Rumoured impeachment plot: Edo Speaker says he has full support of members

AGENE GODWIN, Benin

 Speaker, Edo State House of Assembly Rt.Hon. Justin Okonoboh, has described rumours of an impeachment threat against him as an exercise in futility.

The obviously confident Speaker added that he has the implicit confidence and backing of all of the 24 members of the House.

 The Speaker, who disclosed this to newsmen in Benin City, said the House only adjourned Wednesday’s plenary sitting to enable it fix the power generating plant and other communication gadgets in the hallow chambers.

 “We are 24 members in the House. Every body is qualified to be a Speaker . So anybody can occupy this seat. The impeachment style of the Speaker is different from that of the Governor. Once you get 16 members’ signatures out of 24, you are gone. Unlike the Governor where you have to set up committee to investigate. So, if they have the signatures nothing stops them from going ahead to do what they want to do,” he said.

 He said the vote of confidence unanimously passed on him by the House on Tuesday as moved by the member representing Esan North East constituency and was an indicator that the parliamentarians have implicit confidence in his leadership style.

Also backing up the Speaker’s  claim, the member representing Oredo Constituency, Hon. Christopher Okaeben assured members of the public that all is well at the State House of Assembly.

Hon. Okaeben said that besides the challenge with the generator , the House deferred plenary sitting till Monday to allow engineers carry out maintenance work on the verbatim sound recorder for effective raw representation of members during plenary.

 On the rumoured plot to impeach the Speaker, he insisted that “It is a fallacy, there is no iota  of truth in the rumour that there were signatures collected by members to impeach the Speaker. This rumor has been in the public domain since last year . It is not also true that there were nocturnal meetings to that effect. ”