Bauchi State Government has absolved itself from the leadership crisis rocking the State House of Assembly following the emergence of two people as Speakers of the House after it was inaugurated on Thursday.
While speaking with newsmen in a reaction to claims that the state government has a hand in the crisis, the Spokesperson of Governor Bala Mohammed, Dr. Ladan Salihu vehemently denied any involvement of the state government.
He said that “the Governor is a democrat and a parliamentarian who knows the rules, so, there is no handiwork of government in what happened” explaining that he decided to speak on the matter because the Assembly had adjourned sitting and they have not yet appointed anyone as the Spokesperson.
Ladan Salihu added that, “And keeping quiet will be suicidal. We have to come out and speak because it is our own government that has the constituted authorities of the executive which I belong to, the legislature and the judiciary which is also an aspect of government and government does not operate in a vacuum. I had to speak because it is in the overall stability of government.”
He further said that the election of the Speaker was conducted, pronounced and he did his acceptance speech adding that thereafter, the same process was followed for the Deputy Speaker.
“All these happened inside the main Chambers of the Bauchi State House of Assembly, all these happened in the public view of those who witnessed this occasion. And there were 13 members who were sworn in contrary to what was paraded in the media not 11. The quorum that was needed to elect a Speaker out of 31 members of the Assembly was met,” he said.
He added that, “This Speaker, was legitimately elected by a duly constituted State Assembly. So, anybody who says there are two Assemblies in Bauchi is just something conjured up in the inner recesses of his own imagination. As far as we are concerned in Bauchi state, there is only one Speaker, Abubakar Suleiman, who was duly elected and recognized by all the parties and he is a Member of the APC.”
He further said that ,”this is the most authentic election ever” pointing out that the other Members chose to stay away for whatever reason they did, ” later, they came and congregated outside the Assembly and stood before a model of a Mace, “and what do you have, you had an elected Member presiding as the Clerk who presided over the so called oath.”
According to him: “What Hon. Kawuwa Damina and his group did, was to downgrade their political esteem from political heavyweights to political paper tigers. They downgraded the esteem of their own political being from being Members of the inner Chambers of the Assembly to Members of a garden outside premises of the Assembly”.
“There has never been any Assembly that sat in a garden under the shadow of a model of a Mace without a Clerk, without other supporting staff, without a Mace, without other paraphernalia and regalia of the Assembly. They just made Bauchi state to look like just like a banana state.”
He wondered why the same members who sat down 11 of them and abrogated an anti-corruption law they had earlier passed before other members arrived, “the same people are now turning around and are saying, no, there was no quorum. I think it is not only shameful, it is a travesty of democracy and the people of Bauchi state are looking at them as not only a laughing stock, they are a group of political charlatans and profiteers.”
“They are there simply because they are doing the bidding of the former Governor and that is unacceptable. Bauchi has only one Governor, for now, he has a term of four years and that is Bala Mohammed, that is what the people have spoken, whom they have spoken for and that is the path we will continue to pursue,” he alleged.