The face-off between the President of the Senate, Senator Godswill Akpabio and his fellow Senate accuser, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan took a new twist last week when stories began to emerge of a recall process being instituted against her. Both Senators have been in the eye of the storm since Senator Natasha challenged reallocation to a new seat in the Senate. She followed this up with allegations of sexual harassment against the President of the Senate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was subsequently suspended by the Senate following a report by the\nSenate Ethics, Privileges and Public Petitions Committee where she was charged\nwith misconduct and suspended from the Senate for 6 legislative months, which\neffectively ousts her from the Senate for about one calendar year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Senator Akpoti has since gone to town granting media interviews on local\nand international news outlets and digging deep on her allegations against the President\nof the Senate. A report made by her to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) was\nacknowledged by the President of the IPU, who stated that they will wait to\nhear from Senator Akpabio before reaching a decision on next steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a new twist however, Senator Natasha\u2019s traducers appear not to be\nrelenting and had orchestrated a recall process against her. According to the\npromoters of her recall, more than 50% of registered voters in her Kogi Central\nSenatorial District signed off on the petition to recall her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The recall process is a mechanism used to impeach legislators in the\nState or National Assembly, it is different from the process of impeachment of\nGovernors or the President.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since the commencement of the current 4th<\/sup> republic, there has\nbeen no successful impeachment of a legislator as the constitutional provisions\nfor impeachment is quite onerous. Section 69 of the Constitution provides for\nrecall of a legislator and states as that a member of the Senate or House of\nRepresentatives may be recalled if more than one half of the persons registered\nto vote in the constituency sign up to a petition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This requirement was made even more stringent in the amendment of said\nSection 69 during the first alteration of the constitution in 2010 by the\ninclusion of the added condition that the signatures signing up to a petition\nmust be duly verified by the INEC. The said section 69 also requires that INEC\ncarry out a referendum within 90 days of receipt of the recall petition. The\nreferendum will succeed only if a simple majority of registered voters in the\nconstituency approve the recall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This constitutional provision in section 69 is very clear, yet difficult\nto surmount. In an electoral environment where the voters register is often\nbloated and a number of persons who turn out to vote matches less than 40% of\nvoters, it is understandable how difficult it would be for INEC can verify that\n50% plus one of voters in a constituency have signed up to a petition. In\naddition, 50% plus one of registered voters is what constitutes the vote\nrequired to remove an elected legislator, meaning that the same number of\npersons who sign up to a recall process must also all fully vote for the recall\nto succeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n INEC has however on Thursday,\nannounced that the petition to recall Senator Natasha did not meet the\nconstitutional requirements outlined in Section 69 of the Constitution. This\ndevelopment follows INEC\u2019s earlier acceptance of the petition, pending verification\nof signatures from the constituents and that no further action will be taken on the recall of\nthe Senator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Senator Natasha would not be the first legislator to face the threat of\na recall since the 4th<\/sup> Republic \u2013 Senator Dino Melaye, Senator\nFrancis Nzeribe, Senator Ali Ndume, and Senator Jubril Aminu have all been\nthreatened with impeachment from legislative positions, with all of this coming\nto nought. The reality is, the recall procedure is just so herculean that it\nwould be nearly impossible to achieve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The face-off between the President of the Senate, Senator Godswill Akpabio and his fellow Senate accuser, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan took a new twist last week when stories began to emerge of a recall process being instituted against her. Both Senators have been in the eye of the storm since Senator Natasha challenged reallocation to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3782"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3788,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3782\/revisions\/3788"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}