The scenarios
FOR many Nigerians resident in Ekiti State, the House of Assembly crisis that has seemingly dragged on, and appears intractable so far for about six months, has become a matter for varying analyses and perception. There are those who have come to see the imbroglio as purely politics on the part of the lawmaking and executive arms of government, as officials elected in the 2011 general election, see the denouement of their terms at hand.
For those who hold this thought, the May 29 destination of the All Progressives Congress (APC) lawmakers must not come without them earning their salaries and allowances, and perhaps, “severance package.” All of these are currently stuck in the lingering crisis. “To be able to get their entitlements, there must, therefore be a way to resolve the issues around the bitter war the APC lawmakers have intently waged against the administration of Governor Ayodele Fayose from its first day, and by extension, Ekiti State and its people.” This was the submission of a legal practitioner in the state, who also said he had been “keenly watching the events in the state Assembly since Governor Fayose won the governorship election in June 2014.”
The lawyer said it had been “not only interesting and amusing but worrisome that the lawmakers allowed a simple issue of ‘who can shake the other more’ to fester and nearly rupture the peace of the state, after it became a war.” According to this source, the matter had been “unfortunately reduced to ‘how can 7 out of 26 lawmakers impeach the Speaker of the state House of Assembly’, which is about the only facet of the matter that had been made clear to the unsuspecting public by a well-orchestrated media and propaganda plan of their party.”
To him, “the entire matter should be viewed in its larger picture, rather than the narrow and selfish purview of portraying the APC lawmakers as victims of a Governor Fayose that has come again, bared his fangs and chased them out of the state.”
This obvious Fayose sympathiser recalled what he described as “the unceremonious, indefinite and self-serving adjournment of the Assembly by Dr. Adewale Omirin, the embattled Speaker, the day after Fayose assumed office as governor, with nothing as explanation given to the people of the state.” According to him, “the APC lawmakers had an obvious plan to frustrate the government and they didn’t hesitate to bring it to fore when their party’s plan to prevent Fayose from being sworn-in as governor failed.” He claimed that “it all appeared as a plan B, activated promptly after the swearing-in, while they also awaited the outcome of their mysterious applications at the various courts all in a bid to create confusion in the state and give the outside world something to talk about in Fayose and Ekiti.”
The “concerned Ekiti indigene” said he knew the matter was “going to come down to ‘pay us our entitlements’ claims now being made by the APC lawmakers.” He also boasted that he knew that the “the whole issue had no basis all along because it couldn’t have been that we lump the presidential election campaigns with the so-called constitutional breaches of Fayose which they caused directly or indirectly and the politics of supremacy in the Assembly, which have led us to this.”
Another scenario, however, was the dismissal of the portrayal of the APC members of the Assembly as “bread and butter-seeking people.” An APC insider said it was not true that the party had laid mines for Fayose’s administration, saying “simply put, the person of Fayose is the problem with the state and not the legitimate steps our lawmakers are taking.”
According to the APC chief, “Omirin has the powers to adjourn the house for as long as he deems fit if the vagaries of his duty as the Speaker demand that he does so. He noted that the activities of the House shouldn’t be tied to the apron strings of the executive, as they are separate arms of government. Thus, it was justified for the Speaker to adjourn the House indefinitely when a new governor had just assumed office. “I don’t see anything wrong in that so long as the action does not breach any part of the constitution of the country which forms a kind of guide for the actions of the lawmakers,” he maintained.
The matters are interwoven now, with the vexed issue of whether the moves by the APC lawmakers were actually out to frustrate Fayose or not, received a bland response from the APC chief. “The crux of the matter, as far as I am concerned, is that Governor Fayose, through many of his unconstitutional and immoral actions has breached the constitution, because he is running the state without the proper legislative guide he needs to make his actions legal, and therefore the 19 APC lawmakers are justified in moving for his impeachment.”
The Issues
The current issues, according to some of the stakeholders, peaked with the removal of Omirin as the Speaker by the PDP lawmakers in the House and the move by the APC members of the Assembly to impeach Governor Fayose. The two planks of the Ekiti Assembly crisis, however, have been analysed simply as PDP versus APC rivalry in the state.
“When Fayose won the election, the PDP and Ekiti people were still in the euphoria of the victory when news filtered into town that the APC had gone to the tribunal, while the E-11 went back to court. While the APC was challenging the electoral victory, citing ‘stomach infrastructure’; ‘photochromic’ ballot papers and lastly, audio tape as reasons for the loss of the election, the E-11 was challenging the eligibility of Fayose to even stand for election at all, citing his “impeachment” in 2006.
These created all forms of tensions and crisis in Ekiti until the swearing-in on October 16, 2014. With the assumption of office of Fayose, the Assembly crisis began and was temporarily subsumed by the din from the campaigns for the general election, which ended with the election of General Muhammadu Buhari. The day Buhari was announced as the winner of the presidential election, the APC lawmakers resurfaced, not just in the state but at the Assembly Complex, where they held a brief thanksgiving prayer session and announced that more “activities will take place in the coming days.”
The APC lawmakers, ostensibly dubbed “runaway lawmakers” by a section of the Ekiti people, had literally left the state when it was obvious that they could not flow on the same wavelength with their PDP colleagues and Governor Fayose. A source said: “After the adjournment controversy instigated by Omirin, we had several meetings in which we agreed that ‘election is over, Ekiti is left for us all’. But we soon found that they were taking instructions and getting financial support, from some sources outside the state, which we feel had told them to hold fast and refuse to cooperate with Fayose.”
Soon after the emergence of Buhari as the president-elect, the issue of impeachment heightened, with the lawmakers always in the news with one form of item or the other on the matter. But Omirin refused to agree with insinuations that they were acting some other people’s script in the state. “The fact that we are not sitting in the chambers of the Assembly does not mean that we are not performing our constitutional roles. We can perform our duties from anywhere,” he said.
The embattled speaker maintained that Governor Fayose had been the one preventing them from carrying out their roles as he, according to him, had hounded them out of the state with “his thugs and the police, which were playing their accomplice role well.”
But their colleagues in the PDP rejected the allegation of hounding them, saying after it became obvious that they were not ready to cooperate with the governor “to make laws for the good governance of Ekiti State, we had to find a solution so as not to allow them grind the state to a halt.” They cited the botched screening of some of Fayose’s nominees as a case in point, saying from their excuse not to screen the commissioner-nominees, “it was clear that they had some other plans.” This probably led to the sitting that removed Omirin as Speaker and appointed Dele Olugbemi. The controversy lingered for a few days until Omirin went to court, an action which some lawyers and APC sympathisers claimed meant that “he agreed that he was indeed impeached.”
The heightened impeachment moves commenced after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had done with the presidential election which the APC won. “The Ekiti APC lawmakers saw their party’s victory at the polls as a morale-booster and they rode in the tide to the Assembly, to further exploit their chances as they had fallen out with Fayose and cooked impeachment plans,” a source held.
Today, almost all the stakeholders in the affairs of the state, including traditional rulers, religious leaders, Ekiti Council of Elders and so on, have all sued for peace, and charged the two divides in the issue to work together. Fayose, after his Supreme Court victory, also extended a hand of fellowship to the APC lawmakers and said that Ekiti was more important and that they should come together. But the APC refused to trust him, with Omirin’s spokesperson, Wole Olujobi, noting that Fayose should show his commitment to peace by creating avenue for the payment of the entitlements of the embattled lawmakers. He alleged that Fayose “is not known for compromise and there is nothing anybody can do about it.”
About 20 days ago, the APC lawmakers said they had written to the Chief Judge of the state, Justice Ayodeji Daramola, to constitute a seven-man panel within seven days, to probe the allegations of constitutional breaches by Fayose. The statement announcing this important step in the impeachment process came through Olujobi, who also announced that the lawmakers sat at a secondary school in Oke-Ila, Ado Ekiti. But the Olugbemi’s faction countered the move by writing Justice Daramola to disregard any such letter as, according to Olugbemi, “no such letter emanated from the office of the speaker of Ekiti State House of Assembly” and that “Omirin is challenging his impeachment in court and couldn’t have been the speaker.”
So far, it is the belief in some quarters in the state that nothing more than rhetoric is what has been coming from the pro-impeachment lawmakers, as they contend that they had been shut out of all the avenues through which they could make constitutionally valid moves to impeach a governor. In what appeared to be lending credence to that belief, a Federal High Court in Abuja, set aside the actions and activities of the Omirin-led group beginning from November 21, 2014 until now, with the purported commencement of impeachment proceedings also part of the actions, which the court ruled against.
Some, however, still harbour the hope that Fayose would be impeached sooner or later. Some even say after May 29, Ekiti will not remain the same again. Time will show which direction the state would move. (Credit: Sam Nwaoko, Tribune).