The senator representing Benue North senatorial district, Sen. Barnabas Gemade, has told the Federal Government to forget about ever removing Senate President Bukola Saraki from office.
Gemade, a former PDP national chairman who defected to the APC but recently returned to the PDP, made this known in an interview published by Daily Sun on Thursday.
According to him, the Federal Government has resorted to unconstitutional means to remove Saraki because it realised it does not have the required number of senators to remove the senate president from office.
Gemade said, “That process (Saraki’s removal) ought not to be a fight. It’s statistical process and therefore, you must follow the rules.
“They have no chance whatsoever. That is why they started through illegal means of barricading state assembly and National Assembly to cause things to be done.
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“All of those have failed and those who were perpetrating this have been sacked from office. So, if you believe that you can carry something through constitutionally, you will not first go too illegality.
“The simple fact that they want to use force and illegal means meant clearly that they had no chance. And I don’t think they will ever be able to do it.
“As far as we are concerned, every senator, every House of Representatives member represents his own people and does not represent the federal government and therefore, we will not carry out what the federal wants.
“We will carry out what our people want. And our people want a free country where there is liberty, where there is security for everybody, where there is fairness. And if the federal government cannot guarantee safety of life and property, does not guarantee freedom, does not guarantee liberty and is not even helping on the economy, then we are not bound to do their bidding.
“Poverty today has become so pervasive that we have 87 million Nigerians that are very, very poor. During the PDP era, the people used to be poor but population of the very poor people never went beyond 50 million.
“Today, we have overtaken India. India has only 78 million people that are very, very poor. And that is out of a population on 950 million.
“We are only 160 million people or thereabouts and we have 87 million very poor Nigerians.
“And these are statistics of World Bank, statistics of UN. You cannot fault these statistics. So, this is what this government has done. So, we in the National Assembly are not there to defend this type of thing.”