N’Assembly must approve confab report without delay –Ekwueme

Nigeria’s first vice president, Dr. Alex Ekwueme, at the weekend in Abuja, called on members of the Na­tional Assembly to immedi­ately approve all the recom­mendations of the National Conference.

He urged them to treat the issue with all seriousness and not the way it did with bills.

According to him, the Na­tional Assembly should go ahead and approve the report instead of “taking it sentence by sentence.”

Ekwueme equally stated that it would have been agreed earlier whether the fi­nal report of the conference should be ratified through a referendum or by the National Assembly.

He warned that “if it goes to the National Assembly, it would be done the same way they do with bills.”

The octogenarian spoke with journalists during the in­auguration and commission­ing of a multi-billion naira mega church edifice called “The Refuge” belonging to Paul Adefarasin’s House on the Rock Church, which would be used as a centre of national transformation.

He said: “The decision whether the report of the 2014 confab should be ratified by the National Assembly or through a referendum should have been taken before the conference itself started. Dur­ing our time (1995), it was a military government and there was no National Assembly and the document setting us up specified that whatever de­cision we arrived at would be accepted without amendment by the military government.

“In this case, the issue of whether it should go to the National Assembly or through a referendum should have been agreed before it started. If it goes to the National As­sembly, it would be done the same way they do with bills.

“They will take each sec­tion one by one, clause by clause, phrase by phrase and they will start patching and patching.

“But bearing in mind that the final report was approved unanimously, I think if people are logical and if the National Assembly itself means well, they should go ahead and ap­prove it and not taking it sen­tence by sentence.”