A renowned political and civil rights activist, Aisha Yesufu, has called for the scrapping of the Nigerian Senate stressing that they don’t add anything to governance and therefore must be cut out to reduce cost of governance.
Yesufu made the call in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Lagos.
According to her, until something is done about the cost of running government and corruption, Nigerians will not feel the dividends of democracy.
In her words, “We need to really and critically examine our democracy, look at what fits us, and serve the ordinary people and the masses. The one that will not be too expensive.
“What we have now is too expensive. We need to cut costs and not just continue what we have that has not been working for Nigerians.
“I totally support the call for us to have a unicameral legislature and the scrapping of the Senate; it is very important because the kind of governance that we are practicing is very expensive.
“As a country, we really don’t have that kind of money. Apart from this, the fact is that both the Senate and House of Representatives end up duplicating functions in terms of what they do,” Yesufu said.
She further stated that the Senate had been turned into a retirement home for a lot of incompetent and failed governors who didn’t do anywhere well for the people in their state.
She continued, “It (Senate) is a joke ground; we cannot say what the Senate does is in a really sense different from what the House of Representatives does.
“They (Senators) do nothing special, and at the end of the day, they are paid humongous amounts of our money and such huge allowances for doing nothing different.
“We found out that a good number of them, especially those that are former governors, while they get this humongous salary, they are also collecting pensions from their respective states.
“There is no way democracy can work for the masses with this kind of waste of public funds that could have been directed to put happiness in the face of the common man”, she added.
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