PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari’s nominee for the board of Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, Alhaji Saidu Abubakar, who appeared for screening, stunned senators yesterday with a call that the Upper Chamber be urgently scrapped to reduce cost of governance.
According to him, the Senate is an avenue for wastage of scarce economic resources of the country and must go.
Speaking before the Senator Gilbert Nnaji-led Committee on Communications, Abubakar, who is the candidate for the North-East, said the cost of running the Senate was high, stressing that it had become imperative that it be scrapped.
According to him, a situation where senators are paid huge transport allowances, among others, will be a clear economic loss, if they are also given expensive vehicles.
When the committee presented him with several photographs where he had variously led organized protests against the Senate, particularly at the gate of the National Assembly recently, unrepentant Abubakar maintained that he had no regret for his actions.
He told the senators that he was still convinced that the Senate was an avenue for wastage of scarce economic resources of the country.
The committee had earlier pointed out grave irregularities in the personal records of the nominee.
After Abubakar had been nominated, he claimed loss of his credentials and it was discovered that the highest academic qualification he had was a diploma certificate in computer Science from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi.
The certificate attached to his resume, was dated September 23, 2016, indicating that it was issued after his nomination by President Muhammadu Buhari.
When requested by the senators to throw more light on why he chose to present documents prepared shortly after his nomination and also why he believed that he was qualified to function as a national commissioner in such a critical agency as NCC, the nominee said he didn’t bother to go for the credentials.
He said he “only went to school merely for knowledge, having been self-employed, prior to his nomination.”
Speaking with journalists after the screening, Abubakar, who insisted that the Senate should be scrapped, said:
“It is not true that I told members of the committee that the Senate should be scrapped.
They asked me whether I was part of the group that agitated for the scrapping of the Senate and I said yes because of so many things involved in the Senate and their budget.
“They asked me to state the reasons we were agitating for the scrapping of the Senate, I said it is because of their huge budget; they consume a lot of resources from the government; they put it in their own budget.
‘’Also, they have transport allowance and, yet, they budget a lot of money to acquire vehicles.”
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