Earlier this year, the House was left embarrassed after the budget was passed on to it for deliberation but by the time it was handed over to President Muhammadu Buhari to sign, it had been padded. Apparently, members of the House had slipped in additional items of expenditure, prompting President Buhari to refuse to sign the budget into law until the anomalies were corrected.
Responding to the embarrassment, house speaker Hon Yakubu Dogara took action on the debacle, sacking Hon Jibrin as the chair of appropriation committee that looked at the budget. Hon Jibrin, an All Progressives Congress lawmaker from Kano State, was immediately replaced by another Kano member Hon Mustapha Bala-Dawaki.
Since then, Hon Jibrin has been championing the campaign to unseat Hon Dogara for alleged padding of the budget, with both men trading blame for the debacle. Hon Jibrin, has now gone to court to stop the police from arresting or questioning him over allegations bordering on claims of his complicity in the matter.
He is also seeking judicial relief to stop the House of Representatives from reconvening or suspending him. Hon Jibrin had a few days ago claimed to be on the moral high ground with sufficient support of members to remove the speaker.
In an affidavit attached to the suit, Hon Jibrin alleged that the principal officers of the House named in the suit have plotted with the inspector general of police and Federal Capital Territory police commissioner to nab him. He added that they have also put him out of circulation and so as to lay their hands on the said documents and destroy the evidence therein and avoid a leakage of their roles in the budget issue.
In another suit against the House of Representatives, the clerk, the speaker and 12 other members, Hon Jibrin is among other things seeking an order of the court stopping the House from suspending him from the House pending the determination of the substantive suit. In an affidavit deposed in the court, Hon Jibrin said if the respondents/defendants are not immediately restrained, he would be suspended as a member of the House and this will greatly prejudice him and thousands of his constituents who rely on him to afford them their due representations in the federal legislature.
In the said affidavit, he said he was aware that they held meetings wherein they agreed to urgently reconvene the House which is presently on recess with a desperate agenda to suspend him. This is in sharp contrast to a series of statements Hon Jibrin released in which he called for the reconvening of the House to address the allegations he raised against the speaker and 13 others.
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