volume Two, Action plans from the research to implement its resolution and draft of bills; Volume 3, Media reports and the result of the online survey of the issue; and Volume Four, the appendix- summary of all memoranda received.
“I’ll like to highlight some principal recommendation by the committee. We articulated 14 issues re-occuring in previous conferences.
“At the end of our rigorous research, debates and deliberations, we came up with 24 items that Nigerians have indicated interest views that balance our federation.
“These items are; creation of states, merger of states, delegation principle, fiscal federalism, devolution of power and resources between state, federal and local governments, federating units, form of government, independent candidacy, land tenure system, local government autonomy ,power sharing and rotation, resource control, types of legislature, demand for affirmation for vulnerable groups; people with disabilities, women and youth, ministerial appointment, citizenship, state constitution, community participation, minimum wage, governance, judiciary, state re-alignment and border adjustment, circular status of the federation; and referendum.
“We articulated only 13 issues from the various opinions expressed by Nigerians in our engagement, identified these 24 issues for which the committee deliberated and has made recommendations in the report.
“We went ahead to look at these recommendations to convert them into concrete actions that the party, government and the national assembly can take to re-balance our federation.
“The first item that we thought needed legislative action is merger of states because creation of states is already in the Constitution; so there is a procedure, so there was no action needed.
“However, it is appropriate to point out, Mr. Chairman, that only 36 percent of Nigerians want more states created. So majority of Nigerians don’t want creation of states.”
“So, the first recommendation for which we have proposed a draft bill for constitution amendment is the merger of states.
“Though there was no consensus from stakeholders on the merger of states, we felt that we should propose a bill that allows state to merge and it is up to the party, the National Assembly and the people of Nigeria to decide on that. But we drafted a bill that is there for the party and the government to move on with.”
~Premium Times
0 comments:
Post a Comment