Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information, has announced the cancellation of Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting.

This is the second cancellation of the FEC meeting since President Muhammadu Buhar’si return from his 103-day medical leave in London.

In a statement on Tuesday, Mohammed explained that the meeting was called off because the government could not prepare for it as a result of the two-day public holidays declared for the Eid-el-Kabir celebrations.

“This week’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting will not hold due to inadequate time to prepare the documents for the meeting,” read a statement signed by Segun Adeyemi, Mohammed’s media aide. “The
two-day public holidays declared for the Eid-el-Kabir celebrations left little or no time to prepare for the weekly meeting.”

It is not clear as of the time of filing this report whether Buhari, who travelled to his hometown, Daura, Katsina State, for the holidays, had returned to the Aso Rock Presidential Villa in Abuja.

But Garba Shehu, one of his spokesmen, tweeted a photo of him watching Monday night’s Cameroon-Nigeria World Cup qualifier from his house in Daura.

Following the cancelled FEC meeting of August 23, Femi Adesina, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, said that there was no law stating that the FEC meeting must hold every week.

“There is no law that says the Federal Executive Council meeting should hold every week. There is no law that says it must be weekly. Under a past administration, it used to hold once every two weeks,” Adesina said.

“So, there is no law that says it should hold every Wednesday. It depends on what you have on the agenda to discuss. The President is the Chairman of that meeting. So, he has the discretion to hold or not to hold (the meeting).

Asked whether the cancellation of the meeting meant that the FEC would no longer meet weekly, Adesina said since the inception of the Buhari administration, the meeting had not been a weekly affair..

“It did not hold every week; when this administration began, it did not hold every week. And right from then, it had been understood that the FEC would hold as often as there are things to discuss,” he said.