Senator Matthew Mbu Jnr was a member of the Senate from 1999-2003. In this interview with Vanguard, he said that though the decision by the National Assembly to empower the Vice President to act as President has lowered tension in the country, the National Assembly must, however, move a styep futher to conform with constitutional provision to compel the Federal Executive Council to declare the president not fit to continue in office

In the 1950s and 1960s, the main agenda of the Ekiti people was education.
So high was education on the priority list of Ekiti, then in the Western Region, that virtually every household had a professor.

The Constitution provided that if the President is indisposed, the Vice President has to take over as Acting President. That ought to have been done much earlier and there was actually no basis for all the controversy. It was just that human beings were trying to circumvent the spirit of the Constitution. What has happened is not unusual. It happens in every democracy in the world.

When the whistle for the race was blown, all manner of people indicated interest to contest the election on the platform of the party such that before the primaries to select a candidate for the party, no fewer than 50 aspirants paid the mandatory N5 million fixed by the leadership of the party. And when it became obvious that the party was going to settle for the former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Prof Chukwuma Soludo, most of the aspirants swore never to work for him, despite overtures he made to them.

Nigerians should be patriotic for once. Nigerians should believe in Nigeria. We should believe in our Constitution. Everything should not be North/South. People like Zik didn’t talk about the East. He talked about Nigeria. Why do we talk about the Ziks of Nigeria? It is because we know what he stood for; he was not a tribal champion. We should not speak about the North/South divide all the time whenever issues like this come up.