Constitution review: Fresh crisis hits N/Assembly

Taiwo Adisa, Abuja - 21.05.2009

A fresh round of controversy has hit the renewed effort at constitution amendment by the National Assembly as Senators on Wednesday rejected a plan to have them review only issues presented to them by President Umaru Yar’Adua.

A meeting of the Senate wing of National Assembly’s Constitution review committee which held on Wednesday ended with a note of dissent from the 44 members.

It was gathered that the Senators were firmly against the plot to have the constitution reviewed only on the issues of electoral reforms as well as the land reform bill presented to the lawmakers by the president.

Some lawmakers, who spoke at the meeting, presided over by the Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, insisted that the constitution amendment exercise would not be worth its name if the lawmakers were resisted to the agenda of the presidency.

Some of them were said to have alluded to the fact that restricting themselves to the electoral reform bills would amount to succumbing to a blackmail from the executive, which was said to have covertly subverted the holistic review of the constitution by engineering crisis through members of House of Representatives.