The refusal of the perm sec's to honour the invitation by the Senate is indeed causing dis-hamoney between the presidency and Senate. The information reaching us on Sunday, had it that there is an
imminent clash between the Presidency and the Senate over an alleged
attempt by the Presidency to rubbish the senate president.
Pro-Saraki senators are accusing the
Presidency of instigating the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of
Finance, Mrs. Anastacia Nwaobia, not to honour an invitation by the
upper chamber which is a total dis-respect to the highest law making institution and its members in Nigeria.
However, Nwaobia had communicated to the Senate
that she could not honour its invitation without an approval by her
supervisors, but the Saraki loyalists said the Senate had the
constitutional power to invite Nwaobia and that her refusal constituted
an affront to the legitimacy of the senate president. Furthermore, the Saraki loyalists’ belief that her refusal to honour the invitation is due to the alleged ‘non-acceptance’ of his presidency by the All
Progressives Congress and President Muhammadu Buhari. It will not augur well for our
democracy if the Presidency will not allow civil servants to do their
jobs. We should not carry the crisis in the APC to the Senate, a
pro-Saraki senator told one of our correspondents in Abuja on Sunday. Both
Saraki and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara,
had spurned the party’s directive on who to lead the National Assembly
and had ridden on the back of an alleged alliance with the opposition
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) members to clinch the leadership posts in both
chambers. But the APC had preferred Ahmad Lawan, a Senator from Yobe State, as the president of the Senate.
However, The Lawan group in the Senate on Sunday
said it supported Nwaobia because Saraki was said to lack both
legitimacy and the moral right to invite the permanent secretary to
brief the senate on the state of the economy. The Saraki group said the offending
permanent secretary failed to honour the Senate’s invitation because she
did not get clearance from the Presidency. Investigations by one of our reporter revealed that as of Friday the permanent secretary had
yet to neither appear before the Senate leadership nor respond to the
letters from the National Assembly management. It was learnt that senators loyal to the
Senate President were angry that the Presidency could encourage the
civil servants to disobey the Senate. What a change that Nigerian voted for!