Edo Crisis: House Speaker, Frank Okiye’s Full Speech After Yekini Idiaye’s Impeachment

Frank Okiye, Speaker of the Edo State House of Assembly, has explained in detail the reason why Yekini Idiaye, his deputy was impeached on Wednesday, August 5.

According to the speaker, his deputy got impeached following an understanding that he had joined head with the leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC), including the Governor Hope Uzodinma of Imo State to hijack the assembly.

Naija News reported earlier that Edo State House of Assembly impeached its Deputy Speaker, Yekini Idiaye, on Wednesday during a plenary session of the Assembly in Benin City, the Edo State capital, and immediately replaced him with the member representing Orhionmwon II Constituency, Roland Asoro.

Speaking via a social media live session moments later, Okiye who alleged that his deputy together with Governor Uzodinma had plotted to illegally and violently take over the assembly.  Okiye in the address titled, ‘The Urgent Need To Call The Imo State Governor and Leaders Of APC In Edo State To Order Over Their Plan To Violently And Illegally Takeover The Edo State House Of Assembly’, urged President Muhammadu Buhari to call the governor and other members of the APC camp to order.

The statement reads in full; “We have it on good authority, the dubious plans by the governor of Imo State, Senator Hope Uzodinma, and the stakeholders of APC in Edo State to import a fake maze to take over the Edo State House of Assembly working in cohort with the former deputy speaker who recently declared his support for the governorship candidate of APC to congregate in a separate location to illegally and violently take over the Edo State House of Assembly as brought to our notice.

“And so, we call on the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari and the presidency to urgently call this governor and others working with him to execute this illegal plan to desist and allow the laws of the state to guide them.

“The state polity is already heated up by the political tension from the various electioneering campaign. Their planned action is likened to lightening a match in an already tensed political environment which conflagration is capable of causing crisis in the state and may scale beyond imagination.

“We call on Edo State people, whose mandate and interest the state legislature holds and protect, to rise against this attack and plot to subvert their will and subjugate them using external forces. We urge lovers of democracy across the world and institutions that uphold democracy and value, as well as pro-democracy groups to denounce this planned illegality that seems to distract a duly constituted authority.”

“We recognize the constitutional rights of the three members of the Assembly to support the candidate of their choice but that should not distract them from coming to work to carry out the job for which they were elected and become an agent of mutiny against their own primary constituency.

“We are as always committed to protecting the democratic rights of our people as the legislature remains the sacred institution in the democratisation process signed by my honourable self on behalf of the Edo State House of Assembly.”

Meanwhile, Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State has been named the best performing governor in Nigeria in the fight against coronavirus (COVID-19).