The Senate will today meet with economic experts to gather useful ideas on how best to get Nigeria out of recession.
The National Assembly resumes today from an eight-week recess, with economy topping its agenda.
This comes as the Senate President Bukola Saraki would lead a two-day debate on the best options open to Nigeria to exit the economic crisis.
Briefing journalists at the National Assembly on Monday, Chairman, Senate Committee on Rules and Business, Baba Kaka Garbai, disclosed that the 2016/2017 legislative session would be devoted to strategies for getting out of recession.
Meanwhile, the Senate leadership has begun moves to get every Senator to act in unison in the struggle to redeem the country from the current economic crisis.
After an initial meeting of all principal officers on Monday afternoon, the entire Senate broke into political caucuses along the lines of the two parties: the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) where the message of unity and harmonious working relationship was further preached.
The plan of action for today’s sitting is that shortly after a long speech has been delivered by Saraki on the economy, Senators will take their turns to contribute to the debate.
Thereafter, the Senate would go into an executive session to hear from experts from the private sector, who would brief legislators on the way out of the crisis, before commencing the debate.
The debate by senators expected to review the state of the Nigerian economy and outline the Senate agenda to address the recession, will hold on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Since the commencement of the recess, Nigeria has officially fallen into recession and last Friday, Standard and Poors (S&P) downgraded Nigeria’s credit rating. Additionally, inflation has caused the price of basic food items to skyrocket severely impacting the availability of food in many households that live below the poverty line.
Briefing journalist on the development, Garbai said: “Every senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has gone to his/her constituency during the annual recess.
“We have also seen that people are actually going through a lot of hardship because of the various problems we are undergoing as a result of the economic recession in the country.
“The discussions, particularly within the next two months in the Senate will be dominated by issues relating to economy, especially how to rescue the economy out of the recession we are currently facing. This will dominate this legislative session”.
He disclosed further that “We will actually have discussions bothering on recession. Some will be open to everybody in the plenary, and we will also have a close door session, where we will hold discussions with some resource persons in relation to the recession.
“Although we have several items in our order paper for tomorrow (today) but the discussion on the recession will dominate our meeting. And most part of the entire legislative session will be geared towards deliberations on how to bail out the economy from the current recession.”
On the reported emergency powers being sought by President Muhammadu Buhari, he said: “As far as I am concerned, the issue of the President requesting for emergency powers is speculative because we have not received any communication to that effect; I just read it the way you read it in the newspapers. So, I cannot go into it because officially, we don’t know anything about it.
“We are also going to have bills that will go through First Reading from the proposed Order Paper. We have First Reading of House bills which have been sent to the Senate for concurrence”.
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