Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ghali Umar Na’Abba has passed on at 65.
He was reported to have died in an Abuja hospital following a brief illness.
Na’Abba, the second Speaker of the House of Representatives in the current 4th Republic, died in the wee hours of Wednesday.
There are no immediate official reports from the family but Na’Abba had been battling an ailment for some years before his death.
He was elected Member of the House of Representatives in 1999 from Kano State and was elected Speaker after Salisu Buhari, from the same Kano State, resigned over certificate forgery scandal.
Na’Abba, born in 1958,was a political scientist and a policy architect. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in 1979.
His early education was at Jakara Primary School, Kano where he obtained his First School Leaving Certificate in 1969.
He later attended Rumfa College, Kano for his West African School Certificate and was also at School of Preliminary Studies, Kano, between 1974 and 1976, before gaining admission into Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in October, 1976.
He completed a postgraduate programme on Leadership and Good Governance at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University in the United States in 2004. He served as Speaker of the House, and led several international bodies on parliament at the wake of the millennium.
He has also attended, chaired and presented papers at several international seminars, conferences on politics, parliament, development and good governance. Among them were Conference of Presiding Officers of National Parliaments held in New York in 2000; West African Speakers Conferences held in 2000 and 2001 in Ouagadougou and Abuja respectively; Commonwealth Parliamentary Association annual conferences held variously in 1999, 2000, 2001 at Trinidad and Tobago, London and Melbourne, Australia and several others.
