By Haruna Salami
The Federal Government’s request that is before the Senate to borrow the sum of $22.7 billion, as part of 2016 – 2018 External Borrowing (Rolling) Plan, set the red chamber into commotion on Thursday.
As soon as the Chairman, Senate Committee on Local and Foreign Debts, Clifford Ordia laid the report on the floor of the Senate, the upper chamber was thrown into heated debate of whether to consider it or slate it for the next legislative day, in view of the sensitive nature of the report.
When it was finally decided that the report be considered at once, to forestall the media “reporting it before it is debated”, the Senate was thrown into another sharp division.
The Senate President, Ahmad Lawan was not ready to allow members to subject the recommendations of the committee to debate, saying “we are not taking a second reading”.
However, the Senate Minority Leader, Enyinnaaya Abaribe had a different view as he wanted each recommendation be matched to the project.
This did not go down well with Lawan, who told Abaribe to vote against any recommendation he didn’t like.
At a point, it degenerated to verbal exchange between the Senate President and the Minority Leader, making Lawan to caution that “the issue should not be allowed to take partisan colouration.”
It took the intervention of Senator Gabriel Susan, who pleaded with his colleagues for Senate to go on 10 minute “executive session”, to enable him give them further information that would assist the members reach amicable resolution.
Although Lawan objected to this and insisted on voting just “aye” or “nay” on two recommendations of the committee, he was prevailed upon by the majority of the members to go into a short executive session.
When they returned from the executive session, the Senate President simply read out the names of lending institutions and the amount each was lending out to Nigeria, totalling $22.7 billion and asked those in support of the recommendation to say “aye” or those against to say “nay” and as usual, the “ayes” had it.
All the Senate President said was that the Senate committees would oversight the projects the loan would be used to execute, in order to see that “every single dollar and cent is spent on the project it’s meant for”.
