10th Speakership: Opposition Denies Endorsing Any Candidate

•Meets Obi, Kwakwanso, inaugurates zonal coordinators to interface with stakeholders

Udora Orizu and Juliet Akoje in Abuja

The minority caucus for the 10th House of Representatives, has reiterated that, it has not endorsed any aspirant for the office of speaker.

The caucus also known as ‘greater majority’ going by its collective number of 182 member-elect across minority parties, made this known at its fourth general meeting in Abuja, yesterday.

The lawmakers had last week met with the outgoing Speaker, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila and disclosed that during their talks, frank exchanges were shared, all sides agreed to embark on consensus building, in the interest of the institution of the legislature.

But 48 hours later, the group claimed the caucus only met with Gbajabiamila and APC’s consensus speakership candidate Tajudeen Abbas, who also engaged its members and made his own presentation to solicit their support to work with him just like the other aspirants had done.

Addressing journalists at the meeting, the Convener, Hon. Fred Agbedi (PDP, Bayelsa), reiterated that they were yet to endorse any of the aspirants as their candidate, disclosing also that they met with Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi and his counterpart in NNPP, Rabiu Kwakwanso as part of their ongoing consultation.

The lawmaker while disclosing that the group has set up zonal coordinators that would interface with party’s stakeholders for the achievement of their objective, said they had not been given any mandate by their governors on what to do.

“Let me quickly say that if we must do the right thing, if we must actually represent our people, we need to be guided and to be guided we mean that we need to interact with our leaders in our constituencies, we need to interact with our colleagues from the various states.

“We need to interact with our party stakeholders and all that in arriving at a decision that will be well for us. Your conveners and other leaders have not either on your behalf or for you adopted anybody for the office of presiding officers. That will only take place when that agreement is reached by all of us. That decision will be our collective decision.

“But I am even saying before we get to that decision, we are going to ensure that take, for example, I come from Bayelsa State, I should be able to speak with my governors, party leaders so that whatever I key into is with the understanding that my state leaders are on the same page with and that’s what we expect of all of us to do. So, that we don’t ambush Mr. A or Mr. B.

“So, I wan to assure you that we will lead ourselves to arrive at a collective decision and in doing that, we have also resolved to have state coordinators, who are going to meet at their different state levels, eventually also have zonal coordinators who will also work at the zonal level in collating decision that they will finally come up with after due consultation,” Agbedi said.