Why we deferred EFCC boss confirmation - Senate

The Senate yes­terday explained why it could not attend to the act­ing Chairman of the Economic and Finan­cial Crimes Commis­sion (EFCC), Mr. Ibra­him Magu, and other member-nominees of the Commission, who had turned up for their screening yesterday.

The Upper House specifi­cally attributed the de­velopment to the poor attendance of Senators at plenary.


Senate’s Deputy Majority Leader, Sena­tor Bala Ibn Na’Allah, who disclosed this to the members of the Senate Press Corps yesterday shortly after the day’s plenary session, said given the importance of the screening exercise, the Senate could not have gone ahead with­out majority of Senators present.

Na’Allah how­ever noted that the absent Senators were on over­sight assignment to dif­ferent parts of the coun­try, hence they deserve to be part of the confir­mation hearing, adding that Magu had also been officially informed of the re-scheduling decision, which according to him, was reached at the Senate leadership meeting.

Ac­cording to the Deputy Leader of the Red Cham­ber, the exercise has been re-scheduled for Thurs­day, December 15, 2016, a day after President Mu­hammadu Buhari would present the 2017 Budget estimates to a joint sit­ting of the National As­sembly.

“We agreed that today (Thursday) will be the confirmation hear­ing of the EFCC Act­ing Chairman, Ibrahim Magu but yesterday (Wednesday) we re­ceived a lot of calls from Senators who are away and who believe that they want to participate and that it is unfair for us to fix today when we know they are not around.
When we look at the de­mands and number, we felt it would be wrong for us to proceed disregard­ing those calls.