Edo PDP chairman calls on INEC to conduct bye-election for 14 vacant seats

Edo State Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Hon Tony Azegbiemi, has called on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct bye-election into 14 seats of the state House of Assembly which were declared vacant in December 2019 by the Speaker of the House, Hon Frank Okiye.

The vacant seats belong to the 14 members-elect who refused to present themselves for inauguration in June 2019, when Governor Godwin Obaseki issued the proclamation for the inauguration of the state’s 8th assembly.

Azegbiemi, in a television interview monitored in Benin Sunday, hinted the party would formally write INEC to conduct fresh elections into the seats on the ground that the people in the constituencies were being denied representation in the assembly.

“We are very worried because about a million people have lost their voices in the house of assembly; their voices are not being heard, nobody is talking about them, nobody is representing their interests. We are worried about it because these are people that voted for the party, they voted for the governor in the last governorship election and we want them to be represented in the house of assembly and apart from the demand we are making now for INEC to commence the process, we are going to follow it up with a letter as a party, we are going to write INEC officially to carry out its constitutional responsibility by conducting election into this 14 constituencies,” he added.

The 14 members-elect, it would be recalled, had on Thursday, August 6, 2020, gathered at a private residence at Ugbor area of Benin GRA, where they got a retired Deputy Clerk of the house to inaugurate them and went shed to elect Mr Victor Edoror as a speaker.

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They later that day stormed the Anthony Enahoro House of Assembly complex and were engaged in a battle of supremacy by people loyal to the Okiye speakership. Three other members of the Okiye-led house later joined the 14 but those three had since returned to the mainstream house after the All Progressive Congress, APC, lost the September 19 governorship election to the incumbent Governor Obaseki of the PDP.

Efforts to reach the factional Speaker, Hon Victor Edoror was not successful as he did not pick repeated calls and same for one of the members of the factional assembly, Washington Osifo.

Though the 14 members-elect are in various courts, challenging the propriety of declaring their seats vacant by Okiye, they, however, continue to issue parliamentary orders on some actions and activities of Governor Obaseki, such as the nomination and clearing of fresh commissioners and the move to secure the loan for infrastructure from a commercial bank.

NIGERIAN TRIBUNE