Date: 2018-08-26

Senate President, Bukola Saraki has said he is not losing sleep over plot and threat by the All Progressives Congress to impeach him.

Saraki said those who were seeking his removal had reduced themselves to the level of using "cheap blackmail" rather than following due process as enshrined in the constitution to remove him as Senate President.

The former Kwara State governor spoke in Asaba, the Delta State capital, after a closed-door meeting with Governor Ifeanyi Okowa at the Government House on Saturday.

The meeting lasted for over 40 minutes.

Saraki was accompanied by some senators including Dino Melaye and Peter Nwaoboshi, and it was the first time the Senate President would be visiting Okowa at the Government House, since his defection from the ruling APC to the Peoples Democratic Party

He dismissed insinuations that he had decided not to reconvene the National Assembly to consider the budget of the Independent National Electoral Commission owing to plot to impeach him.

Saraki said, "I am not losing any sleep about the impeachment plots. We have a country that a lot of Nigerians believed there must be rule of law and those who are talking about impeachment are engaging in cheap blackmail. I am not concerned about that."

The meeting which was attended by Speaker of the Delta State House of Assembly, Chief Sheriff Oborevwori, the state chairman of the PDP, Olorogun Kingsley Esiso, is believed to be in continuation of Saraki's 2019 presidential ambition.

Saraki, who had also visited other prominent Nigerians including former President Olusegun Obasanjo and a former military President, Ibrahim Babangida, said he decided to leave the APC because it had performed poorly in the last three years and lacked justice.

He added, "I have made a four-page statement on why I left the All Progressives Congress and I made it very clear that the ideals and visions of what we expected was not realised in the areas of democracy, justice and so on.

"Those that followed the political terrain of the last three years can see that the people are not happy. It is not about me but about Nigerians and about the kind of country we want to build, the kind of democracy we want to practise and the kind of leadership we need. But we have not been able to achieve any of these under the APC as much as we have tried."

He commended Okowa for his developmental stride in the state and he used the occasion to inform him that he had returned to the PDP under which they were both senators in the seventh Senate.