Senate to set up SUB-Committee on State Creation Requests-Ekweremadu

* Canvasses for 1 DCM per pooling Booth to reduce costs of 2011 Elections

Posted By Lateef Lawal

The Senate is to set up a sub-committee on State creation to look at all the requests and advise it on those that meet the requirements.

This was disclose yesterday by the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu while fielding questions today from journalists at the presidential lounge of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport,Lagos.

He said the National Assembly will only consider those State creation requests based on the advise of the committee and added that he could not recall the number of the requests before the Senate now

Speaking on the viability of the States to be created and their fiscal federalism along with the existing ones, the Deputy Senate President explains:'We can still create more states and go along side with fiscal federalism. There are two different concepts. What we tend to do is, first of all decide the nature of federalism we want. If we want the state to be a federating unit, then we should be talking about whether the local government would be part of the constitution or not. The issue of federalism will also deal with the control of natural resources. Should it be along regional lines or be along state lines? So those are two different issues and we intend to deal with all these as we go into the next stage of the constitutional amendment.'

He also speak on the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC), Attahiru Jega, here are excerpts:

"Jega has been consistent that he was going to play by the law and he is not asking for any extension of date.It is the people who are asking for extension of date. Jega personally has never asked for any date. What they wanted us to do is to adjust the period for registration of voters, from 120 days to 60 days minimum, which we have done under the new electoral Act. He is not asking for any date, what is he is asking for is money to go and deal with that. As soon as he gets money I'm sure he will deliver.

Is Jega’ s request N84billion for the 2011 general elections adequate?

Well that is his own estimate that is not mine? It should be adequate. We should be talking about how to save money from that figure and focus on other areas. I think for the purpose of the elections, I think it is reasonable but for a country like ours with so much poverty, it is on the high side.He may have to adjust it to be more realistic.We believe there are other ways we can adjust this.He is looking at one Data Capturing Machine(DCM) per polling booth and we have 120,000 of such (polling booths) ,so if there is anyway we can deal with it in such a way that there could be like two polling both per DCM, I’m sure its going to reduce the figure. We will work it out with him but he is going to get all the support he needs for us