NOTWITHSTAN-DING the spate of criticisms that greeted the plan by the presidency to send a bill containing a single term proposal for president and governors to the National Assembly , it emerged, at the weekend, that President Goodluck Jonathan is not about to jettison the plan.
It was also learnt that the proposed bill will contain transitional provisions, which will address some concerns about tenure of first term governors.
A source said that one of the things already being addressed is the issue of governors already sworn in on a four-year term and that the transitional provisions would take care of it.
“It is being proposed that one of the transitional clauses should indicate that the incumbent president, having ruled himself out of re-election in 2015, will not benefit from the new single term provision. It will also be stated that the eight first term governors, who will be caught in the new bill, will not be barred from re-contesting for their offices in the new constitution,” a source in the know said.
It was learnt that a committee, which reviewed the report of the Inter-Party Committee on Electoral Reform, had proposed that the first term governors should either be allowed to re-contest for a second four-year tenure or contest for the new six-year tenure and that the National Assembly and political stakeholders should look for the way out.
It was learnt that President Jonathan was “far more convinced” that the nation’s developmental challenges needed to be fully addressed and that with distractions coming from re-election issues, political office holders would hardly be able to concentrate on the problems.
It was also gathered that some of the statistics relied upon by the government to arrive at the six-year single tenure proposal included the unofficial financial records of the last election, which were considered staggering for a developing nation.
For instance, a source said that the nation spent between N700 billion and N1 trillion to prosecute the last general election. This, according to the source, included both the official and unofficial funds committed to the election by the Federal Government, the political parties and the individual contestants.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) gulped about N120 billion to prosecute the 2011 elections. While the different political parties had records of officials funds deployed in the conduct of the elections, other sources were said to have documented unofficial costs the election constituted to the nation.
A source said that besides the issue of distraction over second term, the nation could not afford to consistently commit N1 trillion to election matters every four years.
It was also gathered that the presidency was using the constitutional amendment issue as part of the transformation agenda of the president.
“How can you plan to transform the country when you are not tackling the main issue of tenure? It is the most important issue to office holders and that is why the president is starting very early,” a source said.
It was further gathered that giving voting rights to Nigerians in the diaspora would also form a key aspect of the proposed bill.
The issue of voting power for Nigerians in the diaspora is said to have been taken care of in the new bill.
The Federal Government is to fine-tune the critical issues about registration and locations before sending the bill for consideration, a source further said.
It was learnt that the government is studying the operations of the immigration service, as far as passport issuance to Nigerians in the diaspora is concerned.
The government is said to be looking at the operations of the immigration service with a view to adopting its procedures in registering Nigerians in the diaspora for election.
Meanwhile, as Nigerians continued to express their views on the proposed single term of six years for the president and governors, with effect from 2015, strong indication emerged, at the weekend, that leading northern politicians across the various political parties along with major interest groups in the North are rallying against the proposal.
It was gathered that since the proposal was made public and its defence by President Good-luck Jonathan at the last National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Abuja, the politicians had been meeting behind closed doors to stra-tegise on how to kill the bill whenever it was presented to the National Assembly.
This is coming just as a federal lawmaker from the North, Honourable Herma Hembe, vowed that the National Assembly would give the single term tenure bill the treatment given to the “third term” bill of former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.
He said “we are just waiting for the bill, we will respond swiftly in line with the yearnings of Nigerians.”
Nigerian Tribune learnt that a prominent politician and former presidential aspirant of one of the leading political parties was said to have made contacts with other northern leaders and major interest groups, last week, on the need to come together, irrespective of their political or religious differences and fight the proposal in the overall interest of the North.
It was gathered that already. the likes of the chairman, Northern Political Leaders Forum (NPLF), Mallam Adamu Ciroma; Chief Solomon Lar; former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida; the presidential candidate of Congress for Positive Change (CPC), Alhaji Muhammadu Buhari; former National Security Adviser (NSA), General Aliyu Gusau; former vice-president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar; former president, Alhaji Shehu Shagari; former Senate Leader, Dr Olusola Saraki and a host of others were being consulted on the need to reject the new agenda.
According to the source, “we will go out to all the 19 northern state houses of Assembly to scuttle it and we will mobilise against it at the public hearings, we will not even allow it to see the light of the day beyond the National Assembly.”
The Nigerian Tribune learnt that various meetings had been slated for Abuja, Kano, Sokoto, Kaduna and even in Saudi Arabia in the days ahead, on how to tackle the proposal should the president make good his intention to present the single term bill to the National Assembly for consideration.
“We decide to include Saudi Arabia because during the fasting period, some key figures may be away for the lesser Hajj, we don’t want to leave out who’s who in the struggle,” the source declared.
Speaking in the same vein, Hon Hembe assured Nigerians that he along with other lawmakers in the National would do everything humanly possible “to kill the evil bill at birth”.
“We, I mean the members of the House of Representatives, have been vindicated by the choice of our Speaker and Deputy Speaker respectively despite desperate attempts to dictate to us who should be our leaders and I’m deadly sure that whenever the bill is brought to us, we will look into it thoroughly and act accordingly, we are not rubber stamp House of Representatives for the executives,” he explained.
He urged Nigerians not to lose any sleep over whether or not the National Assembly would be by their side when considering the bill at the appropriate time.