By Adadareporters
The Senate president, Ahmad Lawan, Tuesday, announced the defection of two senators of the All Progressives Congress to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party with ‘a heavy heart’.
The defected senators, both from Kebbi State, are former Senate leader Yahaya Abdullahi (Kebbi North) and Adamu Aliero (Kebbi Central).
Lawan described their defection as ‘a loss to the APC’. While wishing them well, he said the senators ‘will be the light of the other side’, apparently referring to the PDP.
Adadareporters gathered that the latest defection cuts down the number of APC senators from 71 to 69. PDP now has 39 senators.
In his letter of resignation, addressed to Mr Lawan at the start of the plenary, Adamu Aliero, a former governor of Kebbi State, said he defected because ‘there is no internal democracy in the APC’.
Aliero said the state governor, Atiku Bagudu, had frustrated the efforts of party members in the state.
According to him, the state governor had ‘bastardised the party, and that the electoral processes in the state are now characterised by high-handedness and unfairness’.
He accused Gov Bagudu of frustrating interventions by North-west Zone Governors and the defunct Abdullahi Adamu-led National Reconciliation Committee to remedy the situation.
On his part, Mr Abdullahi said he defected to the PDP to rescue the state from the governor’s high-handedness.
He said the trouble with the party in the state began last July ‘when the governor illegally decapitated the state leadership of the party, imposed unelected ward, local government and state executives on the party’.
Quoting him, “At a point I thought of resort to the courts, but decided against that course of action after realising that political challenges require political solutions in the democratic arena where it is the people and not the judges who are the final arbiters.
“After having failed to get justice in my former party, the APC, I have jumped ship to the PDP together with our teeming supporters in a struggle to democratically bring to an end the misrule and tyranny currently gripping Kebbi State.”
Our correspondent reports that the Senate had been unease following the failure of a majority of them to get return tickets to contest in the 2023 general elections.
