The APC did not win any seat whatsoever in the House of Representatives in the 2011 elections.\u00a0 Therefore, it cannot provide the Speaker of the House.
\nHave you ever heard the parable of a man who stole a goat and was arrested and prosecuted?\u00a0 When brought before the judge, his line of defense was that others had stolen goats in the past but had not been prosecuted.\u00a0 How does that absolve him of guilt?\u00a0 The man is a thief, pure and simple.
\nWhen one talks of the treachery of Aminu Tambuwal\u2019s defection from the PDP to the APC, his apologists trot out opposition-party legislators and governors that also defected to the PDP in the past.\u00a0 So what?\u00a0 All such defections are equally treacherous and morally indefensible.\u00a0 What we have today is the glorification of treachery for political reasons.\u00a0 The honorable thing for any defecting politician to do is to resign his or her seat in the legislature and then seek a fresh mandate under the new party through a by-election.<\/p>\n
Dishonorable politics.<\/strong> Trouble-maker Tambuwal<\/strong> Time to resign<\/strong> \nSome people say it is not the business of the executive to determine if Tambuwal should remain as Speaker or not: it is a matter for the courts.\u00a0 However, the courts don\u2019t execute laws: the executive does.\u00a0 The Constitution says if a man defects from his elected party to another party, he automatically loses his seat.\u00a0 Tambuwal resigned; therefore he has lost his seat.\u00a0 The executive has implemented that loss. Attempted coup<\/strong> \nIndeed, at the national level, the APC is unknown and has yet to be recognized by the Nigerian electorate.\u00a0 The APC has never presented a candidate to the electorate at the national level.\u00a0 Therefore, the APC cannot come out of nowhere to commandeer the major office of the Speaker.\u00a0 These shenanigans have gone on for too long.\u00a0 The APC did not win any seat whatsoever in the House of Representatives in the 2011 elections.\u00a0 Therefore, it cannot provide the Speaker of the House.<\/p>\n \nTambuwal should have known that by resigning from the PDP while hanging on to the position of Speaker he is bound to generate unnecessary political tension.\u00a0 If he did not know this before, he knows this now.\u00a0 Failure to resign from the House now only portrays him as a shameless troublesome opportunist.\u00a0 Tambuwal needs to redeem his battered image soonest.\u00a0 He should do the honorable thing and resign from the House without further delay<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The APC did not win any seat whatsoever in the House of Representatives in the 2011 elections.\u00a0 Therefore, it cannot provide the Speaker of the House. Have you ever heard…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-opinions"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nAminu Waziri Tambuwal, Mutawallen Sakwato
\nIn 1983, Abubakar Rimi resigned as Governor of Kano when he defected from the Peoples\u2019 Redemption Party (PRP) to the Nigeria Peoples\u2019 Party (NPP).\u00a0 He did this because he was an honorable man; a true progressive.\u00a0 In 2014, Aminu Tanbuwal defected from the PDP to the APC but has refused to relinquish his seat in the National Assembly.\u00a0 He did this because he is not an honorable man; neither is he a true progressive.\u00a0 Tambuwal has been Speaker for four years, and yet he has not championed one single piece of progressive legislation in all that time.
\nWith his defection, some busybody parliamentarians with 27.5 million naira to burn bought the APC nomination papers for Tambuwal so he can contest for the party\u2019s presidential ticket.\u00a0 Almost immediately, he was touted as a spoiler for Muhammadu Buhari\u2019s presidential ambitions and was shamelessly courted by the Tinubu brigade in the APC.\u00a0 Realising that his hopeless candidacy would only be used to foment problems within the APC, Tambuwal wisely resigned from the contest, forfeiting the millions paid.
\nAs a face-saving device to camouflage his signaled readiness to ditch Buhari for Tambuwal, Bola Tinubu went public to congratulate Tambuwal for deciding not to contest for the APC presidential nomination.\u00a0 He said: \u201cThis sacrifice you have made will not be in vain. It must be noted by all democrats across the country as an act of great patriotism.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThis is really neat.\u00a0 Tinubu\u2019s definition of patriotism applies to the APC and not to Nigeria.\u00a0 Tinubu forgot to mention that while Tambuwal decided not to cause trouble in the APC; at the same time, he decided to be a trouble-maker at the national level.\u00a0 Should this man who has the good sense to withdraw as APC presidential candidate \u201cas a sacrifice for the cohesion and unity of the APC\u201d not also have the good sense to resign from the National Assembly now that he has defected from the PDP for the sake of national peace and cohesion?\u00a0 Apparently not!
\nAccording to the Godfather of the APC, a patriot can be a trouble-maker at the national level, as long as his trouble-making is in the interest of the APC.\u00a0 That, in a nutshell, is the crux of the problem with the APC.\u00a0 It is a party of trouble-makers.\u00a0 The APC does not really believe it can win the 2015 elections.\u00a0 Therefore, it is determined to cause as much mayhem as possible; even threatening to create a parallel government when and if it loses the election.
\nThe Tambuwal saga is the latest example of APC mischief.\u00a0 The party\u2019s strategy is to achieve power immorally and illegally.\u00a0 It is a party of treacherous defectors.\u00a0 It even went to Obasanjo, a former PDP president, asking him to defect to the APC.\u00a0 Instead of attracting its own membership, it gathers together a coterie of treacherous defectors.\u00a0 All its presidential candidates have jumped from party to party.
\nIt is now encouraging Tambuwal in his treachery of attempting to defect to the APC with the position of Speaker.\u00a0 However, the APC remains a minority party in the National Assembly.\u00a0 The position of Speaker belongs to the majority party.\u00a0 The APC cannot receive by subterfuge what rightly belongs to the majority PDP.
\nTambuwal knows he can no longer be Speaker.\u00a0 He knows that APC cannot win a majority of the seats in the legislature in the coming elections.\u00a0 He knows the \u201cmago mago\u201d he used to become the Speaker cannot be duplicated in the next House of Representatives.\u00a0 Therefore, in defeat, he has picked up the nomination form to contest as Governor of Sokoto under the APC ticket.
\nShow of shame
\nSince this is the new reality confronting Tambuwal, the man should stop causing trouble and simply resign his seat in the House.\u00a0 But rather than resign, and with his security detail removed, Tambuwal drove with a convoy of \u201cthugs\u201d to the National Assembly.\u00a0 This led to a show of shame that was televised and broadcast to the whole world.\u00a0 The fact that Tambuwal led this brazen display of lawlessness at the National Assembly shows that he is unworthy of being the number four citizen of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
\nEmmanuel Ojukwu, the Public Relations Officer of the Nigeria Police, had this to say: \u201cThe speaker came with thugs, refused to be searched and six of the hoodlums attacked a police man, after which the police tear-gassed the Speaker and his riotous crowd so as to restore order.\u00a0 Everybody has seen that somebody was even beating somebody; somebody was pushing a policeman from the car.\u00a0 Somebody was removing road blocks mounted by police.\u201d\u00a0 Those \u201csomebodies\u201d are supposed to be Nigeria\u2019s law-makers.
\nIn effect, championed by Tambuwal, our law-makers became law-breakers.\u00a0 Impeded by the police from entering the House, some climbed the gate.\u00a0 The Speaker himself flouted the directives of the police.\u00a0 He forced his way inside.\u00a0 Later, in disgrace, he sent his media aide with the statement that: \u201cThe honorable speaker wishes to state that he is a law-abiding citizen of the Federal Republic of Nigeria who has no immunity against arrest and prosecution.\u201d\u00a0 This is what is called \u201ccampaigning after failure to be elected.\u201d\u00a0 The video of his lawlessness had already gone viral on the internet.<\/p>\n
\nThere is nothing left for Tambuwal to do now than to resign from the House of Representatives and save Nigeria from all this \u201cwahala\u201d he has created.\u00a0 Defecting from one party to another is against the spirit and the letter of the Nigerian Constitution.\u00a0 Section 68 (g) of the 1999 Constitution says: \u201cA member of the Senate or of the House of Representatives shall vacate his seat in the House of which he is a member if being a person whose election to the House was sponsored by a political party, he becomes a member of another political party before the expiration of the period for which that House was elected\u2026\u201d
\nTambuwal\u2019s name did not even appear on the ballot-paper when he was elected to the House of Representatives from his constituency in Sokoto.\u00a0 It was the PDP that was on the ballot.\u00a0 That is how Rotimi Amaechi became Governor of Rivers State.\u00a0 He was not even the candidate who ran for the office.\u00a0 However, the courts ruled that he should have been the PDP candidate.\u00a0 Since the PDP won the election, Amaechi became the Governor of Rivers State even though he did not campaign in the election for the post.
\nThe only proviso in the Constitution for Tambuwal to remain in the House is if his defection to the APC is as a result of a division in the PDP or the merger of the PDP with another political party, or the faction of another party.\u00a0 This situation does not exist, except in the imagination of APC supporters.\u00a0 The courts in Nigeria have ruled that the PDP is not divided and is not bedeviled by any factions.\u00a0 Everyone in Nigeria knows this in any case.<\/p>\n
\nIf Tambuwal has a problem with that, the onus is on him to go to court.\u00a0 The onus is not on the executive.\u00a0 Until the courts say otherwise, Tambuwal can no longer be a member of the House of Representatives; and someone who is not a member of the House cannot be the Speaker.\u00a0 We borrowed our political system from the United States where it is well understood that the Speaker of the House cannot belong to the minority party.<\/p>\n
\nTambuwal, the Speaker, is APC.\u00a0 Emeka Ihedioha, the Deputy Speaker, is PDP.\u00a0 This situation is unacceptable, especially given the fact that the mandate for leadership in the House was freely given by the electorate to the PDP and not the APC.\u00a0 You cannot have a situation of minority rule, when in actual fact it is the majority that has the mandate.<\/p>\n