By James Isaac, Abuja
The Senator who represents Edo South in the Senate and Committee Chairman of Public Petition, Neda Imasuen has posited that, the Public Petition Committee is the people’s court where petitions all over the country are received and treated without discrimination.
According to him, such petitions comes from Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government , Commissions, Contractors who do business within the Country, Councils and ranged from unlawful dismissals, unfair treatment within the place of work, discrimination, refusal of due benefits , students who have issues with the authorities.
Speaking on the benefits of the Committee, he said that, it helped in doing away with the long time it take before judgement is served in the regular courts, less expensive as no money is require for a petition to be attended to, petitions are attended to expeditiously.
Noted that the Senate as a whole is in support of the Committee.
On the challenges faced by the Committee in the discharge of their duties, Sen. Imasuen said that they were few and primarily has to do with MDA’s departmental heads who failed to respond when summoned by the Committee to appear before it, stated that they have a job at hand and required everybody’s cooperation.
Speaking about constituency projects, he said that they were intervention policies put in place to bridge certain gaps in the service delivery chain, in his words, if State and Local Governments do what they ought to do then there will be no need for Members and Senators to intervene in areas of roads, light, schools and medicals, as their duty specifically is to make laws and oversight MDA’s for good governance.
He said that there was a misconception about constituency projects where people tend to think that money is given to the lawmakers, where as it is the value of the projects as proposed by lawmakers for their constituents, budgeted for and executed by the relevant MDA’s as against giving physical cash to lawmakers to disburse.
Painting a very pathetic picture, he said that, some of his local constituents have not seeing light in their whole life until he took it upon himself to provide solar powered light to them which they are enjoying.
