The Deputy Senate President of Nigeria, Ike Ekweremadu has been asked to report at the Force Headquarters, Abuja, Monday to answer questions on a petition said to have been filed against him by a group of senators detailing how he unilaterally tinkered with certain provisions of the Senate Standing Rules relating to the election of the President of the Senate and that of the Deputy.
The petitioners were said to have alleged that Ekweremadu had taken undue advantage of the slated rules to become the Deputy Senate President in the June 9 election of principal officers of the National Assembly.
But speaking at a media briefing in Abuja on Sunday, the National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Olisa Metuh said the said amendment to the rule was effected by the bureaucracy of the National Assembly headed by the Clerk, Alhaji Salisu Maikasuwa.
Metuh said the invitation from the IGP was a build up to phantom charges with a view to arresting and incarcerating Ekweremadu, and thereby creating a vacuum in the Senate and pave the way for the imposition of a preferred APC senator to take his position.
The party accused curtain unnamed All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders of instigating the police action against Ekweremadu, adding that the party had uncovered threats to the life of the Deputy Senate President and other key leaders of the PDP.
In reaction to PDP, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has said it has nothing to do with the reported police’s invitation of Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu, over which the PDP has released an outlandish statement containing all sorts of imaginary claims.
In a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party said it neither wrote a petition to the police nor is it aware that any petition was written against the Deputy Senate President.
”However, if, as the PDP claims, the petition concerns alleged altering of the Senate’s Standing Rules on the process of electing Presiding Officers, that is a clear case of forgery which the police have a duty to investigate. Questioning the right of the police to carry out their duties in this regard amounts to intimidating the security agency.
”Forgery is a crime that is being regularly investigated by the police, and it beggars belief that such investigation will now be interpreted to mean that Nigeria is descending into dictatorship or that democracy and the enjoyment of personal freedoms are now endangered. These claims by the scaremongering PDP are far fetched and preposterous,” it said.
APC said if indeed there is a petition against Senator Ekweremadu, he should gladly heed the invitation by the police so he can clear his name, adding that no one is above the law.
”President Muhammadu Buhari has repeatedly said that at every point, the law must be supreme and everyone must respect the law, if the nation’s democratic system is to survive. Extrapolating a police invitation of anyone, no matter his status, to mean the onset of dictatorship is itself an invitation to lawlessness and anarchy, which permeated the long but ineffective rule of the PDP,” the party said.
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