What is your assessment of the last general elections?
To be very honest, I was not expecting a perfect election. When I say perfect, I mean a flawless election. The reason is that these are human actions. And there is no human being that is an embodiment of accomplishment. That is why the law says substantial compliance to the law, laid down rules or INEC guidelines.
I will say that to a very large extent the results that came out were a true reflection of the wish of Nigerians. The outing of some parties, particularly the Labour Party, surprised the country and I don’t think that anybody will say that the election was manipulated by the Labour Party.
The Labour Party was a child of circumstance and nobody knew that they could pull the kind of support they had during this election. I want to say that what happened was the true expression of the people’s wish through the ballot box.
You, like many other senators will not be going back, what will be missing in the next Senate?
Parliament all over the world or the National Assembly is a place driven by knowledge, it is a repository of knowledge, and you get better in the business of lawmaking and other legislative activities the more you stay there. That is why they tell you that the number of times you come in ranks you. That is what they call ‘ranking.’
The National Assembly is what makes the difference between military and civilian rule. So, if you take people out of the National Assembly and you keep feeding in new members, what happens to institutional memory? What happened yesterday will be lost. The way we did it yesterday will be lost. Nobody will ensure continuity.
Nobody will develop what we did yesterday. Nobody can say we did it like this yesterday and this is the result we got, let’s do it differently today. It is a huge loss. Since I got to the Senate about eight years ago, put conservatively, I have been trained up to 20 times outside the shores of this country. What happens to the experience?