With three days before the resumption of legislative duties in the two chambers of the National Assembly, it appears the leadership crisis that forced the lawmakers to adjourn plenary for five weeks is far from over with the contending parties firmly sticking to their positions…
When on June 25 the Senate and the House of Representatives adjourned plenary till July 21, owing to the crisis that followed the emergence of Dr. Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara as Senate president and speaker respectively, many thought that the issues that gave birth to the crisis would be amicably resolved before the resumption date.
However, the matter could not be resolved within the period of the adjournment, forcing Saraki and Dogara to shift the resumption date by one week.
Saraki and Dogara emerged leaders against the wishes and directive of their party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), which apart from winning the presidency, also won majority of seats in the parliament.
To achieve its target, the APC conducted a straw poll, where Senator Ahmad Lawan and Mr. Femi Gbajabiamila emerged as its candidates for the two coveted positions.
During same exercise, Senator George Akume and Mohammed Tahir Monguno emerged candidates for the deputy Senate president and deputy speaker’s offices.
But on the day of inauguration of the federal legislature on June 9, Saraki and Dogara defeated the APC preferred candidates in the elections conducted on the floors of the two chambers.
On that dramatic inauguration day, instead of the 109 senators to be present to elect their leaders, only 58 of them did so. The other 51, who are members of the APC, were at the International Conference Centre (ICC), Abuja, attending a party meeting.
Although the meeting did not hold, the APC senators were still at the ICC when their colleagues in the Red Chamber, mostly of the opposition PDP, swiftly went ahead and elected Saraki as the Senate President.
A similar scenario also played out in the House of Representatives when some of the APC members, backed by their PDP counterparts, elected Dogara as the leader.
Expectedly, crisis erupted in both chambers and since then, they have not known peace. For the past 46 days that they were inaugurated, lawmakers of both chambers only sat at plenary for four days due to the crisis.
Apparently, in an attempt to carry everybody along after the inauguration and put the matter behind it, the APC, under its National Chairman John Oyegun, forwarded names of nominees for the offices of the four principal officers of the Senate and the House.
In the Senate, APC nominated Lawan (North-east) for Senate leader; Akume (North-central) for deputy Senate leader; Sola Adeyeye (South-west) for chief whip and Abu Ibrahim (North-west) for deputy chief whip.
The APC nominates Gbajabiamila (South-west) for House leader; Alhassan Ado Doguwa (North-west) for deputy House leader; Monguno (North-east) for chief whip and Pally Iriase (South-South) for the office of deputy chief whip.
As it turned out, Saraki announced Senator Ali Ndume as Senate leader; Bala Ibn Na’Allah as his deputy and Francis Ailimikhena as deputy chief whip on June 25 and adjourned the Senate.
Saraki said those he announced were nominated by their respective zonal caucuses of the APC, adding that he could not respect the wish of his party because his hands were tight on the behind his back, as far as the matter was concerned.
Yet, in an attempt to have a genuine reconciliation, the APC held its National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting on July 3, where President Muhammadu Buhari emphasised, to all the party leaders especially those in the National Assembly, the need to respect the party’s supremacy, saying that as the president, he would not go against the party’s decision.
However, Buhari’s plea did not change anything as both Saraki and Dogara maintain their positions on the matter.
On their part, the APC senators, who remain loyal to the party’s position on the matter, alleged that Saraki’s election as Senate president and that of Dr. Ike Ekweremadu, a People’s Democratic Party (PDP) lawmaker, as his deputy, were conducted using a ‘forged’ Senate Standing Orders book, 2015.
The situation led Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi, from Kaduna State, to petition the Inspector-General of Police Solomon Arase to investigate the matter. Some senators and the Clerk to the National Assembly Salisu Maikasuwa were said to have been invited by the police on the issue.
Obviously, there seems to be no solution to the problem plaguing the Senate. In fact, last week, the crisis reached a head when one of the arrowheads of the APC senators’ Unity Forum,’ Senator Kabiru Marafa, from Zamfara State, said they cannot reconcile on a matter that borders on forgery of a document, which should be the guiding book of the upper chamber.
The committee established by the APC Governors’ Forum, under the leadership of Governor Atiku Bagudu, a former senator, to broker a truce among the senators is yet to come out with its report.
In the House of Representatives, the crisis has already taken a new dimension. On July 16, Dogara replied Oyegun’s letter on nominations of principal officers, where he said that respecting the party’s position would mean that the South-east and North-central zones would not benefit from the sharing of principal offices, thus, violating the spirit of the federal character.
Dogara suggested that the position of House leader should go to the North-west, deputy to the North-central, chief whip to the South-south and deputy chief whip to the South-east.
But lawmakers loyal to Gbajabiamila rejected Dogara’s position, accusing him of being hypocritical about the issue of zoning. They claim that he jettisoned zoning in his selfish bid to become speaker. They argue going by the House rules, the South-east does not have any member with cognate experience to be appointed a principal officer.
But reacting to threat of their exclusion, the only two APC members from the South-east, Austin Chukwukere and Chika Okafor, Tuesday, wrote Oyegun that they deserved to be considered for the principal officers’ positions as the argument on cognate experience applies only to members coming in before inauguration.
However, members of the Consolidation Group, who are Dogara’s loyalists, have declared their support for the position taken by the speaker.
They said, in a statement issued by their spokesman Abdulmumin Jibrin, that Dogara’s decision to zone the principal officers’ positions to the zones other than the ones suggested by the APC was in line with the constitutional provisions.
Amidst this turmoil, emerged another dimension to the whole squabble in the House, when two APC lawmakers dragged Dogara to court for failing to announce the party’s nominees for the positions of principal officers.
The two lawmakers, Abubakar Lado Abdullahi (APC, Niger) and Olajide Abdul Jimoh (APC, Lagos), filed a suit against Dogara in an Abuja Federal High Court, seeking an order to restrain Dogara, his deputy, Suleiman Lasun, and Clerk of the House Sani Omolori, from preventing the announcement of the APC nominees for the four principal positions.
Meanwhile the APC has been having series of meetings including at the National Working Committee (NWC), special sub-committees and selected caucus meeting levels to resolve the lingering the crisis.
It was however, learnt that despite report of resumption of the two chambers of the scheduled for Tuesday, the lawmakers may not resume due to the non-resolution of the crisis.
A senior party official told our reporter that the duo of Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker of the House Yakubu Dogara were given ultimatum to respect the party’s supremacy. The ultimatum, it was learnt, expires today.
However, political parties have differed on the development with the Labour Party, the National Conscience Party (NCP) and the Deputy National Chairman North of the APC Senator Lawal Shuaibu expressing divergent views on the matter.
National Chairman of LP Alhaji Abdulkadir Abdulsalam said the National Assembly should resume as scheduled in the interest of national development as the nation is bigger than anybody or party.
Abdulsalam said: “The failure of the APC to put its house on order, though the ruling party; should not hold the nation to ransom. They should have learnt their lessons and moved on to deliver the promises they made during the electioneering. If they are spending this precious times bickering, how many years or months do they think they have to serve Nigerians?”
The NCP national chairman, who is also a former chairman of the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC), Dr Yunusa Tanko, said the inability of the National Assembly to get their acts right is worrisome, especially with a humble and dedicated President Muhammadu Buhari in office.
“If you noticed the president has shown very little interest in the melo-drama in the Assembly not to be accused of interfering in the independent of the assembly, the truth be said they are drawing the President back,” he said.
“Nigerian did not Bargain for this attitude, they should remember that the task of building this country is a collective one of which they have a bigger role to play, they must as a matter of urgency put the house in order not for personal gain but for the country,” Tanko said.
APC deputy national chairman, Lawal Shuaibu expressed confidence that the crisis would be resolved amicably and in the interest of the nation.
Locked in leadership tussle since their inauguration, the House has already breached the one-month window within which standing committees must be constituted.