The President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, and his deputy, Ike Ekweremadu, have raised the alarm over alleged plot by the Presidency to arrest them and effect their removal from their offices.
The plot, the two top legislators said it gathered, would be hatched through the use of the anti-graft agency, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, and security agencies.
In the same vein, Saraki and Ekweremadu raised the alarm that there was also a plan to implicate them and some of their colleagues in the siege laid to the National Assembly on Tuesday by operatives of the Department of State Service, DSS.
They alleged that after receiving the interim report submitted by the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr. Idris Ibrahim, on the siege, the Presidency had set up a “closet panel” to review the report and submit a final recommendation.
The mandate of the “closet panel,” the two legislators claimed, was to turn facts on the head and blame the invasion of the National Assembly on them.
The argument, it was said, would be that the two leaders of the red chamber of the National Assembly, worked in tandem with the sacked Director General of the DSS, Mallam Lawal Daura to stage the parliamentary security breach.
The details of the claims of the two legislators are contained in a statement issued on Friday by their media aides – Yusuph Olaniyonu, for the Senate President and Uche Anichukwu, for the Deputy Senate President.
The statement reads:
“We have been reliably informed that instead of the Presidency to set up a public inquiry or judicial commission to probe last Tuesday’s early morning Invasion of the National Assembly as being demanded by the general public, they have commenced a process of manipulation and fabrication.
“The Presidency has set up a closet panel, which would work to a predetermined conclusion in which they will now claim that the Senate President and the Deputy Senate President worked in collusion with ex-DG of DSS, Lawal Daura to stage the invasion.
“They want to shield the fact that the previous night before the invasion and up till the early hours of Tuesday, there was a meeting of the All Progressives Congress (APC) senators and that the plan was for them to be moved in a Coaster bus into the National Assembly complex later that morning for them to purportedly remove us and select a new Senate President and Deputy Senate President.
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“Their Plot only failed because the media, particularly social media, Nigerians and international community responded very swiftly as some legislators who came into the complex were refused entry by gun-wielding, hooded security operatives.
“Now, they want to turn the facts on its head and blame us for their botched plot against democracy. We are hereby alerting all Nigerians and members of the international community that the present Nigerian government will stop at nothing to destroy, suppress and incapacitate the opposition. This is their new tactic and plot as we approach the period of the 2019 polls.
“We hereby reiterate our earlier position that the coup against democracy as represented by the invasion must be probed through an independent judicial commission of inquiry which will produce a comprehensive report. We reject any manipulated and fabricated investigation.”
