By Ibrahim Suleiman

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.

Let us interrogate his views. First, in chastising 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 two-term 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 during which 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 about 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. 

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.

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.

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 legislators are currently Speakers of the Benue and Plateau States House 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.

Far from patriotism, Kwankwaso is afraid of retribution. His words:    “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 turned round to visit them in their new party.

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.

•Sule, a political analyst, lives in Lokoja

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G

His name sef

God bless you for exposing hypocritical nature of Kwankwaso.

The writer is a real SULE

This write up looks unbiased,most of this politicians are worse than what they portray themselves to be .