Envoys’ visits

•Britain and US should not have endorsed the charade at the NASS

Barely 48 hours after Senator Bukola Saraki was elected Senate President, the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Dr Andrew Pocock, visited him to congratulate him on his election which he reportedly described as “well deserved”. His visit to the Senate President was followed, six days later, by that of the United States Ambassador to Nigeria, James F. Entwistle.

Pocock said most things expected during such visits; he spoke of his country’s readiness to support the red chamber in capacity building of the lawmakers to make their job easier. “We discussed capacity building for the Senate both in general terms and also in areas of particular interest and difficulty, complex pieces of legislation”, he told journalists after the visit. He added: “We briefly discussed some of the security inputs that we might make to help with the stabilisation of the security situation in the North East,” and that Britain would assist the country on the economic front as well as other areas where it can be of assistance.

We do not have much on record concerning the US envoy’s visit to Dr Saraki on June 18, about nine days after he assumed duties as Senate President, which, to us, is also an endorsement of his emergence as Senate President.

But we are particularly concerned about these visits, especially coming from the two countries with strong democratic traditions, given the circumstances under which Dr Saraki emerged as Senate President. There is no doubt that Dr Saraki clinched that position in the most controversial manner.

The upper legislative chamber has 109 members. Of this number, the former ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has 49 senators while the All Progressives Congress (APC) has the remaining 59; one of its senators-elect died last month. This leaves the APC comfortable to produce the leadership in the senate.

Unfortunately, Senator Saraki teamed up with the PDP senators and about eight from the APC to get the position at a time that about 51 other members of the APC were at the International Conference Centre in Abuja to attend a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari. As part of the trade-off by Senator Saraki, Senator Ike Ekweremadu of the PDP was elected Deputy Senate President. Not a few wondered how a man could have stabbed his own party in the back the way Senator Saraki did, just to realise his ambition.

Of course, all of these are in the public domain and ought to have served as notice to the envoys to be more circumspect in endorsing Dr Saraki’s election. We are sure none of the two envoys would have seen Senator Saraki’s election as acceptable if it had happened in their countries the way it did here on June 9. The point is, the mandate that Dr Saraki is exercising does not belong to him, it belongs to the political party under which platform he contested and won election into the Senate. And once that party takes a decision on a matter, he is duty bound to abide by that decision.

What we are saying is that nothing would have been lost if the envoys had waited for the fog over these issues to clear before visiting the winner or felicitating with him. There is no doubt that the Senate President met the legal requirement of a simple majority that he needed to occupy the position. In other words, he complied with the letter of the law but unfortunately fell short of the spirit of the law.

Without doubt, it took the APC a long time to decide on the contentious issue of who takes what position in the National Assembly after its victory at the polls; that still, should not be a justification for Senator Saraki to cede what rightly belongs to his party to another political party. Such bad faith cannot be in accord with the spirit of the law which, sometimes, is even more evocative than the letter of the law.