Northern stakeholders protest against pro-Tinubu senators’ plans to suspend Ndume

Senators loyal to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu have initiated plans to impose sanctions on Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume (APC, Borno South) over his recent comments against the President.

Sources in the National Assembly told Daily Trust on Tuesday that the pro-Tinubu senators are planning to remove Ndume from his post as Chief Whip of the Senate and suspend him along with Senator Abdul Ningi (PDP, Bauchi Central).

Ningi, also a senior senator from the North, was suspended for three months in March this year for giving an interview to BBC Hausa in which he claimed that N3.7 trillion naira in the national budget for the 2024 fiscal year was not committed to any projects or locations.

Ndume said in an interview with journalists at the National Assembly building in Abuja last week: “The president has no insight into what is happening outside the villa. He is cordoned off and locked in cages. Many of us will not go through the back door to attack him.”

“Now they have prevented him from speaking and he has no PR manager except his spokesman Ajuri Ngelale who writes press statements. Nigerians are getting very angry.

“The government is not doing anything about the food shortage, although it urgently needs to do something. We have no food reserves. There is no food left. A food crisis is the worst crisis a country can face. If we add the security crisis to that, it gets even worse.”

However, his remarks triggered a series of reactions from the pro-Tinubu camp: Both Senator Sunday Karimi (Kogi West) and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) sharply criticized the Borno MP and described his statement as derogatory.

Our correspondent learnt from reliable sources that three of the four senators plotting Ndume’s suspension and removal as Speaker of Parliament are from the South-West – Ekiti, Ogun and Lagos – and that another senator from Kogi is also in the mix.

It was learnt that Senate President Godswill Akpabio is in a bind as Ndume was the Director General of the Stability Group that had worked hard to make him the President of the Senate in June 2023.

However, there were suggestions that some northern senators were waiting for the cat to be let out of the bag during the plenary session before taking a stand.

A source said: “But of course you know that the northern senators will rebel against another plan to destabilise their faction, barely a few months after Ningi was suspended.”

However, some northern stakeholders under the aegis of the Concerned Northern Forum (CNF) in a statement signed by Mallam Abdulkadir Kura on Tuesday said: “It is on record that Ndume is a key stakeholder of the ruling APC and a close ally of President Tinubu. So, if he dares to take such a bold step and speak the truth about the economic and social realities on the ground, then the Senator from Southern Borno deserves to be celebrated by all and sundry. So, we stand behind him.”

“Ndume has expressed the views of ordinary Nigerians who have been suffering severe economic hardship since the abolition of fuel subsidies and other anti-people measures by the current administration.

“This is not the first time Senator Ndume has criticised or questioned the policies of the Federal Government. He has done so time and again during the past administrations of Presidents Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari. Such criticism led to positive changes in the respective governments who listened to the policies.”