Former Deputy Governor of Ogun State, Senator Adegbenga Kaka, has reacted to Thursday Editorial of The DEFENDER, which held that what President Muhammadu Buhari needed to bring sanity to the APC-dominated Senate currently at war with his Presidency was not a reconciliation committee but use of powers confined on him by the Constitution against the reign of impunity in the upper chamber.
In the Editorial titled, “Instead of Presidency/Senate reconciliation committee”, The DEFENDER posited that a group of Senators, whose conditions for making peace with the Buhari’s government centred on the President’s readiness to drop ongoing corruption and criminal trials against one of them, Senate Bukola Saraki, did not deserve a reconciliation as such would rubbish the person and government of the President in the end.
It however proffered decisive action based on comprehensive legal advice by legal luminaries that it advised the President should gather to advise him.
But in a letter he emailed to The DEFENDER by 11.52pm Thursday night, Senator Gbenga Kaka, who represented Ogun East Senatorial District at the Seventh Senate, disclosed the two sides of his opinion about the editorial content saying, while he agreed on one hand that reconciliation committee was not what was needed, that he would on the other hand not agree that wielding unorthodox power was needed either.
Kaka, a very vibrant Ogun politician, said the solution, instead of reconciling with Saraki’s Senate or use of what he called unorthodox power, was in building a strong party structure with the President combining roles with chairmanship of the party or alternatively empowering the party executives with responsibilities backed with commensurate authorities.
Kaka, according to the message, said, “Permit me to agree on one hand, that the Presidency/Senate Reconciliation committee is not what is needed, and on the other hand, assemblage of lawyers, SANs, to tell the Presidency of his right under the constitution or wielding of unorthodox power, is also not what is required either.
“Rather, a strong Party structure with the President and/or Governor combining roles with chairmanship of the party or alternatively empower the party Executives with responsibilities backed with commensurate authorities, that will make the Party to be truly supreme and capable of instituting a workable Parliamentary caucus that can act as a genuine and respectable clearing house for the smooth Party/ Executive /Legislatures relationship and understanding.
“The practice of Executive buy over of the Party leadership with real or expected patronage is part of the contributory factors to the lingering feud apart from all the negativisms bedeviling our socio-political and economic space,” Kaka said in the email message to The DEFENDER.
