The Leader of the Senate, Opeyemi Bamidele has called for robust collaboration between the Federal Executive Council and the National Assembly, saying such synergy would help address the hydra-headed challenges bedevilling the country.
Bamidele who stated this in a statement issued by his Media Office on the just-concluded retreat for all senators in Ikot Ekpene, Akwa Ibom State and made available to journalists said such collaboration would enable the realisation of the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu 8-point agenda.
The Senate Leader at the retreat under the theme, ‘Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms in Nigeria,’ said the retreat created an avenue for the key players in both executive and legislative arm of government to ruminate on diverse issues that placed Nigerians under undue socio-economic burdens in the last two decades.
To ensure that the retreat was not another talk shop but a gathering of patriots, who were curiously in search of antidotes to hydra-headed challenges that viciously beset Nigeria, Bamidele set the agenda on how to transform this consensus into reality in nearly all sectors of Nigeria’s economy.
Bamidele specifically recommended a forum where the executive and legislature would always meet to perfect institutional approaches to addressing vicious challenges that threaten Nigeria.
He further delineated the need for such regular sessions, an initiative comparable to quarterly executive-legislative parleys that successive governments in Lagos State have embraced since 1999 to tackle governance challenges through strategic collaboration and collective responses among arms of government. And the outcome, as far as Lagos is concerned, has been enviable.
The former commissioner for information and strategy in Lagos State suggested that such sessions should be held quarterly or biannually, that it should be tailored practically at discussing and perfecting coherent and logical responses to a myriad of socio-economic challenges that complicate the conditions of living and undermine the unity of Nigeria.
Bamidele explained the imperative of holding regular executive-legislative sessions, which other speakers agreed, would open a new vista of strategic collaboration in the overall interest of Nigeria and her teeming populations.
First, according to him, such sessions will give the National Assembly and Federal Executive Council to work out modalities of mainstreaming Tinubu’s eight-point agenda into the programmes of the National Assembly.
Second, he believed, such sessions will speed up the process of developing and initiating innovative legislative frameworks that can aid delivery of enviable public services within a short period.
His argument is pure and simple. He simply argued that actualising Tinubu’s eight-point agenda “entails the collective responsibilities between the two arms of government rather than unilateral roles of the executive.”
The Senate Leader succinctly pointed out that the strategic collaboration should encompass the ministers and chairmen of all standing committees in the Senate and House Committees.
For the President of the Senate, Senator Godswill Akpabio who set the stage for the legislative retreat, where resource persons freely shared divergent views about many challenges confronting the federation it was a forum for building capacity, which every legislator requires to function effectively.
The Senate president observed that the retreat was designed to develop pro-people legislations that could promote enduring peace; guarantee sustainable development and deepen peaceful co-existence, among all Nigerians, irrespective of their ethnic nationalities and religious leaning.
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