By Chibuike Nwabuko
Abuja (Sundiata Post) – The weekly Federal Executive Council, (FEC) meeting slated to start by 10am today has been shifted to 4pm.
Although the reason for shifting the FEC meeting to 4pm was not made public, it may not be unconnected to an engagement of the Vice President, Prof Yemi Osinbajo.
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo who is to preside over the meeting was said to have been in Lagos in the early hours of the day.
The Vice President is to stand in for President Muhammadu Buhari who last week embarked on a 10-day private visit to the United Kingdom.
Sundiata Post recalls that President Buhari left the country after official engagement in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital on Thursday last week and he is expected to return to Nigeria at the weekend.
Recalls that the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) had in a statement on the 29th pf April, shortly after President Buhari left for London, alleged that President Muhammadu Buhari embarked on “private voyage without transmitting power as required by the constitution and described it as an act of dereliction.
According to the party, this action “confirms that the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Buhari Presidency are not interested in governance but seeks to vacate our constitutional order and foist an authoritarian system on our country.
“Such dereliction of office can only come from leaders, who do not have respect for the people they governed but always muscling their way to power through intimidation, harassment as well as official manipulations, as witnessed in the rigging of the February 23 Presidential election by the APC, PDP said,”
The PDP’s statement signed by Kola Ologbondiyan further reads:
Moreover, Mr. President’s abandoning of governance, particularly at this critical time when our nation is facing grave security and economic challenges, signposts the level of impunity and recklessness that will characterize our nation in the next four years, if the stolen Presidential mandate is not retrieved from the APC.
What else, beside an authoritarian propensity, can explain why the Buhari Presidency relegated our Constitutional Order by declaring the application of Section 145 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) which directs that the President transmits power whenever he is travelling out of the country on vacation, as a mere “convention”.
Authoritarian tendencies are usually characterized by absolute lack of trust on other government functionaries, which could likely explain the failure to transmit power to the Vice President. Such proclivity can also lead to a sequestering of institutions of government, if not checked.
The import of this relegation of Section 145 is also a clear absence of a constitutional command structure which leaves our nation at the mercy of the extremely corrupt, vicious and anti-people cabal with whom President Buhari presided over the most corrupt and most incompetent administration, which wrecked our economy, divided our nation and opened her up for escalated insecurity.
Such dereliction at the high levels emboldens bandits, bolsters insurgents and fuels cruel acts such as extra-judicial killing, illegal arrests, detention of innocent citizens, constitutional violations, attack on institutions of democracy as well as reckless looting of our national treasury by members of the cabal because they know that “nothing will happen.”
The PDP therefore urges Nigerians to unite in condemning this act of impunity in the interest of our nation even as they earnestly await the retrieval of the stolen Presidential mandate at the tribunal.
Our nation, is in dire need of a legitimate, people-oriented, responsible and responsive government that will foster respect for rule of law as well as due regard to other arms and institutions of government, particularly the judiciary and the legislature, in ensuring the general wellbeing and security of all Nigerians.