Kwankwaso and the 8th National Assembly

The recent outburst by the former governor of Kano State, Alhaji Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, over the emergence of the National Assembly leadership, leaves no one in doubt that the development, especially the election of Senator Bukola Saraki and Senator Ike Ekweremadu as the Senate’s presiding officers, has given him sleepless nights.

Unfortunately, the content of the interview leaves so much to be desired in terms of logic, morality, decorum, diction, and respect for constituted authorities. It is shallow, pedestrian, puerile, and rancorous.

Let us interrogate his views. First, in chastising Senator Bukola Saraki, Kwankwaso said: “Bukola should not go too far on his ambition. At his level, people should be more careful about what they do. Members of the party (APC) should have limitations; they should know where to start and where to stop. I think this is going too far romancing members of the PDP.

As far as we are concerned, PDP was dead until recently when ambition brought certain people to do what they should not do in party politics”.

Reading him, one is pushed to wonder whether Kwankwaso is actually speaking about the same party on whose platform he rose to the position of a Minister and twoterm governor. It makes one to wonder if the man sermonizing about party supremacy and discipline is the same Kwankwaso who, along with seven PDP governors, staged a rude walkout on the PDP hierarchy, including then President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, at the party’s mini convention in 2013 because he wanted more grips on the party to oil his presidential ambition. The same Kwankwaso, along with four governors of the new PDP (nPDP) fame not only romanced, but also married into the APC family in pursuit of his presidential ambition before he was floored by General Buhari at the Lagos presidential primary. He never stopped at nothing in pursuit of his personal interest above party interest.

So, when then did he become born again and anointed to sermonize on party discipline and supremacy? What treachery and indiscipline could be worse than carrying PDP’s gubernatorial mandate to the APC, passing off projects done under the PDP as though they were done under the APC, and finally manufacturing a screaming 1.9 million votes (which he boasts of today) to rig out the PDP on March 28?

Again, he tried to justify the Hon. Aminu Tambuwal rebellion in 2011, which he was part of, while demonising the one that led to Saraki’s emergence. According to him: “In 2011 the Tambuwal case was a case of going out of the zoning but all the positions went to the members of the party, while this time around, because of the ambition of members of our party, they went and connived with people who are not only opponents but enemies of the party to fight the party after the people of this country have discarded these people”.

Kwankwaso is being economical with the truth? A rebellion is a rebellion and both Saraki and Tambuwal were rebels with just causes. In 2011, Tambuwal led a rebellion that ensured that democracy and legislative independence prevailed. Today, Saraki, Hon. Yakubu Dogara, etc have further stretched the rebellion to ensure that free choices and constitutionalism prevailed above party highhandedness and cabalism.

As for the rambling on conniving with “people who are not only opponents, but enemies of the party to fight the party”, I can’t remember that the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), now APC, with whom Kwankwaso and company plotted the democratic coup that overthrew Hon. Mulikat Akande-Adeola as the PDP’s choice for Speaker in 2011 was friends of the PDP. The thrust was to incapacitate the Jonathan administration and mortally wound PDP ahead of 2015 if they could not take it entirely. The strategy worked.

When you also hear Kwankwaso say, “the people of this country have discarded these people (PDP)”, you are again moved to wonder why some invitees to a party like to showcase their attire and dance more than the organisers and celebrant. For crying out loud, the PDP in Kwankwaso cannot be wished away by a few month marriage of convenience to the APC. All whatever he is worth politically and economically, he owes to PDP. And if all PDP members have become three-headed demons, he too should consider himself a seven-headed demon, given his ranking in the PDP club when the going was good.

Kwankwaso also overreached himself when he decreed as follows: “That position (Deputy Senate President) doesn’t belong to the PDP and that is the mistake Ekweremadu is making. All those who supported him and his party to get it have made a big mistake for themselves and for the party and indeed for the country and they should be ashamed of themselves”. His reason was that for the 16 years that the PDP was in majority at the National Assembly, no other party shared the position of presiding officer with it.

However, it is either Kwankwaso is being hypocritical or he is crassly ignorant of the constitutional provisions on the election of the presiding officers of the nation’s apex legislature. It could be both. But, he needs to be tutored that the position of the Deputy Senate President or any presiding officer at the National Assembly is for any duly elected Senator or House Member. Section 50 (1)(a) of the 1999 Constitution is very clear on this matter. It provides: “There shall be a President and a Deputy President of the Senate, who shall be elected by the members of that House from among themselves”. Therefore, it is not the property of the APC or any party.

Also, besides the fact that Kwankwaso was instrumental to Tambuwal’s defection to the APC as a minority party with PDP’s speakership mandate in 2014, APC state legislators currently seat as Speakers of the Benue and Plateau States Houses of Assembly. Yet PDP has the majority there. So, on what moral grounds does he chastise the PDP?

He also probably forgot that the APC only enjoys a delicate majority in the Senate, unlike the overwhelming majority the PDP enjoyed those 16 years. Of the PDP’s 49 Senators, 32 come from the South East and South-South, regions the APC did not consider worthy of any substantive office from President to Deputy Speaker. They distributed those offices as if the two regions are inconsequential even though both have federal lawmakers elected on the APC platform. The APC even endorsed a North East and North Central Senate Presidency even though APC has a Senator from Edo and even though the APC will rely on the oil resources in both regions to fund their government. It is the height of unreasonableness and the party was deservedly punished.

Kwankwanso further declared rather gleefully: “Just yesterday I was reading Ekweremadu talking rubbish….” This is particularly indecorous, a showcase of poor upbringing, and a banal infringement on both Ekweremadu’s and Senate’s parliamentary privileges. By the way, Kwankwaso does not yet enjoy parliamentary immunity. He cannot bear being sworn in before Senators Saraki or Ekweremadu. Some say he is awaiting his ministerial nomination. Unfortunately for him, he not only has to deal with a Senate which President he pours invectives on at will and which Deputy President is “talking rubbish”, but he would even have to now bow before Saraki or Ekweremadu whom he loathes.

Far from patriotism, Kwankwanso is afraid of retribution. Hear him: “What complicated the whole matter is that the situation now is that more than 50 percent of Bukola is in PDP. If you take the position of the Senate President (that is compared to what Tambuwal’s rebellious Speakership position), it becomes more difficult. The implication is that very soon the leadership of the Senate will start Tambuwalising the party and of course the government as we have seen in 2011”.

In other words, Kwankwaso is afraid that what he and his cohorts did to the PDP as enemies within might also turn round to visit them in their new party. While there is nothing wrong with APC reaping what it sowed, I would say that contrary to Kwankwanso’s false alarm, the duo of Saraki and Ekweremadu are patriots who would always put national interest above party or personal interest. Ekweremadu himself has severally called on Nigerians to give Buhari all he needed to succeed. He has severally warned against destructive opposition, which sees nothing good in government’s programmes or tends to incite the people against the government. So, everybody is not a Kwankwaso or APC after all.

Ultimately, Kwankwaso’s fear is his 2019 presidential ambition. But, with all that happened in this country, whoever does not yet understand that all power belongs to God is still in spiritual and political kindergarten.

––