Lawmakers’ suspension: Speakership election causes division in Benue Assembly

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The Majority Leader of Benue State House of Assembly, Saateer Tiseer, has admitted division in the House, leading to the recent suspension of four lawmakers.

The state assembly had on Monday suspended four members for three months.

The suspended members, who were said to be leaders of G-22 of the house are; Solomon Gyila, representing Gwer West state constituency; Douglass Akya, representing Makurdi South; Dyako Ashwa, representing Konshisha state constituency; and Anthony Agom of Okpokwu state constituency.

According to Tiseer, the division of the House started during the election of the speaker in which Aondona Dajoh won.

Asked about the insinuations that those who were against the Speaker were not considered for official vehicles recently procured by the House, Tiseer confirmed the allocation of vehicles to 17 of the 31 members.

He said, “The state government actually ordered vehicles for all the members but only 17 have been delivered and the vehicles were allocated to those who supported the speaker, at least to hold our support base.”

While stating that other vehicles would soon be delivered, the majority leader asked those yet to get to wait until the remaining vehicles arrive.

Speaking on the reason for suspension of the four members, the majority leader said that the affected members tried to embarrass the state governor, Rev Fr Hyacinth Alia.

He said, “The four members were suspended because they constituted themselves to a clog in the wheel of progress.

“We were supposed to sit after the Assembly staff called off the strike. Normally, when we are to sit like that, we always have an executive session where we itemise the things we have to discuss and if there are issues that are involving members and this is what we did and the executive session was successful.

“So, at the time we decided to go to the chamber, some members who constituted themselves to be G22 (these are members who are not part of the principal officers of the house), it’s a pressure group.

“They said they had something to say but we now asked what it was that they could not raise during the executive session.

“In fact, the speaker had already left and I was the one who asked the leader of the G 22 what did they want and they said I should ask the speaker to come out, I went and told speaker that they said they wanted him to address them but the speaker said that he asked everyone earlier to speak out if there was any issue and the speaker said he was not going to attend to them.”

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