For Senate President Bukola Saraki and his deputy, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, these are not the best of times. The duo have been going through a rough patch since they became leaders of the eighth Senate through what some consider to be unfair means. They were said to have forged the Senate Rules to facilitate their coming to office on June 9, last year. Saraki and Ekweremadu do not belong to the same party. Saraki is of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC); Ekweremadu belongs to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
As the majority party, APC has the prerogative of filling the principal offices of Senate president and deputy Senate president. Acting under the principle that the party is supreme, the APC leadership settled for Senator Ahmad Lawan from Yobe State as its candidate for Senate president and asked its members to support him. Some members kicked, saying the party could not decide who their leader should be in the Senate since it is not made up of APC loyalists alone. As presently constituted, APC has 57 members in the Senate, PDP, 45 and Labour Party (LP), one; six seats are vacant. Then, it was APC, 59 and PDP, 49 because of the death of APC’s Senator-elect Khalifa Ahmed Zanna from Borno State.
Among those who kicked against the party’s position was Saraki, who was also interested in the Senate presidency. His supporters went all out to campaign for him and castigated the party for meddling in what they called the Senate’s internal affairs. The APC insisted on Lawan despite the antics of the Saraki loyalists. To break the logjam, President Muhammadu Buhari invited the APC senators to a meeting at the International Conference Centre (ICC) in Abuja on June 9, the day he had fixed for the proclamation of the National Assembly. By now, there was a split in the rank of APC senators, with the creation of two opposing camps – the Unity Forum and the Like Minds.
Lawan’s supporters are in the Unity Forum; those for Saraki belong to the Like Minds. The Unity Forum members went for the meeting, which eventually did not hold; their Like Minds counterparts, who seemed to be aware that the Senate will be inaugurated that day in accordance with the president’s letter to the Clerk of the National Assembly, were on the floor of the chamber in full force. They came prepared for the election of the Senate president and his deputy. Armed with the supposedly amended Senate Rules, which allow the inauguration of the Senate without its full complement of members, the clerk proceeded with his job and called for nominations for the post of Senate president. Saraki was nominated unopposed, while Lawan and his loyalists watched the proceedings on television dumbfounded from the ICC.
APC’s Ali Ndume vied for the deputy Senate presidency with Ekweremadu. With the PDP members outnumbering their APC colleagues at that sitting, Ekweremadu won hands down. The truth is God saved APC from losing the Senate presidency too. If PDP had contested the position with APC, it might have won because it had the number to carry the day, but it refrained from the race because of what some political pundits described as the understanding it had with Saraki, who was a member of the party before he defected to APC. Since then Saraki and Ekweremadu have become conjoined politically. With their shared destinies, they have been facing good and bad times together since June 9, 2015.
Reason: the Senate Rules under which they became presiding officers are said to have been forged. Who forged the rules? This is the puzzle Justice Yusuf Haliru of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court is to unravel in the trial of Saraki, Ekweremadu, former Clerk of the Senate Salihu Abubakar Maikasuwa and Deputy Clerk Benedict Efeturi. They appeared in court last Monday and were granted bail. Their trial begins on July 11. Beyond the trial is what Saraki and Ekweremadu said after their arraignment last Monday. Saraki believes that he is being persecuted by the Presidency, which he claims ‘’is distracting the nation with its inability to move beyond a leadership election among Senate peers’’.
Accusing Attorney-General Abubakar Malami of filing trumped up charges against them, Saraki asked : ‘’How does this promote public interest and benefit the nation…however, what has become clear is that there is now a government within the government of President Buhari which has seized the apparatus of executive powers to pursue its nefarious agenda. This latest onslaught against the legislature represents a clear and present danger to the democracy Nigerians fought hard to win and preserve’’. Not to be outdone, Ekweremadu said it ‘’is democracy and not the defendants that is on a ridiculous trial’’.
He went on : ‘’This grotesque display of vindictiveness, arrogance and mindless targeting of innocent citizens should find no sanctuary in our democracy’’. Replying Saraki, presidential spokesman Femi Adesina said his ‘’allegation is not worth the paper on which it is written as anybody can wake from a troubled sleep and say anything…pretending to carry an imaginary cross is mere obfuscation, if, indeed, a criminal act has been committed. But we leave the courts to judge’’.
Yes, the ball is in Justice Haliru’s court and milord has promised to dispense justice without fear or favour, affection or ill will. Saraki and Ekweremadu too should concentrate on defending themselves instead of making incendiary statements. What will it profit them if through their statements they heat up the polity? A clear conscience has nothing to fear. The law presumes that they are innocent until otherwise proven. The onus is on the prosecution to prove its allegation that the Senate Rules were forged. If, indeed, they were forged, who did it? This is the trillion naira question, which no amount of political chicanery can answer. Only evidence, credible evidence, at that, can answer the question.
No matter how much the attorney-general may hate their faces, assuming that is the case, he cannot get them convicted without proving his case beyond reasonable doubt. The nation is watching how the case will go because it is the number three citizen that is being tried not just anybody that was randomly picked off the street for an offence he did not commit. Will this case sink Saraki and Ekweremadu or will they swim out of it?
NATION
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