ekweremadu-senate
The plot to unseat Ekweremadu
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By Our Reporter on July 21, 2015 Opinion

By Dan Amor

We must get the record straight. As Senator Ken Nnamani, the last President of the Fifth Senate and one of the finest legislative minds in the country has asserted, the floor of any chamber of the Nigerian bi-camera legislature is not a party secretariat. So, those calling for the resignation of Senator Ike Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate President are enemies of our democracy. President Muhammadu Buhari was recently quoted as saying that the emergence of Senator Ike Ekweremadu of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as Deputy Senate President is unacceptable to him and his party, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). “I cannot work with enemies of my party”-Buhari), so goes the headline, whatever that means.

This position of the President was followed by the alleged invitation of Ekweremadu by the police to be quizzed over the alleged doctoring of the Senate Rules to facilitate his election as Deputy Senate President. It is like the fable of the owl cring in the night and the child dying the following morning. The reported invasion of the hallowed chamber of the Senate by the police ostensibly to question the Clerk is outrageous, to say the least and must be condemned by all Nigerians who fought the military to a standstill to bring about the current democratic dispensation in 1999.

Therefore, the statement by the Presidency denying its involvement in the matter is laughable. Yet, without much ado, it must be emphasized that those who want to remove by hook or by crook, Ike Ekweremadu who was duly elected by Nigerian Senators as Deputy President of the Eight Senate in a keenly contested election on the floor of the Red Chamber and was sworn in in accordance with the Rules of the Senate as sanctioned by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, do not wish this democracy well. The PDP, despite its numerous shortcomings, still managed to hold the entire country and the democratic experiment together for sixteen unbroken years and handed over power to the APC in peace on May 29, 2015. The APC, rather than manifest the time tested ethos of democracy and progressive ideology which they claimed they had, are trying to bring back the hand of the clock. A true progressive should radiate the equanimity to accept defeat and the magnanimity to share his victory. Anything short of this is retrogressive.The assumption that Ekweremadu should step down as Deputy Senate President because he is of a minority party, is hopelessly bogus and out of tune with democratic best practices across the world. There is nowhere in our Constitution or even in the Electoral Act that states that the winning party must produce all the principal officers of the National Assembly.

There is even no specific designation which must be occupied by the ruling party in the National Assembly. The Senate has its own Rules not within the contemplation of any political affiliations. It is this that has bestowed its occupants with the appellation of “Distinguished Senators of the Federal Republic”, not of any political party, tribe or religion. In fact, it is only natural that the majority party ( the party in power) should produce the Senate President. This enviable position the APC has already assumed in the person of Distinguished Senator Abubakar Bukola Saraki. If our Senators, in their wisdom had decided to vote in their colleague from a minority party to the position of Deputy Senate President due to his competence and experience, so be it.

Indeed, it was just because of our mundane political practice in which the winner takes all, that the PDP in the past had to occupy both the positions of Senate President and Deputy Senate President. If APC as the ruling party, is prepared to work for Nigeria in the interest of the people, does it need to occupy all the principal offices at the National Assembly before it can effectively deliver on its campaign promises? Again, if the APC is truly progressive, isn’t it to its credit that for the first time in our democratic sojourn a minority party became Deputy Senate President when it was in power?

For so long, Nigerians have had to contend with so many obscenities from their leaders who try to import every conceivable political or economic experiment on the face value without trying to imbibe the spirit behind the idea. If our politicians assume the courage to practise in letter and in spirit the rules of engagement in presidential democracy as it is done in the United States of America from where we copied our executive presidential system, all the charades and shenanigans we are witnessing would not rear their ugly heads in our system of governance.

In his seminal, “PROFILES IN COURAGE “, John F. Kennedy, himself, a Junior Senator of the United States of America espouses eight vignettes of eight United States senators, who sat in the United States Senate, and by their various actions at crucial moments in American political history displayed courage. They displayed the strength to resist political pressure, and to take a lonely stand on their own sense of what was right for their beloved country.

The eight profiles are bracketed by a first chapter, “Courage and Politics,” and a last chapter, “The Meaning of Courage.” Kennedy was obviously exploring his own sense of what it meant to occupy that high office. Beyond the fact that Kennedy’s eight heroes were all senators of the United States, no region or party or moment in time includes them. They come not only from different parties in their national history, but from the North and the South, the East and the West. But whatever their party and whatever their section of the country, each of Kennedy’s eight senators at a crucial moment chooses an unpopular course and acts in the light of what he conceives to be the higher interest of the nation as a whole; against party, against section, even against the will of his constituents.

•Amor writes from Abuja

Make e dey go

i think this matter should rest let the governance take place

Godsbaby1:
i think this matter should rest let the governance take place

take a good look at the body language of APC and PMB.do you think they believe in governance .

baralatie:

take a good look at the body language of APC and PMB.do you think they believe in governance .

so so witch hunting, since it is not a must that the ruling party must produce all the principle officers i don't think Ike is a problem, that guy is a pure democrat,