A new nominee for the board of
Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, Alhaji Saidu Abubakar, who appeared
for screening, stunned senators yesterday with a call that the Upper Chamber be
urgently scrapped to reduce cost of governance.
According to him, the Senate is an
avenue for wastage of scarce economic resources of the country and must go.
Speaking before the Senator Gilbert Nnaji-led Committee on Communications,
Abubakar, who is the candidate for the North-East, said the cost of running the
Senate was high, stressing that it had become imperative that it be scrapped.
According to him, a situation where
senators are paid huge transport allowances, among others, will be a clear
economic loss, if they are also given expensive vehicles. When the committee
presented him with several photographs where he had variously led organized
protests against the Senate, particularly at the gate of the National Assembly
recently, unrepentant Abubakar maintained that he had no regret for his
actions.
He told the senators that he was
still convinced that the Senate was an avenue for wastage of scarce economic
resources of the country. The committee had earlier pointed out grave
irregularities in the personal records of the nominee.
Aside from the birth certificate,
there were only copies of court affidavit and police extract dated the same
day. After Abubakar had been nominated, he claimed loss of his credentials and
it was discovered that the highest academic qualification he had was a diploma
certificate in computer Science from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi.
The certificate attached to his
resume, was dated September 23, 2016, indicating that it was issued after his
nomination by President Muhammadu Buhari. When requested by the senators to
throw more light on why he chose to present documents prepared shortly after
his nomination and also why he believed that he was qualified to function as a
national commissioner in such a critical agency as NCC, the nominee said he
didn’t bother to go for the credentials.
H e said he “only went to school
merely for knowledge, having been self-employed, prior to his nomination.”
Speaking with journalists after the screening, Abubakar, who insisted that the
Senate should be scrapped, said: “It is not true that I told members of the
committee that the Senate should be scrapped.
They asked me whether I was part of
the group that agitated for the scrapping of the Senate and I said yes because
of so many things involved in the Senate and their budget. “They asked me to
state the reasons we were agitating for the scrapping of the Senate, I said it
is because of their huge budget; they consume a lot of resources from the
government; they put it in their own budget. ‘’Also, they have transport allowance
and, yet, they budget a lot of money to acquire vehicles.”
Source:Vanguard Newspaper
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