The lawmaker representing Ekiti Central in the Senate says the call by Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu for two additional years in office for President Goodluck Jonathan and State Governors has justified his prediction that the proposed national conference is designed to elongate the president's term of office.
The lawmaker representing Ekiti Central in the Senate says the call by Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu for two additional years in office for President Goodluck Jonathan and State Governors has justified his prediction that the proposed national conference is designed to elongate the president's term of office.
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In a statement in Ado-Ekiti, Ojudu said: "My attention has been drawn to a statement made by my colleague and Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu for two additional years for Mr. President and state governors. But just as it fails during regimes of Babangida and Obasanjo, this exercise or adventure will also fail."
Ojudu contended that Nigerians only voted Jonathan for a four-year term which can only be reviewed by another presidential election, stressing that "any attempt to elongate the president's term will be rejected and resisted by Nigerians. It is undemocratic!"
He added: "Nigerians are wiser and are determined to make our democratic experiment succeed more than ever before. The planned tenure elongation can only be in the interest of a few Nigerians and it is capable of bringing the country to its kneel."
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According to Ojudu, there are two pointers to the fact that the proposed national conference is a hatchet job to achieve a predetermined objective of tenure elongation.
One of such, he said, is the position of the president that the outcome of the conference will be brought to the National Assembly and one of the leaders of that legislature is Senator Ekweremadu who is already canvassing for tenure elongation.
Ojudu said Nigerians must by now be seeing the link between the call by Ekweremadu and the proposed national conference.
He said all well-meaning Nigerians should be on high alert at this time that so-called leaders no longer have values or scruples, adding that it should not just be about the condemnation of Ekweremadu's call, but ensuring that "this stillborn proposal is not stealthily smuggled in overnight."
Adding that the Jonathan-led presidency by such proposition has demonstrated the objective of its proposed National Conference, Ojudu warned that they should have it in mind that "Nigeria is not a banana republic where every of their poison offered to Nigerians will be swallowed like a choice-bereaved sheep being goaded to the slaughter."
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