By Chinelo Obogo
The Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, has assured that the review of the 1999 Constitution will be completed before the end of the year.
Speaking yesterday during the joint retreat of the Senate and House of Representatives Committees on the exercise in Lagos, Ekweremadu, who is the chairman of the Senate Committee, explained that for the first time, the Senate would not present the reviewed sections of the constitution as a single document, but as separate bills to be treated on merit.
He said: “Our hope is that up to 90 of the state Houses of Assembly will approve it when it gets transmitted to them. We also hope that before the end of 2017, the exercise would have been concluded. We cannot over emphasise the role of the state Houses of Assembly because their consent of the revised constitution is very crucial.”
The Senate Minority Leader, Senator Godswill Akpabio, who fielded questions from newsmen shortly after the retreat was declared open, said there was need to unbundle the Federal Government and allocate more resources to the states to make them more viable.
He said: “We inherited a unitary system of government, as a result of the 35 years of military regime and what that means is that more power and resources belong to the Federal Government, while states are now salary paying centres.
“At the end of the day, if you conduct an election, you cannot have one policeman in every polling unit in Nigeria because we don’t have that number. More than half of the policemen in this country are involved in VIP protection because we have too many parastatals. We need to unbundle these things. We need to unbundle the Federal Government. We need to reduce some of the responsibilities of the Federal Government, because they don’t have the capacity to handle the things they have lumped upon themselves in the first instance. The number of parastatals and agencies the Federal Government now has will cause 78 per cent of its resources going into recurrent expenses and less than 21 per cent in capital expenses. You cannot put something on nothing and expect it to stand. It is a sad thing that if we don’t unbundle the Federal Government and at the same time reduce the resources that go into Federal Government and reduce the recurrent expenses at the federal level, we can never have infrastructure and without infrastructure, we can never have industrialisation and that is why this exercise is important.”
The governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, who declared the retreat open, insisted that Lagos should have a special status and that states should have the liberty of having their own police force.
He asked why states should be precluded from performing several important constitutional responsibilities and why the federal government held legislative and executive powers on matters of local concern, which over-stretched its administrative and supervisory abilities.
“We must identify and address the provisions in our constitution which have become stumbling blocks in the spirit of true federalism and in our efforts to fully realise our potentials in all sectors of the nation.
“We believe that the principle of appropriateness should guide the sharing of powers between the federal and state governments. Our political experience and long period of military rule has resulted in the Exclusive Legislative List being tilted heavily in favour of the Federal Government at the expense of the state governments”, Ambode said.