Buhari: I rate Saraki, Dogara very, very low

President Muhammadu Buhari says he rates Senate President Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara, speaker of the house, “very very low”.

Speaking in an interview with state TV, Buhari said the national assembly, as led by Saraki and Dogara held Nigeria to ransom for seven months without passing the budget.

“I think a culture was developed at the National Assembly; that they should dictate the terms which I believe was wrong. It is the executive that dictates the terms and take it before the legislature to examine it and agree or disagree with it,” Buhari said on Monday night.

“But when they go around posing that they are the government, not the executive, then that is the problem. I spoke personally to the Senate President Saraki and the leader of the House Dogara and they could not deny it.

“I told them how do they feel to hold the country to ransom for seven months without passing a budget? I said personally they are not hurting me, they were hurting the country. So really in terms of patriotism, I think I rated them very, very low indeed.”

The president said the national assembly wanted to show they were the government and not the executive, and he made his displeasure known about their conduct.

Buhari and the leadership of the national assembly have had a long run of disagreement from one issue to the other.

Upon election of the eight national assembly, Buhari and the leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) had preferred candidates for the leadership of the assembly.

Their preferred choices — Ahmad Lawan and Femi Gbajabiamila — were defeated in a political game that threw up Saraki and Dogara, who were former members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

By 2016, the assembly was rocked by a budget padding scandal, which pitched the executive against the legislative arm of government.

The senate in 2017 stopped the screening of Buhari’s appointees, following the president’s refusal to sign some bills of the national assembly into law, and the refusal to sack Ibrahim Magu as the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).