In order to end the National Assembly crisis, the camp supporting Hon. Yakubu Dogara had on Tuesday, July 7, decided to concede the position of the House leader to the camp supporting Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila.
However, they insisted that the House leader will neither come from the Southwest nor the Northeast, which essentially meant that Gbajabiamila could not have the position for himself.
To compensate Gbajabiamila, they offered to make him head of the AdHoc Committee on Constitution Review in place of being the majority leader of the 8th Assembly.
The spokesman for the Dogara group, Abdulmumin Jibrin, added that if the Gbajabiamila group did not accept the concession, all the APC caucuses in the House would go for an election to decide who would become the majority leader as well as the other three positions in the house.
He had said: “The entire APC members would hold an election to elect the House leaders. If someone says he has 174 members, fine; let us hold an election and see if he actually has that majority he claims,” Jibrin told a news conference.
However, it is believed that Gbajabiamila turned down the offer from the camp of Dogara.
At a meeting with the peace committee chaired by Sokoto State Governor, Aminu Tambuwal, the Gbajabimaila group restated its stance that the decision of the APC on the allocation of the offices must stand.
The group would however, agree with the Dogara camp on the proposal of conducting elections to pick House Leaders, as the only acceptable compromise.
A member of the group, Rufai Chachangi, said this in a statement.
“To the best of our knowledge, no counter-offer has been made to the APC Loyalists’ group after her first meeting with Tambuwal peace committee, wherein the APC loyalists clearly stated that in line with party supremacy resolution reached at the last APC NEC meeting, the position of the party on Femi Gbajabiamila as the House Leader is non-negotiable.”
“However, as a group that wants peace and quick solution to the logjam in the House, the APC Loyalists group would equally subscribe to an election among entire members of the APC House Caucus, where all members, irrespective of zones, would exercise their right to elect their principal officers.”
