by crossriverwatch admin
Honorable John Gaul Lebo, member representing Abi State Constituency, in the Cross River State House of Assembly has disclosed to CrossRiverWatch in an interview that the 40 Billion Naira bond approved by the House was done without adequately informing members who are not in the leadership of the House.
John Gaul said the sms invitation to come for sittings which is the usual practice from the office of the Clark, did not come on this particular occasion describing it as an ambush.
He said, “The motion for the resolution to support the bond to recapitalize the state debt came up and because it coincided with the day we were resuming and the Bond needed to be taken, the few members around took the resolution without our consent, without our knowledge, we were not aware, the usual SMS from the Clark didn’t come, they formed a quorum but some of us were angry that a matter as important as that; they should have informed us”.
He denied that there was any attempt to impeach the Speaker but accepted the existence of a group known as G17 in the House which he is part of that threatened the Speaker and other members of the leadership of the House to resign because of poor performance.
His word, “There was no time the House tried impeaching the Speaker apart from the first impeachment attempt, I’m not aware of any other. What I know is that there is a group of 17 lawmakers who are not part of the leadership of the House, those in charge of the daily running of the House, like the Speaker, Deputy Speaker, Whip, Deputy Whip, Majority Leader, Deputy Majority Leader, Minority Leader, and Advisers of Mr. Speaker.
“When we came back from recess we had a meeting within the 17 of us where we did a performance review of our operational frame work and identified that things are not going the way we wanted; we are not sitting on time, a lot of delays, and release of funding among others.
“The 17 of us apart from those who are members of the leadership of the House met and had a discussion and agreed that we need to have an engagement with the Speaker and other members of the leadership which after the meeting, we had the engagement with them in what we called our executive session where we put out all these matters before them, they were able to answer us respectably more than half but there are about three to four issues we had to go to the governor to answer us appropriately.
“The situation escalated and we demanded to have a meeting with His Excellency which we had, we took a decision and asked the leadership to resign. The manner in which this whole engagement was handled there is no feedback plan; it was some kind of relationship by ambush”. He said.
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