Pioneer Chief Whip of the 4th Senate, Senator Roland Stephen Owie has urged the National Assembly (NASS) to allow political parties to organise themselves and be in charge of their internal affairs.
Owie spoke against the backdrop of the amendment to the Electoral Act by the National Assembly that provided and legalised imposition of direct primary election as the mode for selecting parties’ standard bearers for elective positions.
He said that under the Ibrahim Babangida junta when direct primary election (Option A4) was decreed and imposed on the two political parties that existed then, billions of naira were spent by the Federal Government to prosecute the series of direct primary elections.
Read him: “I urge my colleagues in the National Assembly to allow political parties to organise themselves and be in charge of their internal affairs, especially now, when discipline within some political parties is at the lowest ebb.
“During the Second Republic, when I was a member of the House of Representatives, on the UPN platform, we gave our bankers standing orders for the deductions of at least 10 percent of our monthly salaries to the Party at the national level, excluding supporting the Party at the State, Local Government Areas and Ward levels. Chief Ebenezer Babatope can testify (to this).
“I am not sure now what percentage of my colleagues’ salaries that goes to their parties at their various levels of operation.
“A Benin parable says that ‘even in prostitution, there is seniority’. Some of us have seen it all. To God be glory!
“Please leave the political parties to organise themselves.”
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