PDP Primaries: Senators plot to impeach Mark

Following the defeat of senators and members of the House of Representatives in the recently concluded Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) primaries across the country, colleagues of the Senate president, David Mark, have turned against him and have started hatching a plot for his impeachment.

This is just as they have thrown up either the minority leader, George Akume or chairman of the Committee on Environment and Ecology, Bukola Saraki as successor to the position...

LEADERSHIP gathered that the senators’ reason for choosing either of their two colleagues is that they do not want the Senate Presidency to leave the North Central.In a similar development, the lawmakers have vowed to fully support embattled Speaker Aminu Tambuwal to retain his seat.According to a leading senator, a member of the PDP, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the plot is being hatched by lawmakers who suffered defeat in the primaries and are convinced that Mark could have intervened with the party authorities to help them secure return tickets.He argued that their support for the party and the leadership of the Senate in the heat of the emergence of the nPDP should have been reciprocated during their primaries instead of allowing their state governors to play the game as they pleased.Shortly before the Senate adjourned plenary two weeks ago, the senators had already started venting their anger by gathering signatures to impeach President Goodluck Jonathan for what they referred to as “several impeachable offences”.

The plot then, which was championed mainly by the opposition senators, was to table the president’s alleged impeachable offences as soon as the chamber resumes plenary this week.However, this new move does not only involve opposition senators, as members of the PDP are also playing major roles in it, choosing to start with Mark to prove their point.The senator lamented, “We never expected the party to treat us this way. We stood by the party when there was turbulence occasioned by the emergence of the new PDP”.When contacted, the media adviser to David Mark, Kola Ologbondiyan stated that there is no truth in the alleged plan to remove his boss as the president of the Senate, saying that, “There’s no such plot”.“There was a plot then to impeach the same leadership but we stepped in and stopped it with our sheer number. In fact, we used our personal contacts to talk to the organisers and they backed down”.