By Bashir Adefaka
“Recall that Saraki, up till today, frustrated the effort by Customs to get to the root of his atrocities in tariff evasion where he was said to have been abusing the power of state reposed in him as number three citizen. Saraki-led PDP bloc in APC behaved so ungodly and apparently immorally when they have been the ones perpetrating same evils they do not see in President Buhari-led Executive but which they have accused them of. Saraki has suspended elected Senators with impunity without justifications but he would accuse President Buhari of clamping down on anybody who expressed opposing views to his.”
The defection on Tuesday of some “APC” Senators to PDP did not come as a surprise. It has always been the case since the inception of this administration that some of those members of People’s Democratic Party (PDP) who supposedly bundled themselves as New PDP and moved in that order into the All Progressives Congress (APC) did not do so for the love of country but the advancement of personal political ambitions.
Lest I forget, Saraki did not join APC for Nigeria but to escape the axe about to drop on his head at that time by the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s administration where the PDP-led Federal Government was about to use their toothless Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) at that time to victimise him. They knew why they were doing that. It was the reason the then Senate David Mark failed repeatedly to read the letter of 12 senators who agreed to defect from PDP to frustrate Saraki from defecting so that he could be completely wrecked within the PDP ‘s fold. For him to now see himself as all-in-all and must take all in APC today gives him up as an embodiment of ungratefulness.
That has been their guiding principles since the advent of the ongoing three-year old Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government, part of which they operate as legislative arm under Dr. Alhaji Abubakar Bukola Saraki, alias Baba Oloye, when he emerged as Senate President ridiculing the importance of the Party on which shoulders he climbed to the number three position of the country but went ahead to install both moles of PDP they now tell Nigerians are nPDP and the physical PDP senators in the both chambers as very influential principal officers.
It will be recalled that no particular developmental Bill that had emanated from the Executive Arm since that time that the National Assembly under the control of the PDP bloc in the APC had allowed to see the light of the day. And their intention for doing so was clear in how they frustrated any positive move for better Nigeria by the Executive to actualise with such developmental Bill sent to them.
Example of such Bill includes the two anti-corruption Bills sent by President Buhari since December 2015 with intent that they would strengthen him in achieving, on behalf of Nigerians, the killing of corruption before corruption kills them all, which Saraki and his PDP Deputy deliberately did not touch talk less it would pass through first reading. The various Bills for better Nigerian Police Force for improved security of lives and property in the country were at various stages rebuffed by the Saraki Senate just like, but his resoluteness, the PDP-controlled Senate attempted on several occasions to de-capacitate the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), now a Commissioner of Police (CP), Mallam Ibrahim Mustapha Magu, from doing his job as anti-corruption czar.
Same way they, particularly Saraki and his deputy, Ike Ekweremadu, frustrated the Customs’ Comptroller-General, Col. Hameed Ali (Rtd) from functioning well when the former Military Governor of Kaduna State now Customs boss began to intercept and arrest contrabands including thousands of pump action guns during which some of the impounded illegally imported consignments were found out in the course of investigations to be owned by high profile personalities including the Senate President.
Recall that Saraki, up till today, frustrated the effort by Customs to get to the root of his atrocities in tariff evasion where he was said to have been abusing the power of state reposed in him as number three citizen. Saraki-led PDP bloc in APC behaved so ungodly and apparently immorally when they have been the ones perpetrating same evils they do not see in President Buhari-led Executive but which they have accused them of. Saraki has suspended elected Senators with impunity without justifications but he would accuse President Buhari of clamping down on anybody who expressed opposing views to his.
Unfortunately, he failed to tell the media and Nigerians what could suspensions of Senator Ali Ndume be described as when all he did was advise the Senate President at a plenary to set up an investigation panel to look into what media, particularly Punch, had been publishing concerning his tariff scam and the rest of that? He should have also helped himself by telling the media and Nigerians why he had to suspend Ovie Omo-Agege for expressing opposing views to a fellow senator in Oyinnaya Abaribe who publicly at plenary condemned President Buhari as incompetent over a crisis caused by another Saraki loyalist in Dino Melaye but being wrongly tagged as “herdsmen” killing in Kogi State? He should not stop to do that until he has told the media and Nigerians – since the Kogi killers who then claimed Melaye was their sponsors were arrested – how come killings, kidnapping, armed robbery and other crimes have stopped in Kogi State.
But quickly Saraki, and by extension Yakubu Dogara, would be fast to call Buhari a dictator yet they have failed to tell how dictatorial is Buhari since they have been making the scheming in the National Assembly. And it is the main reason these “elected” lawmakers have plotted on several occasions to either impeach the President or at the time the President was on medical vacation in London and his Deputy Yemi Osinbajo was away in Ethiopia they thought it would be a walkover for them to move a motion on the floor of the Senate and quickly second it by another senator that Abubakar Bukola Saraki should declare himself as Acting President that very day Osinbajo was away just for 24 hours. Ironically, former President Olusegun Obasanjo and former Military President Ibrahim Babangida who are inspiration leaders of Saraki in this dangerous trend but suicide mission would not tolerate the kind of atrocities against the State like Buhari has been taking just in fulfilment of promise of “converted democrat” from Saraki. Obasanjo, as civilian President, changed how many Senate President and Speakers? Babangida, military President, killed how many Generals and politicians because of the like of what Saraki and his group are doing to Buhari now?
But the Saraki-leg legislative coupists failed woefully as Osinbajo, unknown to them, had returned to Abuja and was watching the drama of hypocrisy being acted by the Senate President and his stomach-infrastructure men sent by their respective senatorial districts to represent them by cooperating with their Executive counterparts in giving them a better Nigeria but who are there in Abuja just fighting for how they will continue to be relevant in politics, needless to question whether they perform or not.
The Senate President, night of that very day, had to rush to the Villa and started telling stories to Osinbajo how he was not part of the plot to ouster the Buhari/Osinbajo Administration from the floor of the Senate and how his not being part of it was the reason he scuttled the plot. If any Nigerian or Osinbajo believed him, then, it will not be surprising why we are dragged in the mud for this long by the influence of the Almighty Saraki in the politics and governance of Nigeria. However, there is no ruling out the fetish accusations against Saraki but who is the master planner capable of neutralising the evils of all fetish elements? Allah! Then why the need to worry?! If he saved Buhari, he would save all of us.
That they also attempted to incite the military into taking over the Buhari’s government cannot be dem saymatter and that experience, as demonstrated by PDP Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu, cannot be wished away in a hurry. There is no gainsaying that Ekweremadu had always been the harsh tool Saraki was using in carrying out all of those plots as any day such plot would come, Saraki vacated his seat for him, who then began to make all of those loaded unpatriotic political plots that in the end benefited no common Nigerian man.
Great that they did not succeed in getting the immunity that they wanted. This democratic dispensation would have been worse than the PDP era.
After all of those plots had failed, they now resorted to accusations of insecurity against Buhari not minding the remarkable defeat of the one he promised to help Nigerians solve – Boko Haram – and to do that more convincingly the already impatient Nigerians began to witness senseless killings.
These same Saraki, Ekweremadu and, now, Yakubu Dogara of the House of Representatives working with Olusegun Obasanjo and some of his “Retired Christian Generals”, which TY Danjuma and Zamani Lekwolt called themselves when their coalition against Buhari’s re-election started last year, now came in and tagged it on the Daura-born President as the one supporting Fulani herdsmen to kill Nigerians in what Danjuma particularly described as “ethnic cleansing backed by the Armed Forces” because he is Fulani man in power. That was a serious allegation!
But when the wind blew and the rump of fowl of the killings was seen to, for now, expose Bukola Saraki and Dino Melaye, at each time, legislative businesses for which they have UNCONSTITUTIONALLY paid themselves monthly take home pay of N13.5 million were suspended to simply to frustrate the law from taking its course on each of them. It was what happened the day Dino Melaye jumped out of police vehicle with excuses untenable and Saraki suspended Senate plenary for his Senators of same feathers to pay him a solidarity visit at the National Hospital Abuja.
Only on Tuesday, for Saraki himself to have been invited by the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) to come and explain his involvement or not in Offa robbery which perpetrators claimed to be his thugs supplied illegal weapons by him, he directed his men in the Senate and House of Representatives to defect from governing APC to PDP, the same Party that Nigerians sacked for recklessly destroying Nigeria economically, security wise and with impunity whereby for the 16 years they were in power Nigeria knew no rule of law, and in the end he directed suspension, yet again, of Senate legislative business, for one week in protest of his invitation by the Police. He however called the suspension of Senate plenary that happened Tuesday as annual recession of the House. So unfortunate!
But for what reason would those senators who left APC for PDP have taken such action? Saraki said he cannot be stopped by any means from leaving a party where “the police is used to harass” people from expressing themselves. But is that true by the Senate President? Is it true that Saraki and those people including his Chief of Staff Hakeem Baba-Ahmed who left earlier were ever being harassed because they were expressing themselves? How trustworthy can these supposedly respected leaders be taken in the face of these blatant lies they tell which will refuse to go for generations to come?
Truth about the PDP bloc in APC who decamped Tuesday at the National Assembly is that they are doing that in solidarity with Senate President Dr. Alhaji Abubakar Bukola Saraki, alias Baba Oloye. And it is because of this that the Governor of Kwara State has accepted to put his own neck on political slab for a slaughter: very dangerous! And so all the vituperations about President Buhari being the cause do not hold water because Buhari just can’t do what Saraki wants him to do. Those lawyers and journalists backing Saraki over his atrocities, they should be fair to Buhari that they have always held responsible for even problems that state governor regularly takes resources to do but fail to do.
Buhari is not the reason for Saraki’s grievances and so cannot be reason for his and his men’s defection Tuesday. Saraki wants Buhari to just stop his anti-corruption war and that if he must fight corruption it should stop at the common man. Instead for these lawyers and journalists to give President kudos for this quality of standing for the masses based on truth, rule of law and due process, they are backing the corrupt man of highest grade impunity and they even by so doing believe they are truly defenders of fundamental human rights. They are learned but fail to learn by history. Posterity will always be there to judge every Nigerian based on his or her contribution to the ongoing struggle for the restoration of better society in Nigeria.
As for those senators who have gone on recession, this is time for real APC senators to claim their constitutional rights by coming back to seat and do the needful for Nigerians and Nigeria to be better again as we move towards renewal of their mandates in 2019.
*Bashir Adefaka is Editor of The DEFENDER Newspaper. Send your feedback to him via: omope72@gmail.com.
