Dogara In Court For Disobedience

Indications emerged on Thursday July 23, that the leadership crisis in Nigeria’s House of Representatives would not end soon as a Federal lawmaker, Hon. Jide Jimoh, claimed he had taken the speaker of the House, Honourable Yakubu Dogara to court, for disobeying the decision of their party on the leadership structure of the House.


Hon. Jimoh, who spoke at the Yaba Local Council Development Area (LCDA) of Lagos State, insisted that the party remained supreme and that as long as there is no independent candidature in Nigeria, every political officer is supposed to be answerable to the party.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) had made its position clear to the leadership of the House concerning the positions for principal offices to be filled, but Dogara wrote back suggesting other names and arguing that his own position tallied with the principle of federal character.
Jimoh revealed that he and his colleague, Abubakar Lado-Abdullahi from Niger State, had taken the matter to a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja, to restrain the House leadership from stopping the announcement of the names of principal officers recommended by the leadership of the APC.
The lawmaker said the court is now to determine whether section 14 of the 1999 constitution dealing with the principle of federal character is applicable to the sharing of principal offices in the National Assembly.
He lamented that selfishness was at the core of the struggle for leadership by the Dogara group. “The Speaker should be magnanimous in victory and allow the House to be run in accordance with the Nigerian constitution and the rules of the House of Representatives”, he said.

“The other positions in the House are principal positions which are party positions; Order 7, Rule 27 is very explicit.
“In our rules, there is nothing like zoning or House caucus. Without primary, there cannot be secondary. Without being a party member, you cannot be elected not to talk about being a member of the House of Representatives.
“The general interest should be paramount to the newly elected members of the House of Representatives for posterity to judge us.”
In a related development, Okoi Obono-Obla, a legal practitioner who served as member of the Security and Legal Directorate of the Buhari Campaign Organisation, said Dogara had become too arrogant and was taking the party for granted in choice of candidates to fill the remaining leadership seats in the House.