The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, says the recent comment by the National Chairman of the All Progressive Congress, APC, John Odigie-Oyegun, that the continued rumpus in the Senate, including the alleged harassment of its leadership and the recent arraignment of its presiding officers on criminal charges of conspiracy and forgery, was all about the emergence of Senator Ike Ekweremadu as the Deputy President of Senate.
Oyegun had said they would never accept Ekweremadu as the Deputy President of the Senate.
His words: “I think the thing that rankled us most was the election of Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate President.
“Saraki is a member of the APC, much as the main line of the Party would have wished a different result and a different scenario. But we all find it very, very difficult to accept the emergence of a PDP person as his deputy,” the APC leader had stated.
But the PDP stressed that the APC has no constitutional or moral grounds to be displeased with Ekweremadu’s emergence or harass, intimidate, embarrass, and malign him and the Institution of the Senate on account of a position to which his colleagues, cutting across party lines, elected him in a transparent and televised election in line with Section 50 of the 1999 Constitution as Amended.
The PDP pointed out that even the APC as a Party and through its chieftains, including President Muhammadu Buhari (before his Election), had variously and robustly defended the constitutionality and imperativeness of bi-partisan legislative leadership during the defection of the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal to its fold while in opposition without relinquishing his position.
The party urged the APC-led Federal Government to tell the world why bi-partisan leadership in the legislature was good in the instances of Tambuwal as well as the Benue and Plateau Assemblies, but an abomination in the case of Ekweremadu.
PDP stressed that APC’s stance on DSP and his continued persecution on this account as the height of duplicity, intolerance, and executive excesses unwarranted and inexcusable in a democracy.
The opposition party then sought for the support of the International community, the media, and civil society to help arrest this scary deterioration of our nascent democracy and democratic values before it is too late.
