Reps Minority Leader: Northern Group Alerts Buhari

The Northern Youths Movement (NYM) has told President Muhammadu Buhari to be mindful of the use of the National Assembly to tarnish his image.

The group noted that the role being played by the House of Representatives Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila in the appointment of House Minority Principal Officers was capable of “splashing mud on the President’s garment of integrity.”

The NYM, which berated Gbajabiamila for turning himself to a maximum ruler by openly threatening his fellow House members, noted that any wrong that was done by any arm of the government will be blamed on President Buhari when he leaves office.

The group, in a release issued to Journalists on Monday in Abuja which was signed by its Chairman, Mallam Ishaya Jato, asked Gbajabiamila whether or not it was his party that nominated and forwarded his name to the House of Reps Speaker before he was appointed Minority Leader of the House of Representatives in 2007 and 2011 as well as Majority Leader in 2015.

The youths said President Buhari and those around him should recall that they were warned against the option of Gbajabiamila as Speaker because of his arrogance and the plot to use him to advance the 2023 presidential ambition of his political godfather, adding that threatening his colleagues, who disagreed with his decision to usurp the power of the minority political party to appoint principal officers as it happened in the case of the Speaker himself, was a clear sign as to the emergence of a “military speaker” in the House of Reps.

“Fact is that the same process through which minority principal officers were chosen in the Senate was the way those for the House of Representatives were chosen by the PDP, a letter dated June 21, 2019 was sent to the Speaker and was duly received on June 26, 2019.

“Why didn’t the Speaker read this letter in accordance with the House rule that all correspondence must be read at the plenary?

“Apart from the Speaker and Deputy, has there been any time since 1999 that majority and minority principal officers were elected? And if minority principal officers are now by election, where is the record of proceedings of the House sitting in which those appointed by Gbajabiamila were elected?

” If the Speaker’s godfather is comfortable that his political son has descended to the gutter of dictatorship in less than one month of his assumption of office, we don’t think the President, who is the leader of the APC should.

“This is because, in future, it is the name of the president that will be mentioned and we hope our President is mindful of this.

“As for the Lagos godfather of the Speaker, we in the NYM will keep watching and see what he will tell Nigerians when he will finally let the cat of his 2023 presidential ambition out of the bag,” it said.