Adedokun Waliyu 
After it adjourned sitting for six-weeks to enable members participate in the just concluded primaries to pick candidates ahead of 2023 general and Presidential elections, the Senate yesterday resumed in what could be described as the seemingly solemn and glum plenary session as the hallowed chamber was scanty.
The chamber had suspended plenary on Wednesday, May 11, 2022 to enable lawmakers participate in the primaries of political parties.
At the resumed plenary, the President of the Senate, Senator Ahmad Lawan announced to his colleagues the resignation of the Majority Leader, Senator Yahaya Abdullahi, Kebbi North and the Minority Leader, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, Abia South, adding that their resignation followed their defection from their political parties under which platform they got elected into the Senate.
The atmosphere at the Senate Chamber was solemn against the backdrop that n0 fewer than 70 per cent of the senators lost their bid to return to the red chamber on the platform of their parties, just as some of them dumped their parties for new ones.
In a letter he read, the President of the Senate said that Abdullahi’s resignation was attributed to his decision to his defection from the All Progressives Congress, to the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP
Lawan also said that Abaribe dumped the PDP for the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA.
Recall that Abaribe had in May, left the PDP on grounds of “shambolic electoral procesdin the state, driven by a procured court injunction.”
The Senator who resigned as the Minority leader about 48 hours after he withdrew from the state’s governorship race had decried the party’s use of “an imaginary three-man adhoc delegates and the exclusion of the party’s statutory delegates” in the primary elections to elect candidates.
