‘Senate President, Dogara, still in PDP,’ APC chieftain says

House of Representatives member and chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mohammed Musa Soba has said that Senate President, Bukola Saraki and Reps Speaker, Yakubu Dogara have shown by their actions that they still support the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Soba, who represents the Soba Federal Constituency of Kaduna State, also said that both Saraki and Dogara are likely to leave the APC before 2019.

He made the comments during a recent interview with Daily Post. Excerpts below:

You know that APC is the majority party now and those of you that went to Court are of the APC. How does that help to stabilize the party in the House of Representatives?

We are at a crossroad as a party at the moment. Some that pretend to be APC members are not, including the Speaker, Honourable Yakubu Dogara himself. He cannot be said to be a member in spirit. He is a member by jamboree.

The Speaker is a thoroughbred Peoples Democratic Party man and we all recall how he emerged as Speaker through the help of PDP against the choice of APC which is Femi Gbajabiamila.

We lost that election by a slim margin of 8 votes and we said alright let everybody be carried along, but unfortunately, the Speaker is not ready to toe the line of APC’s change agenda. If you see the way he appointed House Committee Chairmen and Vice Chairmen, APC and the opposition PDP have equal stakes here.

Most of the important Committees have been allocated to the PDP including Public Procurement, Army, Budget, Works and so on and having done that, he cannot tell me that he is an APC member. No… and this was what we tried to avoid at the initial stage.

We said let’s actually know those who were in opposition before. I was in the opposition for 16 years. Yakubu Dogara was never in the opposition. Bukola Saraki was never in the opposition. Theirs is transformation from power to power. Ours is transformation from opposition to power and you can see the difference.

That means they don’t have fighting spirit, but only plundering government resources. Our slogan is change and he is not ready to change because his school of thought is the old order and unfortunately they have not learnt anything to know what opposition was all about.

Look at the scandal that is going on in the Senate. It’s very unfortunate and if they were truly APC and representing the APC interest. Why rubbish the President by making him to look like the budget was stolen. If the President wants to change the budget, he has the constitutional right to do so by writing. But they made a public show and the budget is in their custody.

If anything happens to the budget as they tried to tell us, it is in their custody. We all know their game plan; that means they are PDP. They were all in PDP till the last minutes and after winning elections, they came and hijacked the leadership of the National Assembly and what we are seeing is that they are out to rubbish the programmes of President Muhammadu Buhari.

What is the way forward now?

The way forward is for those who think they can rubbish the programme of government to realize that they cannot. We came here with some agenda to be executed through our party and if they cannot assist the government to do that, we are certainly going to fight.

Like I told you, they are people planning for 2019 and they are not going with the APC. They have their own agenda and this is what we are seeing about the Speaker and the Senate President. We believe they are not going to 2019 on the platform of the APC just like what Hon. Aminu Tambuwal did to PDP the other time where himself and others came together.

The game going on in the National Assembly shows that they have Tambuwal solidly behind them. Of course, the party will do something and in the House, we will do something.