Indications emerged on Saturday that opponents of Senate President Bukola Saraki are unrelenting in their bid to remove him from office through the ongoing suit at the Code of Conduct Tribunal(CCT).
Insiders in the plot involving mainly leaders of the All Progressives Congress(APC) said the ultimate push in the ongoing suit was for Saraki’s ouster.
It was gathered that the plot had already started unfolding at the weekend with some forces in the party already calling on Saraki to resign.
Sources said on Saturday that the next stage was to brand any resistance by Saraki as a lot to truncate the government’s anti-corruption drive.
It emerged that the new week is to be devoted to orchestrate campaign to project the morality of Saraki resigning.
A number of forces have already positioned to start the campaign that Saraki would do the government’s anti-corruption drive a whole lot of good by “resigning honorably.”
It was also gathered that the forces had started reaching out to Saraki with the aim of procuring a “soft landing.”
Said one of the sources: “There is the belief that what the government has against the Senate President is enormous and that the way out now is to secure a soft landing. A lot of work is going on underground.”
Meanwhile, it emerged at the weekend that the Chairman of Code of Conduct Tribunal Mr Danladi Umar, was under administrative bail of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
Loyalists of the Senate President have therefore alleged that the CCT Chairman could be acting under the influence of the anti-graft agency to embarrass the Senate President for Senate’s probe of its chairman, Mr. Ibrahim Lamorde.
It also emerged that the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Justice Mahmud Muhammed had in a memo dated May 18, 2015 and with Ref. No. NJC/CIR/HOC/1/74 indicated that Umar and other members of the CCT are not judges.
The CJN, in the letter, stated that “no member, including the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal on appointment is a judicial officer as defined in Section 318 (1) of the 1999 Constitution as amended, unless he or she has held office as a judge of the Superior Court of Record in Nigeria.”
In the vein, the trials of Senate President Bukola Saraki over assets declaration, on Saturday, assumed a different dimension as groups converged on Abuja and threatened to match to select embassies to pass across a message that the country’s democracy was under threat.
The groups did not, however, give names of the embassies where the message would be delivered. (Nigerian Tribune)