No fewer than 17 senators of the Peoples
Democratic Party will this week defect to the All Progressives Congress,
Chairman, Senate Committee on Ecology and Environment, Dr. Bukola Saraki, has
said.
In an interview with journalists in Ilorin on
Sunday, Saraki said the concerned senators had already consulted with their
senatorial districts.
He added that they had signed the letter and
perfected all other strategies for their defection.
This move is in spite of the overtures made to
them and the reconciliatory efforts of the PDP and its new Chairman, Alhaji
Adamu Mu’azu.
“We are going to formally defect. Before we
started we were already 19 senators. Then Jigawa pulled out. We have
about 17 senators that will defect from PDP to APC. The letter has been
signed.
“I have signed my own. Others have signed theirs.
So, it is not a matter of probability or that it will be. It must be and
not a matter of months or weeks but a matter of days,” he said.
Saraki, who ruled Kwara State for eight years,
said he had gone with the election- winning machinery to the APC. He added that
the APC would win both the presidential and governorship elections in the
state.
Decrying the crisis in Rivers State, he alleged
that there were lots of impunity in the state.
He said he supported the directives of the APC
leadership to the party’s federal lawmakers to block the passage of the 2014
budget, confirmation of ministerial nominees and service chiefs.
He added that he supported other democratic and
lawful measures to restore peace and stability to the troubled Rivers State.
He denounced the acrimony between the Governor of
Rivers State, Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, and the state’s Commissioner of Police, Mr.
Joseph Mbu.
He noted that Mbu should surbordinate himself to
Amaechi, the Chief Security Officer of Rivers State or be redeployed.
According to him, the Inspector-General of
Police, Alhaji Abubakar Mohammed, is capable of handling the matter, having
experienced even more serious situation in Kwara State where he once served as
the CP.
Meanwhile, a former Minister of Land, Housing and
Urban Development, Mr. Essien Nduese, has said that the PDP legislators who
defected to APC, were just exercising their freedom of movement and association.
He said by defecting to another political party,
the legislators were not doing something wrong. According to him, defection in
a political situation is a normal process.
Nduese, who spoke on the nation’s political
situation in Eket on Friday, said that all the defected members were free to
return to their former political party, if they so wished.
“Defectors have their freedom of movement and of
association. So, they are free to join any party of their choice. It is a
normal political process. There is nothing wrong with a legislator defecting to
another political party,” he said.
Nduese, who was also a member of the House of
Representatives, representing Eket Federal Constituency, Akwa Ibom State, said
the new PDP Chairman, Alhaji Adamu Mu’azu, might run into trouble if he wanted
to take the party back to the objectives of the founding fathers.
He said there was no situation in which the
national chairman of the PDP would come in and fail to run into problems as
“there are some groups or persons within the party who want things done in
their own way, and not according to the party’s rules.”
He said, “Whoever tries to work against such
people will run into problems. Like I mentioned earlier, there has been a shift
from normal rule that was operating in this country before 1999.
“If you look at it very well, in 1999, there was
some semblance of democratic governance. As time goes on, we are dwindling into
anarchy, impunity, and so on.
“So, any attempt to reverse this trend is bound
to generate another level of crisis. That was what happened to the other
national chairmen of the PDP.”
Punch
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