Senate sacks Ndume as Chief Whip as APC asks him to resign

The Senate, on Wednesday, announced the removal of Senator Mohamed Ali Ndume (Borno South) as Chief Whip.

When put to voice vote by the Senate President Godswill Akpabio, members of the APC Senate Caucus endorsed Ndume’s removal as Senate Chief Whip during plenary.

Ndume was replaced by Tahir Mungono (Borno North).

This comes amid his recent criticisms of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government.

In a letter addressed to the Senate Caucus by the national leadership of the ruling party, the APC asked Ndume to resign his membership of the APC and join any opposition party of his choice.

The letter was signed by the party’s national chairman, and Secretary, Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, and Barrister Ajibola Bashiru.

Daily Trust had reported how some loyalists of Tinubu plotted to get Ndume suspended.

Sources at the National Assembly told Daily Trust that the pro-Tinubu Senators were planning to not just strip Ndume of his position but equally suspend him like Senator Abdul Ningi (PDP, Bauchi Central).

Ningi, also a ranking senator from the North, was suspended for three months in March this year, for granting an interview to the BBC Hausa in which he alleged that N3.7 trillion in the national budget for the 2024 fiscal year was not tied to any projects or locations.

Ndume had in an interview with newsmen at the National Assembly Complex in Abuja last week said, “Mr. President is not in the picture of what is happening outside the Villa. He has been fenced off and caged. So many of us won’t go through the backdoor to engage him.

“Now they have stopped him from talking and he doesn’t have public affairs managers, except his spokesman, Ajuri Ngelale, who writes press statements. Nigerians are getting very angry.

“The government is not doing anything about the food scarcity and it needs to do something urgently. We don’t have food reserve. There is unavailability of food. Food crisis is the worst crisis that any nation can encounter. If we add that to security crisis, it will be severe.”

But his submissions triggered series of reactions from the pro-Tinubu camp as Senator Sunday Karimi (Kogi West) and the ruling APC both knocked the Borno lawmaker, describing his statement as derogatory.

Our correspondent gathered from impeccable sources that three of the four senators plotting Ndume’s suspension and ouster as the Chief Whip are from the South West – Ekiti, Ogun and Lagos, while another Senator from Kogi is also part of the agenda.

It was learnt that Akpabio is in a fix, considering that Ndume was the Director-General of the Stability Group which worked hard to make him President of the Senate in June 2023.

It was, however, hinted that some Northern senators were waiting for the cat to be let out of the bag during plenary before they would take a position.

A source said, “But of course, you know the Northern Senators will rise against another plan to destabilise their caucus, barely a few months after Ningi was suspended.”

However, some stakeholders from the North under the aegis of Concerned Northern Forum (CNF), in a statement on Tuesday signed by Mallam Abdulkadir Kura, said, “It is on record that Ndume is a critical stakeholder of the ruling APC, and a close ally of President Tinubu. Therefore, if he can take such a bold step in saying the truth about the economic and social reality on the ground, then the Southern Borno Senator need to be celebrated by all and sundry. So we stand by him.

“Ndume has spoken the minds of the average Nigerians who have been under serious economic hardship since the removal of the fuel subsidy and other anti-people policies of the present administration.

“This is not the first time Senator Ndume has criticised or challenged policies of the federal government. He consistently did so during the past administrations of Presidents Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari. Such criticisms led to positive changes by the listening governments at that time.”