Battle of the throne!
These Editors at “This
Day”, are doing great job and I will like to be like them. They are very
objective in their reportage. In this write-up, Olawale Olaleye, a public
affairs analyst, chronicled the lingering crisis in the Senate and the possibility
of PDP gaining from the inability of the ruling party APC to manage success.
Read it after the cut…
Senators elected on
the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are intensifying their plot
to take over the senate should Senate President Bukola Saraki fail to survive
his ongoing legal battles, which they view as power play among contending
forces within the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
THISDAY got wind of
the plot from some of the Senators, who have been meeting over the development
in the senate and the travails of Senator Saraki.
Saraki, whose
emergence as Senate President was as a result of the overwhelming support given
to him by PDP senators despite his party’s opposition to his aspiration for the
topmost position in the senate, is currently facing a 13-count charge of
alleged false declaration of assets at the Code of Conduct Tribunal.
There had been
allegations that the current travails of Saraki were aimed at easing him out of
the office of the Senate President. But the PDP lawmakers are confident that
should there be a need for votes to pick a presiding officer, the party’s
caucus is in a good stead to determine who presides over the upper chamber.
Their confidence is
predicated on a simple extrapolation of
numbers and alliances. For instance, the Senate has 109 seats, with one
of the seats vacant as a result of death. The remaining 108 are made up of 59
APC senators and 49 PDP senators.
While the APC caucus
is divided over the emergence of Saraki as Senate President, the PDP caucus
remains intact, and would only need 11 more Senators to fulfil the
constitutional stipulation of one third votes to produce the Senate President.
It was gathered that
the PDP senators have also realised that one of the problems President
Muhammadu Buhari and others seemed to have with Saraki is the emergence of
Senator Ike Ekweremadu as the Deputy Senate President, and are of the view that
should Saraki be removed, the APC would not be satisfied until Ekweremadu is
also removed – consequently forcing members of the PDP caucus to stay together as a united team to be able
to assert themselves and get what they need.
Their calculation is
that if APC successfully used the judiciary or other means to remove Saraki,
the PDP which already has access to the Senate President's core supporters in
APC, would reach out to them, since they are already endangered and aggrieved.
This way, they will get the required one third
to elect either Senator David Mark or Ekweremadu as Senate President.
According to some
members of the PDP caucus, should Mark emerge, his acceptance will be easier
because he is still respected among ranking senators, who would all rally round
him. Ekweremadu’s choice is believed to be strategic too because of the way the
current administration is seen to be treating the Igbos, therefore using his
Senate Presidency to balance the lopsided power equation in the country would
be the way to go.
In addition, the PDP senators
are said to have gone far in their plot such that they already have the
understanding of their APC allies that in the worst case scenario that they
come face-to-face with threat from the APC leadership (which is most likely),
some of them would absent themselves from sitting on the day of the election of
a new Senate leadership.
Some of the senators
who spoke to THISDAY in confidence on the issue were of the view that should
that happen, the new leadership would endure because while its requires a
simple majority to elect the Senate President and his deputy, what is needed to
remove them is a two-third majority - a number the APC cannot muster in both
instances given the current dynamics in the senate, politically and in terms of
numbers.
Citing lack of
capacity to manage success in a critical institution like the Senate, some of
the PDP senators are of the view that a party that is uncoordinated and lacking
internal cohesion is evidently unable to lead a critical arm of government like
the Senate, much less the country.
The PDP Senators
noted that they had every opportunity to have seized the leadership of the
Senate at inauguration but chose to be democratic and exhibit political
maturity. However, with the development in the Senate, the PDP Senators argued
that the need to save the Senate from the greed of some APC leaders had become
inevitable, hence their resolve to take over the senate in the event that a
need to elect a new leadership arises.
The lawmakers also
noted that after all, the Senate in the last few years, especially under the
PDP Senate President David Mark, did a lot, not only to stabilise the
institution, but the country in general through its many interventions at
critical periods in the nation’s political evolution.
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