LINUS CHIBUIKE
THE Peoples Democratic Party Caucus of the House of Representatives has called for the commencement of impeachment proceedings against President Muhammadu Buhari, for what it described as gross incompetence, among others.
The lawmakers also asked members of the Federal Executive Council to immediately commence impeachment proceedings against Buhari by invoking the provisions of Section 144 (1) of the Constitution.
In a statement released in Abuja on Saturday, the leader of the caucus, Kingsley Chinda (PDP, Rivers), called on Nigerians to compel their representatives in the National Assembly to commence the said proceedings “for gross incompetence and persistent and continuous breach of Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution.”
According to him, the Section provides that “the President or Vice-President shall cease to hold office, if- by a resolution passed by two-thirds majority of all the members of the Executive Council of the Federation, it is declared that the President or Vice-President is incapable of discharging the functions of his office.”
“It is disheartening to the PDP Caucus that the President has failed to lead Nigerians from the front as he promised. Nigerians are daily and defencelessly killed by terrorists and bandits, while the economy is being freely bled by public officers,” Chinda said.
The position of the PDP Reps caucus was in reaction to the gruesome murder of 43 rice farmers in Borno State last weekend.
The statement said the reaction of the President and security agencies to the killings highlighted “a certain crassness and lame duck attitude that has for the past five years come to define the Buhari presidency.”
It said, “The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Caucus in the House of Representatives has observed with deep pain the dastardly attacks on poor farmers which have continued unabated across the vast swathes of northern Nigeria, which act came to a sad climax over the weekend in Zabarmari, near Maiduguri, North East Nigeria.
“The attacks continue to take a consistent pattern – a pattern that results in mass deaths and emboldens the insurgents to embark on more spectacular attacks that provide them national and global attention. While the emboldening of terrorists remain sources of worry, the greater worries for us is the do-nothing posturing and the effeminate reactions of the presidency and the military that follow the dastardly attacks.”
Chinda added, “While President Buhari idles in the typical fashion of Emperor Nero as our country burns, questions must be asked about his capacity to lead at a time that our country desires robust and responsible leadership that can pull it from the brink and rescue it from the debilitions of insurgents, terrorists, bandits and kidnappers…
“President Buhari is unwilling, (as it consistently appears), to provide leadership to our fast collapsing country. Rather than take the proverbial bull by the horn, President Buhari ensconces himself in Aso Rock, typical of a Mourner-in-Chief, and issues press statements that make no meaning to a grieving nation.”
Claiming that the President was elected based on sentiments and deceit, the statement said, “When a country elects a clown as its President, based on sentiments and deceit, the country becomes saddled with circus, pantomime jesters who reduce statecraft to utter joke. Our country is in the grips of the clowns, hyenas and the circus is on.”
