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Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu is playing with fire! And if he is not careful that fire will consume him! At a recent dinner meeting with selected reporters in Lagos, Nigeria’s Deputy Senate President, revealed a plan to add an additional two years for current office holders in the country.
The plan is that the National Assembly might consider the tenure of the president and governors, which normally expires by 2015. The absurd and absolutely irresponsible plan is allegedly part of initiatives to resolve so-called ‘threats’ that the 2015 general elections could pose.
According to Ekweremadu, the additional, unconstitutional two extra years, will then allow those in power to be eased out without rancor.
Ekweremadu’s thought was expressed thus: “I believe that if the players in politics or stakeholders are able to come together one way to deal with the situation, it could be a win-win situation for everybody (obviously MINUS the Nigerian people!).
I believe that the way it could work now is that people have been elected for four years, so let everybody complete the four years tenure for which they were elected. And then, through the doctrine of necessity and some sort of jurisprudential approach, do some kind of transition of two years in which case those present occupiers like the president and state governors who are finishing their tenures, will do another two years that would end in 2017…
You can see that those fighting the President have hinged their complaints on the fact that if he gets his second term by the time they are gone, he would start to chase them. So if we all agree (who are this ‘WE’? The thieving political elite obviously!), that is the way to solve the problem.
After two years, both the President and other governors will exit. I believe the fear would not be there and there would not be much pressure in the polity”. These are Ike Ekweremadu’s words!
Amazingly enough, Ekweremadu is Deputy President of Senate and had sworn to uphold and protect the Nigerian Constitution. Yet, he is devising a “doctrine of necessity” plus a “jurisprudential approach” to subvert the same constitution.
And his reason for what is close to treason, is to remove “pressure in the polity”, pressure he alleged, built up from those opposed to Goodluck Jonathan’s second term ambition. Ekweremadu repudiates an electoral battle between president and other contestants, but instead wants constitutional tinkering to add two extra years for all. It is afterall the EXCLUSIVE business of “players in politics (note that, PLAYERS IN POLITICS!) and stakeholders”, to do as they deem fit, with the fate of Nigeria.
The Deputy Senate President is generously offering two extra years of freebies and kleptomania on a platform of “jurisprudential approach” and the unconstitutional “doctrine of necessity”! The Deputy Senate President is only acting true to convention; or have we forgotten that it was then Deputy Senate President, Ibrahim Mantu, who was at the heart of the effort by Obasanjo to push down our throats his notorious Third Term Agenda?
There must be something about the office of Deputy Senate President which seems to dispose the occupier to the unpatriotic scheming of a tenure elongation type.
It is instructive that soon after President Jonathan was sworn-in in 2011, the first agenda that he pushed was for a single Seven Year Tenure! The outcry in the country, but especially in the media, forced Jonathan and his supporters to beat a retreat.
But it seems clear that the plan was only shelved from public scrutiny, but is still very much alive within the circles of the ruling elite. Ekweremadu’s kite flying is very much part of that overall picture of subversion of the constitutional order, from the back door, to achieve tenure elongation. I have an admonition for the Deputy Senate President: He should stay within the insignificant brawl he is having with the governor of his state over his own gubernatorial ambition.
If he pushes further the obnoxious agenda to elongate the tenure of president and governors, he will burn himself very fatally! No amount of subterfuge will chloroform Nigerians into sleep over tenure elongation projects. It will be dead on arrival, headed to the mortuary of Nigerian politics and the nation’s hall of infamy! And he might suffer the indignity of being swept into the dustbin of history!.
