Lawan makes case for capacity building for 10th Assembly members, aides

Senate President, Dr. Ahmad Lawan has made a case for capacity building for members of the incoming 10th National Assembly for efficient and effective service delivery.

Lawan said there should be provisions for capacity building especially for the new members of the 10th Assembly to achieve the set goals and targets.

The Senate President spoke on Thursday while receiving the 2020, 2021 and 2022 annual reports of the activities of the National Assembly Service Commission, NASC in Abuja.

He said: “What is critical to us is what happens when we leave. Everybody knows the turn over rate has been very costly and this is without prejudice to anybody elected.

“Costly in the sense that when you have only about 30 percent of members of the ninth National Assembly going to 10th Assembly, you know that you have lost capacity. You have lost experience. You have lost skills, enterprise and so on and so forth. These are traits that you need, to hit the ground running immediately.

“And I use the word costly deliberately because what this means is that, the 10th Assembly, we must make provisions immediately for capacity building for new members of the National Assembly If we want to achieve our goals and set targets.

“Everybody is enthusiastic. Everybody is ready. We want to come in and continue to contribute to making Nigeria better. But the parliament is not like the Executive.

“Therefore, I am using this channel to sound that advisory that the National Assembly will need money, will need more resources for capacity building for members of the National Assembly that are coming new, as well as those staff that we will be working with.

“I also want to urge here that the National Assembly Service Commission, the management of the National Assembly, as well as the management of the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies will have their hands full because the tenth National Assembly, and I am not speaking for the 10th National Assembly, is yet to be inaugurated, but I know having met many of our Senators-elect, they are all ready to start work immediately we are inaugurated and sworn in.”

The Senate President asked for the support of the National Assembly Service Commission for the incoming lawmakers.

Earlier, the Executive Chairman, NASC, Engr. Ahmed Kadi Amishi, thanked Lawan in his personal intervention on the issues between the commission and the Parliamentary Staff Association of Nigeria, PASAN, saying “had it not been for your interventions, the industrial actions by PASAN would have paralyzed the activities of the National Assembly.”

Amishi also lauded the support of the Senate President to the construction of a befitting NASC office building within the premises of the National Assembly complex.

The chairman, who highlighted the commission’s achievements in the last three days, declared that “obviously, we would not have achieved all these without the support of the leadership of the 9th National Assembly”, promising to remain grateful to them.