By TORDUE SALEM
ABUJA—GOVERNORSHIP candidate of the Congress for Positive Change, CPC, in Bauchi State, Representative Yusuf Maitama Tuggar, yesterday, advised present federal lawmakers who failed to secure return tickets to the National Assembly in next April general elections not to hold their principal officers responsible for their misfortune.

Tuggar who spoke in an interview in Abuja said the presiding officers “even lack the powers to influence the nomination of people in any party.”

Senate President David Mark and House of Representatives Speaker, Dimeji Bankole, are speculated to be at daggers drawn with their colleagues who have failed to win at the primaries of the PDP.

He said: “It will be absolutely absurd to hold principal officers accountable for large number of members not securing the tickets of their political parties.

“In the first place, they are not in a position to give or take tickets from contestants. I am pretty certain that they did their best to see that a large number of our colleagues succeeded in the primaries and if they were not able to achieve that, it will be unfair to hold principal officers responsible.

“Some of the principal officers themselves did not succeed in their own bids to secure tickets for the offices they aspired to get. If they are so powerful as to determine who gets tickets, they should have been able to succeed in their endeavour.”

Rep. Aliyu Wadada Wadada in his reaction said: “I am not aware of any group of lawmakers working against the leadership for losing in the primaries. Secondly I think what members got at the primaries was what was destined for them. For those who got their return tickets, that is how it was destined to be. For those who did not get theirs’ it marks the beginning of another chapter in their lives as destined by God.

“So I believe that it will be very unfair to blame the leadership of the National Assembly for what happened at the primaries except they have another thing that they think the leadership has done wrongly that they want to use against the leadership which I am also not aware of.”