Dino Melaye sets Senate, Presidency on collision course over Peace Corps Bill
The Senator representing Kogi West at the Nigerian Senate, Mr. Dino Melaye, may have put paid to his recent boast to fight the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari with the last drop of his blood, as he said during Senate plenary that the President should be vetoed on the Peace Corps Bill which he refused to sign.
Melaye, who was captured on video painting the picture of Federal Government persecuting him with its planned arraignment of him in court on claim of misinformation, said this following the adoption of a Point of Order he raised during the plenary.
Relying on the Senate rules, he urged the Senate to revisit the bill with a view to vetoing the president if he failed to rescind his rejection of the bill.
President Buhari, it would be recalled, had cited duplication of duty and funding challenges in declining assent to the Nigerian Peace Corps (Establishment) Bill, 2017 recently passed by the National Assembly.
But Melaye, who claimed to be acting on behalf of the Nigerian youths, insisted that, “If the Peace Corps is given an opportunity to exist, thousands will be employed and this will help to fight unemployment in this country.”
The controversial Senator, known to have engaged the government of his own party since his first day at the Senate, did not however state how the executive now and in the future will get the money to fund the peace corps in a situation of still-recovering economy where even the military and police corps of the nation have cried for lack of adequate funding.
Getting money to fund it notwithstanding, Senator Dino Melaye – insensitive to the President’s worries about economic implications of duplicating duty by establishing another paramilitary body like Peace Corps – said, “We may need to write Mr. President to review his position, if not, we have the power on behalf of the Nigerian youths, who voted us, to veto him, so that people will become the ultimate beneficiaries of this bill.”
He added that, “The youth of this country must be given priority and they must be respected.”
By this position of the embattled Senator over the President’s decision to withhold assent to the bill establishing the Corps, therefore, the Nigerian Senate has drawn a battle-line with the presidency.
It thus means, some respondents have suggested, that another distractive controversy may have emanated from the legislature dominated by the All Progressives Congress (APC) for the Federal Government led by the party.
