Nigeria\u2019s President Bola Tinubu says he will support a proposal for the direct election of members into the parliament of the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, expressing confidence that the move would give citizens of member states a say in who represents them.<\/p>\n
While swearing in 97 members into the 6th ECOWAS parliament at the Abuja International Conference Centre, he said, \u201cAs a one-time legislator myself, I look forward to reviewing the proposal regarding this matter. We stand to support the direct elections into ECOWAS parliament.\u201d<\/p>\n
His comments came against the backdrop of the ECOWAS parliament being populated by existing lawmakers from the 15 member states.<\/p>\n
The President said, \u201cThe practice of directly electing public officers aligns with democratic principles, principles that Nigeria upholds.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis principle is also in line with the spirit of the ECOWAS protocol on democracy and good governance.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe this will ensure that citizens will have a direct say in their representation and the legitimacy and credibility it will provide.\u201d<\/p>\n
He assured members of the sixth ECOWAS Parliament that Nigeria, as a host community, will continue to support.<\/p>\n
The ECOWAS parliament, also known as the Community parliament, was established under Articles 6 and 13 of the ECOWAS Revised Treaty of 1993.<\/p>\n
The initial protocol establishing the parliament was signed in Abuja on August 6, 1994, providing for the structure, composition, competence, and other matters relating to the parliament.<\/p>\n
The parliament is composed of 115 seats, with each member state having a guaranteed minimum of five seats while the remaining 40 seats are shared based on population. However, only 97 members, comprising lawmakers from various member states, were sworn in Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nigeria\u2019s President Bola Tinubu says he will support a proposal for the direct election of members into the parliament of the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, expressing confidence that the move would give citizens of member states a say in who represents them. While swearing in 97 members into the 6th ECOWAS parliament […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":25959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[508,59],"class_list":["post-25958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-defence-and-security","tag-ecowas","tag-featured"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25958"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25962,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25958\/revisions\/25962"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}