The Senate has dismissed insinuations that its decision to review the Electoral Act, which would change the sequence of the 2019 election timetable, was targeted at President Muhammadu Buhari. Reacting to the walk out by some Senators during voting on the Act, senate spokesperson, Senator Sabi Aliyu Abdullahi (APC-Niger North) said it was all part of democracy.
Speaking to Vanguard, Abdullahi said: “That is their view. I have never been part of anybody sitting down to say that we should do this because we are targeting the President. So, I don’t know what they are talking about.“Maybe they have information that I don’t have but I don’t think it is about that because basically for us in the Senate, we passed our version of the Electoral Act Amendment a year ago and we wanted the House of Representatives to concur, they said no because they also had their own in the works.
"So in circumstances like that, we had to wait for them to finish. When they finished, one of the major differences was the sequence of the election.“Like I said, fortunately, or unfortunately, whichever way you look at it, by our legislative procedure, the moment we come together, there is concurrence or conference, which are two different things.“Concurrence means they don’t have a similar bill with us but they have done so much legislative work and we are bound by legislative reciprocity to accept that our colleagues at the other side have done a thorough job and we should accept it except if we see one or two things then we may decide to say no.
"So, we have a way of harmonizing that and we concur with those minor amendments. But in this case, they passed their own bill, and we passed our own. The next thing is to have a joint conference committee chaired by a Senator and this was what happened.“By our rule, where they have proposed a clause, which is not in our own or we propose a clause which they do not have, we cannot talk about a merger or try to marry the two, we have to talk about adoption.