As the quest for the leadership of the 10th national assembly heightens, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) has requested that NASS members should be given the chance to elect their leaders based on qualifications and merit.
The spokesman of NEF, Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, stated this at a colloquium organized by the Democratic Watch Initiative (DWI) in Kaduna with the theme: “Inclusive participation for sustainable democracy.”
He noted that the North did not want just any legislator from the region to become senate president or speaker, “we should hope that he has the highest personal integrity and a good idea of how his position can help him.
Baba-Ahmed said, “Individuals and groups lobbying for positions from northern legislators should be conscious of a number of things. First, the best thing is to respect the independence of the legislature and allow members to choose their leaders.
“Elected legislators waiting for final verdicts from the courts, who are lobbying groups and members of the public to be elected by colleagues or president-elect forget that if successful, they will be leading legislators. Groups which lobby Tinubu for ‘theirs’, should know they will pay a price in the long run. That is how politics is played.”
“All of those contesting for positions should submit to a process by which they are nominated and supported. The same thing should be done at the Senate level. If they, who know each other better than us cannot decide who will serve our interests best as Northerners, then we stop campaigning for all of them.
“We do not want legislators who want to be in positions of power to fulfil personal ambition,” Baba-Ahmed said, adding that the result of the elections showed that the North was the only region that gave huge votes to all the candidates, who contested for the presidency.
“Northern voters had done their job and voted based on convictions over qualities of candidates while some because they were induced; just as some voted along faith lines and others along party lines,” he said.
Prof. Sadiq Abubakar, one of the panellists, asserted that given the proportion of northerners in the National Assembly, the region can produce both the speaker of the House of Representatives and the president of the Senate since they are the majority in both houses.
On his part, the convener of the DWI, Nasir Danbatta, said the colloquium was aimed at “brainstorming and designing a comprehensive manifest for a paradigm shift to a more responsive leadership and adoption of a new selection process that would shift from parochial considerations such as ethnicity, religion and sectionalism and centre on competence, capacity and character as a basis for governance.”
