President Buhari In Collision Course With Senate Over Perm Sec’s Refusal To Honor Invitation

There were indications, on Sunday, of an imminent clash between the Presidency and the Senate over an alleged attempt by the Presidency to rubbish the senate president.

Pro-Saraki senators are accusing the Presidency of instigating the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, Mrs. Anastacia Nwaobia, not to honor an invitation by the upper chamber.

Nwaobia had communicated to the Senate that she could not honor its invitation without an approval by her supervisors to do so but the Saraki loyalists said the Senate had the constitutional power to invite Nwaobia and that her refusal constituted an affront to the legitimacy of the senate president.

The Saraki loyalists’ belief apparently rested on the alleged ‘non-acceptance’ of his presidency by the All Progressives Congress and President Muhammadu Buhari.

“It will not augur well for our democracy if the Presidency will not allow civil servants to do their jobs. We should not carry the crisis in the APC to the Senate,” a pro-Saraki senator told one of our correspondents in Abuja on Sunday.

Both Saraki and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, had spurned the party’s directive on who to lead the National Assembly and had ridden on the back of an alleged alliance with the opposition Peoples Democratic Party members to clinch the leadership posts in both chambers.The APC had preferred Ahmad Lawan, a Senator from Yobe State, as the president of the Senate.

The Lawan group in the Senate on Sunday said it supported Nwaobia because Saraki was said to lack both legitimacy and the moral right to invite the permanent secretary to brief the senate on the state of the economy.

The Saraki group said the ‘offending’ permanent secretary failed to honor the Senate’s invitation because she did not get clearance from the Presidency.

Investigations by one of our correspondents revealed that as of Friday the permanent secretary had yet to neither appear before the Senate leadership nor respond to the letters from the National Assembly management.

It was learnt that senators loyal to the Senate President were angry that the Presidency could encourage the civil servants to disobey the Senate.