Reacting to the incident, the Senate accused Omo-Agege of committing treason. A statement issued by its spokesperson, Sabi Abdullahi, said: “Today, some armed hoodlums led by a suspended senator, Ovie Omo-Agege, walked into the Senate plenary and seized the symbol of authority of the Upper Legislative Chamber, the mace. This is an act of treason, as it is an attempt to overthrow a branch of the Federal Government of Nigeria by force, and it must be treated as such.” Indeed, Olamilekan Adeola, the senator representing Lagos West in the National Assembly, was reportedly pushed into one of the SUVs parked by the invaders in front of the White House and driven off, and only escaped by forcing the car door open and jumping out while it was still moving at breakneck speed. The Federal Government, on its part, expressed shock at the development, saying that it had ordered an investigation into the matter. In a statement released by the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, it asked the security agencies“to immediately unravel the circumstances surrounding the breach of security that led to the invasion,” adding that security would be reinforced to prevent a recurrence. Some suspects have since been arrested and the mace recovered.
On his part, Omo-Agege, in a statement issued by his media office, claimed that he attended plenary “after the Senate purportedly suspended him, based on legal advice and his understanding of the current position of the law.” He berated “the few champions of the unconstitutional, invalid and tyrannical suspension who tried to stop him.” Concerning the charge of allegedly leading thugs into the Senate, he said: “This weighty allegation is not true at all.” But why would he take it upon himself to give a judicial verdict on his suspension by the Senate and give effect to same in flagrant violation of the law?
It is indeed difficult not to see the invasion of the Senate as an attempt to truncate democracy. That action, in our view, was a crude attempt to test the resolve of Nigeria’s sovereignty. If this affront on the sovereignty of Nigeria is not decisively put down, then it will be an open invitation to anarchy. The Senate as an institution being a creation of the Nigerian people, the assault on the Senate is an assault on Nigerians as a whole. No matter how factionalised the Senate has become partly as a result of the flawed electioneering process with which the nation continues to grapple, every Nigerian, not to talk of those elected to make laws, is duty-bound to protect that democratic institution. The Senate as an institution will outlive its current occupants and there is no logic potent enough to invalidate its integral place as one of the pillars of democracy. That is the more reason the invasion of the Senate by hoodlums has to be seen and treated as treason and all those found to have enabled the tragedy must be punished according to their degree of involvement in the crime. Nigerians did not endure long years of jackboot repression and persecution only to have a gang of criminals treating them to the kind of sad episode enacted on live television on Wednesday.
Besides, if Senator Omo-Agege felt that his suspension was in breach of the law, the proper and honourable thing to do would have been to allow the courts to make a pronouncement on the matter before taking any action. By invading the Senate chamber, even if he were not accompanied by hoodlums, he scoffed at the law, held the courts in contempt, and trampled on democratic norms and etiquettes, casting a slur on his designation as a member of Nigeria’s highest lawmaking organ. The situation becomes even more confounding when the fact is recalled that he is not the first, and in all probability will not be the last, member of the National Assembly to be placed on suspension. His predecessors in this regard chose the honourable and lawful path of allowing the courts to make a pronouncement on the validity of their suspension and did not cause commotion during plenary sittings. It is therefore difficult to fathom the temerity that informed his dishonourable conduct.
Besides, it is time to enforce discipline within the political parties in the country. To the best of our knowledge, nearly all of the crisis that have bedeviled the executive and legislative arms of government in the current dispensation have featured members of the governing party bickering and setting the polity on edge. It is not enough to create a political ensemble for winning elections: members are duty-bound to regularly interface with one another and resolve issues in the overall national interest. Nigeria’s democracy is not helped by political parties being more concerned with grabbing power than utilising it to the benefit of the people on whose behalf they have been called to serve.
In any case, this was not a case of lawmakers fighting and a faction bolting with the mace: it is a case of outsiders, specifically hoodlums, gaining access to the National Assembly during plenary and making Nigeria a laughing stock in the comity of nations. It therefore speaks to the lax security apparatus in the country that we have consistently warned the nation about in our previous editorials. How did hoodlums gain access into the Senate chamber in spite of the checks mounted by many security agencies, including the secret police? Had the attackers been armed with guns and decided to shoot their way through, where would that have left the nation?
And if the National Assembly is prone to an invasion, what is the fate of ordinary Nigerians? And who is to say that the Presidency itself cannot witness such a fate, particularly if urgent and decisive steps are not taken to arrest the steady slide into anarchy? In the typically Nigerian practice, the police only surfaced after the commission of treason, waxing very bold and lyrical. It can only be hoped that now that the National Assembly has been given a dose of the bitter pill that many state Houses of Assembly have been forced to swallow over time, concrete steps will be taken to avert comedies of error and avoidable tragedies in the nation’s hallowed chambers. In this connection, we find the Federal Government’s response to Wednesday’s episode improper. You do not investigate when sovereignty is threatened: you hunt down the outlaws first.
It is indeed quite unfortunate that the nation has not learnt any useful lessons from the sad incidents in 1962 at the Western Region House of Assembly or during the Second Republic. Today, unlike in the past, the internet and the media have reduced the world to a global village, such that a lawmaker speaking on the floor of the parliament in any clime is in fact addressing virtually the whole world. Now, more than ever, politicians have a bounden duty to be very circumspect in their utterances and actions, otherwise they quickly mark themselves out as irritants across the globe. The invasion of the Senate is a political and security scandal of the highest order and the perpetrators must get their just deserts.
and then