Why are we this blest with our Senators? -By Festus Adedayo

Judging by the infelicity of their language usage and their inability to comprehend the geography of the roles carved out for them to play, elected public officials may have to be taken through refresher courses or even crash courses so as to properly tutor them on the requirements of their roles. About one-year old in the parliament and entrusted the role of spokesperson of the Nigerian Senate, Senator Surajudeen Ajibola Bashiru mirrored this crass need recently. Asked to react to a recent statement by famous retired soldier-activist, Abubakar Dangiwa, accusing President Muhammadu Buhari of lopsidedness in his appointments, Bashiru quickly headed for the gutters and returned with a heap of sewage which he festooned round his own “Distinguished” body and the National Assembly as a whole.

“Beer parlour discussion,” he announced magisterially, was the only way he could describe Dangiwa and Nigerians who took umbrage against the president for what has been labelled his administration’s abiding cronyism. Bashiru even added that Buhari had powers to appoint whoever he wanted into political offices and gave a constitutional shield to Buhari’s notorious nepotism by citing Section 14(3) of the Nigerian constitution. According to him, the constitution didn’t reckon with the strength of appointments made by the President but the number.

Bashiru’s mechanistic and vacuous argument has no response to how a president would appoint virtually all his security chiefs from the same ethnic stock; why he had to be the first Nigerian leader in history to sit atop a national tripodal power configuration which has a Northerner as President, Senate President and Chief Justice.

The ill-logics and intemperate colour of the Senator’s argument are so sickening and rankling that one cannot but wonder whether it was the combination of the delirium of office and intake of the opium of wanting to please the powers-that-be that made him not to know that being the Senate’s spokesman doesn’t approximate being the night soil man of the executive.