ABUJA – A member of the Unity Forum of Senators in the All Progressive Congress who have been backing candidature failed bids by Sen. Ahmad Lawan ( Yobe North) for the President of the 8th Senate, and Majority Leader respectively, yesterday, challenged Senate President Bukola Saraki (Kwara Central) to name those who wanted to abduct him before his emergence as President of the 8th Senate.
The Senator, Kabiru Marafa ( Zamfara Central), in a text message to journalists yesterday, tasked them to ask Saraki to name those who wanted to abduct him before getting full reaction to his allegation.
Sen. Saraki had in an interview with journalists last weekend in Abuja, alleged that before the inauguration of the 8th Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2015, there were plans by some big guns within the party, stridently opposed to his aspiration as President of the 8th Senate, to abduct him as a way of preventing him from attending the inauguration and personally accepting his nomination for the position.
According to Saraki at the interview as widely reported in the print media on Sunday, he escaped the abduction allegedly planned against him that day by refusing to report at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel where all federal lawmakers elect , were billed to gather at 8:am for onward movement to the National Assembly.
He said in the interview that rather than joining his colleagues at Transcorp Hilton Hotel at the slated time, he moved faster than everybody by getting to the premises of the National Assembly as early as 6:am that day and hid in a car at the car park for four solid hours in a state of incommunicado.
“First of all, as regards the meeting (at ICC), on the morning of the inauguration, I didn’t finish meeting until 4:00 of that day and I had got information that efforts would likely be made to make sure that I didn’t get access into the chambers.
So, as early as 4:00am and 5:00am, I had made contingency plans that I must get into the National Assembly because the plan before was that Senators-elect should go to the Transcorp Hilton Hotel around 8:00clock and 9:00am to proceed to the National Assembly.
I was advised that it would not be safe or secure for me to do that because some people made sure…if I didn’t get into the chambers, it would t be possible for me too be nominated, for the nomination to be seconded and for me and to accept the nomination.
I can tell you today that I was in the National Assembly Complex as early as 6:00 in the morning and I stayed in a car in the Car Park, from 6:00 in the morning till quarter to 10:00am. This is the truth. I stayed there and I was there with no communication whatsoever.
So, anybody who said they spoke to me to go the ICC was not true because I didn’t even know what was going on. All I was monitoring was how people were arriving the Complex.
It was at quarter to 10:00 I got information that the Clerk to the National Assembly had entered the chamber. So, I got out of the small car I was inside, stretched myself and put on my Babariga because I didn’t have it on before then.
I walked from the Car Park into the chambers…That was why some of you would have seen that I looked very tired on that morning”, he stressed.
However, in his reaction to Saraki ‘s allegation, Marafa queried: “Who wanted to abduct him and why?” insisting that it is on that basis that his allegation would be fully reacted to.
Senator Kabiru Marafa
