Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar yesterday expressed disappointment at the House of Representatives\u2019 rejection of the six-year single term proposal for president and governors in the country.
\nIn a statement issued in Abuja by his Media Adviser, Paul Ibe, Atiku said he was disappointed that the lawmakers had thrown away the proposal at the expense of the larger interest of the country.
\nHe said because of the challenges facing the nation\u2019s democratic system especially the culture of rigging that subverts the will of the people, a six-year single term would have ended such untoward practices in its electoral process.
\nHe said: \u201cThe desperation for the second term by the incumbents is the main reason why they go for broke and set the rule book on fire, thereby making free and fair elections impossible by legitimising rigging at the expense of their challengers that have no access to public funds.
\n\u201cA situation where the incumbents deploy more public resources to their second term projects than using the funds for people\u2019s welfare encourages massive rigging that undermines electoral integrity.
\n\u201cSix-year single term would remove such desperation and enable the incumbents to concentrate on the job for which they were elected in the first place.\u201d
\nHe regretted that eight-year term of office rewards incompetence because even incumbents that had failed would use their access to public funds to return to power by fair or foul means.
\nThe ex-vice president added: \u201cI don\u2019t agree with the logic that eight years would give elected leaders a better opportunity to fulfill their campaign promises.
\n\u201cAn inherently incompetent incumbent will perform below average even if you give him\/her 20 years in office or give him or her $20 billion.\u201d
\nAccording to him, it is not how long a man spends in office, but how well he is adequately prepared for the job.
\nHe argued that the desperation for the second term was not necessarily driven by patriotism or the passion for service, but by the obsession with the greed for power for its own sake.
\n\u201cSecond term obsession rewards incompetence by allowing failed incumbents to be re-elected regardless of their performance record.
\n\u201cIt also denies political parties the opportunity to replace failed incumbents with better candidates within the parties in the name of the right of first refusal,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar yesterday expressed disappointment at the House of Representatives\u2019 rejection of the six-year single term proposal for president and governors in the country. In a statement issued in Abuja by his Media Adviser, Paul Ibe, Atiku said he was disappointed that the lawmakers had thrown away the proposal at the expense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":208201,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=222865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/208201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=222865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=222865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=222865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}