Saraki: Bill on devolution of power may still scale through

Senate President Bukola Saraki says the bill on the devolution of power may scale through after the national assembly returns from recess.

He said this on Saturday while addressing journalists in Ilorin when the ‘I Support Not Too Young To Run’ group visited him over the recent passage of the ‘Not Too Young To Run’ bill.

The upper legislative chamber had voted against the bill on power devolution during its recent voting on constitutional amendments.

But Saraki said there’s still hope for the bill.

“The fact that the devolution bill lost that day does not mean it will not scale through after the recess,” he said.

“As you know that in the senate we have three senators representing each state of the federation and the federal captial territory (FCT). Whatever we do there, we must engage and have a feedback from our constituencies.

“I believe that if this constitutional amendment had come about eight months ago, the devolution bill would have been passed easily. But I think we must be honest with ourselves that presently, there is a lot of mistrust in the country.

“The air is very polluted. Let us be very frank and that blame must be all round. What happened was that a lot of people misread or misunderstood or were suspicious of what the devolution bill was all about.”

The senate president commended the youth for their perseverance in seeing that the ‘Not Too Young To Run’ bill was passed.

He said although they were defeated at the committee level, they quickly restrategised and put in more effort to ensure its passage.

“You went through the process in making sure that something you believe in scale through. Even when it looked as if it was going down you were not perturbed,” he added.

“You did not resort to abuses and went about lobbying and with the support of the national assembly it scaled through. Both senate and house of representatives believe that is good for our democracy.”