President Muhammadu Buhari would not intervene in the leadership crisis currently rocking the National Assembly until he is requested to do so by the All Progressives Congress (APC) state governors, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, has said.
Shehu gave the revelation on Thursday while talking with TV presenter on Sunrise, a ChannelsTV programme.
According to Shehu, the decision to stay out of the picture until being requested to wade in is necessary because during a meeting of the governors with the President on Tuesday night, the governors had promised to settle the crisis.
“When the governors met with the President, they told him that ‘we are the leaders in our states and we have influence over all of these senators. They come from our places and from us and we can handle it,” Shehu said.
“The President will step into the crisis at the point when the governors say they can no longer fix it.”
He added that Buhari would not impose leaders on the lawmakers, even if he eventually would wade in.
Buhari holds that the National Assembly is an independent arm of government and he would not be seen meddling in their affairs, Shehu explained.
“The President has a responsibility to the party, the President has a responsibility to the nation and as far as we are looking at the situation it has not gotten out of control,” Shehu said.
“It is still within manageable parameters, it is a little storm we will overcome and Nigerians better get used to it.”
He said that there is need for Nigerians to understand the basics of politics as the country is no more in the military era when decrees are made by a single leader.
“Politics, as its theory says, is basically about contest for interests and these interests may be fully defined by political party programme, while some of these things may be outside political party programme,” he said.
Asked about the claim of inheriting a virtually empty treasury, the presidential spokesman answered by. Challenging the former Minister of National Planning, Dr. Abubakar Suleiman, to give further explanations on the $30billion he claimed the former government left behind for the Buhari administration.
