Benue: Atiku, Makarfi decry impeachment moves

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has decried the planned impeachment of Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State, describing the development as “awkward political development.”

Atiku said that any attempt to disregard the rule of law and the Constitution of Nigeria in the impeachment of a governor was a recipe for anarchy.

He urged the police to remain politically neutral and avoid aiding lawlessness, adding that partisanship could professionally destroy their image.

Also, the former National Caretaker Chairman of the PDP and presidential hopeful, Ahmed Makarfi said he was “appalled that despite numerous judicial pronouncements, more than two third of a 30-member House of Assembly in Benue State would be denied access to, and in fact chased away from the house by the police while giving state cover to seven or so other members to sit and even attempt to impeach a democratically elected governor.”

Makarfi in a statement by his spokesman, Mukhtar Zubairu Sirajo, said Governor Ortom was being haunted for the simple reason that some quarters had been slighted by the governor’s decision to move from APC to PDP.

The senator said Nigerians and the APC should not forget in a hurry, that when the PDP held sway, it respected the rights of the people to freely decide what political platform(s) to identify with, “a stance that the APC more than any other party reaped bountifully from and the fruits of which included Governor Ortom himself, at that point.”

“It therefore smacks of hypocrisy and a brazen disrespect for fundamental human rights for the same party to now deny people the right defect from it for whatever reason(s),” the statement said.