Budget: Reps insist on impeaching Jonathan

Speaker, House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal and President Goodluck Jonathan
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INTERVENTIONS by the Peoples Democratic Party notwithstanding, the House of Representatives on Sunday insisted that President Goodluck Jonathan must achieve 100 per cent budget implementation by September or face impeachment.

Apparently reacting to interventions by the PDP and reported overtures by the President to save his job, the House said it would not change its resolution midway.

“A resolution of the House is a resolution of the House; nobody can change it midway,” spokesman for the lawmakers, Zakari Muhammed, told The PUNCH in Abuja.

Muhammed said the only alternative was for Jonathan to achieve a 100 per cent budget implementation by September in accordance with the resolution of the House.

The lawmakers on Thursday frowned on the poor implementation of the 2012 budget and set a September 18 deadline for the Jonathan administration.

“The budget implementation is about 35 percent,” the Chairman, Committee on Appropriation, Mr. John Enoh, had told his colleagues. Enoh said the committee found that only a meagre N200bn had been released to the Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government in the first two quarters of the year.

The House also directed the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to immediately release all first and second quarter capital votes to the MDAs.

The resolution, which was endorsed by all members, faulted the minister’s decision to withhold the funds of some MDAs on the grounds that they were unable to utilise their first quarter votes.

The House noted that withholding funds under any excuse was a “breach of the Appropriation Act (2012).”

The action of the House gave rise to reported moves by the Presidency and the leadership of the PDP at the weekend to make the lawmakers reverse their threat.

Jonathan and the National Chairman of the PDP, Bamangar Tukur, had reportedly reached out to the Speaker of the House, Aminu Tambuwal, with a view to influencing the lawmakers to soft-pedal on their threat.

But Muhammed said while the moves were legitimate, nobody could change a stand already taken by the legislators on the floor of the House.

“Our practice is that our resolution, once taken, it stands; it can only be reviewed on the floor of the House, not by an individual. A resolution of the House is a resolution of the House; nobody can change it midway. Not even the Speaker has the powers to change a House resolution,” the Chairman, House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, said.

He added, “What the Executive should do is to implement the budget in line with the House resolution.

“Let us hold on to the promise of the House Leader (Mrs. Mulikat Akande-Adeola) that things will improve in the next two months.”

Akande-Adeola, had on Thursday urged her colleagues to wait till the expiration of the September deadline, assuring them that she was confident that things would have improved by then.

According to Muhammed, if funds are released to the MDAs and there is evidence that projects are being executed, members will say so on resumption from break on September 18.

“We have employers; they are the people of our constituencies. If they feel the impact of the budget, they will tell us and members will react accordingly”, he stated.

Meanwhile, the PDP, the party to which Jonathan and majority of members of the House belong to, has said it will not allow the President to be impeached.

The party said it would do everything within its powers to make sure that the frosty relationship between the House and the President did not degenerate into the level of impeachment.

To avoid this, the party said it had started consultations on how to make sure that the House work harmoniously with Jonathan.

Secretary of the PDP Board of Trustees, Senator Walid Jubril, told one of our correspondents on Sunday that the party’s leadership had already commenced the process of ending the disagreement between the members of the lower legislative chamber and the Executive.

Though Jubril declined to give the specifics on the party’s intervention, he however said that the party would not fold its arms and allow the House impeach the President.

The party’s constitution in Article 12.80(f) bestows on the BOT the power to mediate in a conflict between the legislature and the Executive.

Jubril said, “The party is doing everything within its powers to resolve the misunderstanding between the two arms of government.

“Majority of the House members are PDP members and the President is also a member of our party. Therefore, we won’t allow the disagreement between them to lead to the point of impeaching the President

breaking news--Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes appears dazed in court

Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes appears dazed in court

Holmes in court, July 23, 2012. (AP/Pool)

UPDATE: 11:30 a.m. ET: James Holmes, the suspect in the Colorado theater massacre, appeared in a Colorado courtroom on Monday. A judge advised Holmes of his Miranda rights, and that there was probable cause to continue to hold him without bond on suspicion of first-degree murder.
Holmes, who was transported from from a holding cell to the courtroom via an underground tunnel, appeared dazed: his brow furrowed, his eyes opening and closing often. His hair was dyed red. His hands and feet were shackled. He did not speak.
Seated in a jury box next public defender Tamara Brady, Holmes never looked towards a gallery that included about two dozen victims and victims advocates.
The preliminary hearing lasted for about 11 minutes. Holmes' next court appearance is July 30.
A decision on whether to seek the death penalty could be weeks or months away, District Attorney Carol Chambers told reporters as she entered the courthouse.
"It will be a conversation we have with the victims before we make that decision," Chambers said.
He could also face additional counts of aggravated assault and weapons violations stemming from the mass shooting that killed 12 and injured 58 people at an Aurora, Colo., screening of "Dark Knight Rises." The rampage is among the worst mass shootings in modern-day American history.
[COMPLETE COVERAGE: Colorado theater shooting]
Holmes, clad in full body armor, surrendered to officers in a parking lot behind the cinema. He did not resist arrest, but investigators have since described the former medical student as uncooperative.
Authorities and news reports have portrayed the native Californian as smart and shy, but no motive for the shooting spree has surfaced.
Federal investigators were dispatched to assist local authorities with the investigation, but officials have indicated justice will be sought in a state courtroom.

Colorado has a death penalty, but only one inmate has been executed since 1977. Three inmates are currently on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

"If James Holmes isn't executed," former Denver prosecutor Craig Silverman told Reuters, "Colorado may as well throw away its death penalty law."

Palestinians seek int’l probe as Al-Jazeera proves Arafat was poisoned

RAMALLAH, Palestinian  (AFP) – The Palestinians want an international probe into the death of former president Yasser Arafat after an investigation showed he may have been poisoned, an official told AFP Wednesday.
“We call for the formation of an international investigation committee modelled on the international investigation committee set up to look into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri,” senior Palestinian official Saeb Erakat said.
The call came a day after the Al-Jazeera news channel broadcast the results of an investigation into the death of Arafat, who died in 2004, which showed that the Palestinian leader might have been poisoned with polonium.
The news channel said an analysis of Arafat’s belongings, which were given to his wife by the Paris hospital where he died, showed high levels of the radioactive substance.
Polonium was used to kill Russian former spy turned Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who died in 2006 after drinking tea laced with the substance at a London hotel.
Francois Bochud, head of the Institute of Radiation Physics at the University of Lausanne, was among the scientists who worked with Al-Jazeera to analyse Arafat’s death and test his possessions.
“The conclusion was that we did find some significant polonium that was present in these samples,” he told Al-Jazeera.
Arafat, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who led the struggle for Palestinian statehood for nearly four decades, died on November 11, 2004, following several weeks of treatment.
He had been airlifted to France from his besieged headquarters in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
French officials, citing privacy laws, refused to reveal the precise cause of death or the nature of his condition, fuelling a host of rumours and theories as to the cause of his illness.
At the time of his death at the age of 75, Palestinian officials charged he had been poisoned by long-time foe Israel, but an inconclusive Palestinian investigation in 2005 ruled out cancer, AIDS or poisoning.
To confirm the theory that he was poisoned by polonium it would be necessary to exhume and analyse Arafat’s remains, Bochud said.
“If (Suha Arafat) really wants to know what happened to her husband (we need) to find a sample — I mean, an exhumation… should provide us with a sample that should have a very high quantity of polonium if he was poisoned,” he said.

FG signs $4.5bn refinery deal with US energy firm

ABUJA (AFP) – Nigeria on Monday signed a Memorandum of Understanding with an American energy firm to build six oil refineries, in a project worth 4.5 billion dollars, a government statement said.
Nigeria’s  refining infrastructure has largely crumbled, turning the country into a net importer, which often pays high prices for its own crude that has been processed abroad.
The deal between US-based Vulcan Energy, the Nigerian government and a local firm, aims to build six refineries with a combined capacity of 180,000 barrels per day, Nigeria’s Trade and Investment Ministry said in a statement, which also listed the 697.5 billion naira ($4.5 billion) price tag.
Two of the refineries are to be completed within a year, according to the terms of the MoU.
“This is the beginning of changing our old paradigm from exporting just raw materials and exporting jobs to the Western countries,” Trade and Investment Minister Olusegun Aganga said in the statement.
Nigeria produces around 2 million barrels a day of crude, making it the world’s eighth largest producer, but its petroleum industry has for years been riddled with corruption and poor management.
Last week, President Goodluck Jonathan fired the chief executive of the state oil firm NNPC, a move his office said was designed to boost transparency and accountability.
Vulcan’s vice president, Jim Mansfield, said the MoU highlighted Nigeria’s attractiveness as an investment destination.
“The funding for the project will be a non-Nigeria source and is from investors who firmly believe that Nigeria is a good place to do business,” he was quoted in the statement as saying.
Houston-based Vulcan currently operates in several US states as well as Canada.