Chairman and other principal officers of the National Conference yesterday said that at no time did the Confab discuss any call for a Presidential Declaration of a Moratorium for tenure elongation for the president and others.
According to a statement issued by the confab Assistant Secretary, Media and Communications, Mr Akpandem James, the conference noted that several publications and commentaries in the media arising from a press conference allegedly addressed by a delegate, Chief Okon Osung, from Akwa Ibom state had claimed that Osung was said to have called for a Presidential Declaration of a Moratorium.
The statement said Osung was quoted to have said: “At this crucial juncture in our national history, a Presidential or National Assembly declaration of a politico-administrative moratorium or cooling-off period before the conduct of the third Transitional Elections scheduled for February 2015 has become an imperative necessity. This calls for a postponement of the or deferment of the scheduled 2015 elections by at least 18 months while retaining all the democratic institutions at all levels of governance and across the entire spectrum of the country’s political divide, without any bias to the statutory termination dates of such democratic institutions.”
It said: “Ordinarily, we would have ignored, as usual, issues raised by Chief Osung in his comments because as a citizen of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, he has a right within the confines of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) to express his personal opinions on any issue of his choice.
“The views expressed by Chief Okon Osung regarding tenure extension for any elected official, based on any reasons cited by him, are entirely personal to him and must not be viewed or regarded to, in any way, have any anything whatsoever to do with the National Conference or any of its committees.”
Continuing, it said: “Such views were never expressed on the floor of the conference, which did not sit in plenary, as at the time the views were made public. It was never heard, never debated or discussed in any manner whatsoever in any of the committees whose reports are already with the management of the conference. Both the leadership of the conference and the other 491 members only read about them in the media just as members of the public did.
“None of these committees either discussed or has made any recommendation or has even mentioned the issue of Presidential Declaration of a Moratorium in their reports as canvassed by Delegate Osung in the media.
“The National Conference, presided over by former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Idris Legbo Kutigi, did not at any point make the issue of tenure extension for any elected official part of a term of reference of any of the 20 committees whose work was already completed before Chief Osung’s agenda was made public by him.”