With the involvement of a dozen chieftains, PDP Senators-elect have orchestrated a two-pronged plan to wrestle the leadership of the National Assembly from APC through the use of secret voting, setting the stage for an epic political battle on the day of inauguration of the 9th session in June.
Although, elections into the Senate Presidency and the Speakership of the Federal House of Representatives are due early in June, APC sources said the two camps are preparing for the day, claiming that PDP, “are already laying political landmines in the path of APC, which clinched majority of seats in the last elections, in order to have the legislative gravel by proxy.”
According to sources, while the opposition party cannot reinvent the wheel in terms of the colouration of the legislature during the 9th session of National Assembly, it is allegedly trying to foist on the winning party, the Senate in particular, APC candidates that would do its bidding, using the Rule Book of National Assembly to achieve it.
Sources claimed that PDP, using their chieftains, would begin the implementation of the two-pronged plan by engaging the top echelon of National Assembly bureaucracy and some APC Senators-elect for their buy-in on the need to continue the use of the 2015 Rule Book, especially its secret ballot provision, which paved the way for the emergence of the current Senate President, Bukola Saraki, against the directives of his then party-APC.
“You know the former Clerk of the Senate allowed the 2015 Rule Book to be used during the inauguration of the 8th Senate as he capitalised on the absence of APC Senators in the red chamber and to complicate the situation, Senator Bukola Saraki insisted on using the forged book after he was sworn in as the Senate President” a ranking APC Senator recalled.
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“Remember that secret voting provision was smuggled into the forged Rule Book used for the 2015 elections despite our protest because secret voting is alien to parliamentary practices. When it comes to voting in the parliaments worldwide, open voting is used,” a Senator-elect said, adding that, “what is now expected of the current Clerk of the National Assembly is not to use the forged book for the inauguration of the 9th Session of the Senate come June this year.
“What happened in 2015 inauguration will not repeat itself because we shall all be present during this year’s inauguration and we shall not allow the forged Rule Book to be used. We will insist on open voting as practised in all parliaments in the world and the National Assembly bureaucracy has already been put on notice,” a current principal officer pledged.
It was gathered that Senators-elect on the platform of the APC, have agreed to insist that this time around, the 7th Senate session Rule Book, which is the approved version, should be used by National Assembly bureaucracy in the unlikely situation of election of presiding officers, as PDP will not be allowed to spring any political surprise.
To buttress the stance of APC Senators-elect on open voting, a source said one of his colleagues, an outspoken and respected returning Senator-elect from Kano State, on a national television station live programme, had to tell a PDP chieftain that secret voting would not be allowed for the upcoming elections of presiding officers of the Senate under any circumstance and “that is a stand that will not be compromised”.
“We underrated the capacity of PDP to go to any length to achieve its aims and objectives during 2015 elections of presiding officers of the National Assembly while we were totally naïve about the crucial role of the bureaucracy in the scheme of things in the legislature, a situation that turned the table in favour of the opposition despite being in the minority,” an APC Senator-elect said.
According to some APC Senators-elect familiar with the scheming, the PDP has realised that unlike in 2015, their plan will not materialise this time and their financiers know that “we are aware of their political manoeuvres and are ready to expose sources of funds for their National Assembly intervention.”
