C’River Assembly can’t stop Ayade from travelling – speaker

John Gaul-Lebo, speaker, Cross River State House of Assembly (CRHA), says there is no law or provision in the Nigerian Constitution that empowers the state assembly to stop a state governor from travelling abroad, and staying away as long as he wanted without handing over to his deputy.

As a result, he said the Cross River Assembly had no constitutional powers to stop Governor Ben Ayade, who had been recently accused of much foreign trips, from travelling outside the state.

The speaker, who spoke in Calabar, in view of agitation by some people in the state that the governor travels too often, and sometimes stayed for over thirty days, without handing over to his deputy, said government responsibility was not a task for one individual, and as such, whether the governor was in the state or not, government programmes would go on as planned.

“The controversy in the state is that the governor has been away without handing over to the deputy, but the Constitution is very clear when the governor should handover to his deputy; and that is when he is incapacitated and cannot perform. And not when he is travelling to perform official functions and to sign Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), to bring investments into the state. So, if he has to handover every time he travels, then he would not be governor,” Lebo said.

He said the governor has not travelled as much as President Mohammadu Buhari, who had been out of the country for over 70 times, without handing over to the Vice President.

“What people need to understand is that the President has travelled over 70 times, and it was only once when he went for medical treatment to Britain, that he officially handed over to the Vice President for one week; and even came back after extra five days,” said the Cross River speaker.

Gaul-Lebo carpeted those he said accused Governor Ayade of breaching the Constitution by travelling without handing over to the Deputy Governor; saying “they are speaking out of ignorance of the law.”

“There is no law that says the state House of Assembly must stop the governor from travelling; I am a lawyer, and I have studied the provisions of the law relating to the functions of a governor. There is no law that says the Speaker of the State House of Assembly must force the governor to hand over to his deputy before travelling,” Gaul-Lebo stated.

He also claimed that the Cross River Assembly was one of the busiest in the present dispensation; stating that after one year of legislative activity, the state Assembly had passed 19 bills into law.

“We’re one of the most outstanding State Houses of Assembly in the country by the number of bills we have passed into law,” he said.