House of reps goes on forced break

The House of Representatives embarked on another one-week recess on Wednesday barely 24 hours after its members resumed from their general elections break.

There were two different accounts of what led to the sudden break. While one had it that the recess resulted from the absence of two key principal officers — the Speaker, Mr. Dimeji Bankole, and his Deputy, Alhaji Usman Nafada— the other attributed it to the need to avert a row planned by some aggrieved members.


Under the standing orders and rules of the House, only the two presiding officers (speaker and deputy speaker) can preside over proceedings in the chamber.

The aggrieved lawmakers, led by Mr. Dino Melaye, are protesting the non-payment of their salaries and allowances for 10 months.

It was learnt that Melaye and his colleagues had attempted to accost the Speaker on Tuesday but for the intervention of Nafada and the Chairman of the House Committee on Rules and Business, Mr. Ita Enang.

On Wednesday, Enang claimed that Bankole stayed away from sitting because he was engaged in “consultations on state matters.”

He did not give details of the consultations but merely told the lawmakers, who were waiting for the commencement of the day’s business, that because of the consultations, Bankole had mandated Nafada to preside over the session.

However, he then told his bewildered colleagues that Nafada could not come to the chamber because he was “indisposed.”

Enang announced that due to the development, the House had been adjourned till Wednesday next week.

As the House adjourned, Melaye in company with another lawmaker, Mr. Independence Ogunewe, arrived at the lobby of the National Assembly.

Melaye confirmed that he came prepared to fight with the Speaker.

“I would have beaten him up seriously; it would have been a case of two fighting”, he told journalists.

According to Melaye, the House adjourned abruptly because the leadership was unwilling to pay the salaries and allowances owed some lawmakers since June 2010 in defiance of a court judgment.

He added, “Yesterday (Tuesday), there would have been no sitting. They pleaded with us that by 12pm today (Wednesday), we would receive alert confirming the payment of our money.

“There is no such alert; instead, what we saw in the office of the Clerk of the House was a memo from the Speaker directing that we should be paid only salaries from January to date.”

He explained that paying salaries alone would have amounted to N3.9m for each of the five lawmakers affected from January to April.

He alleged that Bankole directed the payment of only salaries because he (Speaker) had earlier ordered the bureaucracy of the National Assembly to spend “our money on other things between December and January this year.”

Each lawmaker takes home around N10m monthly, salaries and other allowances inclusive.

Enang, however, insisted that the official position of the House was that the Speaker was away on state matters, while Nafada was indisposed.

Melaye was among the 11 members of the House suspended in June last year following a free-for-all in the chamber.

The lawmakers, who were members of a group, the Progressive-Minded Legislators, had taken the leadership of the House to task over the alleged “misuse” of N9bn from the capital vote of the House between 2008 and 2009.

While some of the legislators were later granted pardon by the House, Melaye and five others (Solomon Awhinawhin, Ogunewe, Bitrus Kaze, Anas Adamu, and Doris Uboh) challenged their suspension at an Abuja Federal High Court and won.

The court ordered that the lawmakers should be paid their emolument for the period of the suspension.

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