About 100 members of the Senate Press Corps (SPC) have converged in the historic town of Keffi, Nasarawa State, for their 2024 Annual Retreat.

The two-day retreat, which is themed ‘Democracy and Development: How Far, So Far, for Nigeria’, would be graced by guest speakers, who are policy-makers and development experts. They include the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio; Chairman of the Senate Committee on Media and Publicity, Senator Yemi Adaramodu; other Senators, Clerk to the National Assembly (CNA), and Professor Shola Omotola, among other resource persons.

The parliamentary reporters, who arrived in Keffi from Abuja on Friday evening, were first treated to a Gala Night ahead of Saturday’s brainstorming sessions.

The Senate President will deliver a keynote address and thereafter will formally declare the retreat open this Saturday while goodwill messages will be delivered by other stakeholders.

Four paper presentations will be made by resource persons bordering on ‘Accessing development impacts of the executive arm of government on Nigeria’s democracy since 1999’; ‘National Assembly’s oversight powers and corruption in MDAs’; ‘Parliamentary Reporting and public perception of the National Assembly’, and ‘Challenges and future of the media in Parliamentary Reporting’.

According to the Retreat Planning Committee headed by the secretary of the SPC, Taiye Odewale of Blueprint Newspaper, a communique will be issued after the two-day event.