By Korede Abdullah
Senate President Ahmed Lawan has been in the National Assembly since 1999. This is not even the story. The man still wants to hijack the senate’s ticket from another man (Bashir Machina Sheriff) from his constituency in Yobe State. That is, after having lost his presidential bid which he thought he would have won through the back door in cahoots with the APC National Chairman, Abdullahi Adamu.
When Lawan was planning his coup on how to win the APC presidential ticket which he was very sure he would clinch, the other man was strategizing on how he would win after he had raised a huge amount of money to buy the senate nomination form.
Sheriff campaigned vigorously to win the hearts of the delegates from his constituency. And at the end of the day, he won the senate ticket convincingly. Like a prodigal son, Ahmed Lawan came back home from Abuja to Yobe with the tail between his legs and began to covet the senate ticket! Is he not greedy and egocentric?
I hope Machina, the winner of the senate ticket will refuse vehemently to yield to Lawan’s entreaties to teach the senate president the lesson of his life. How does he want to eat his cake and still have it?
The Man, Bashir Sheriff Machina, according to a report by ynaija.com
“Hon. Bashir Sheriff Machina is the immediate past chairman of the Governing Board of the Nigeria Shippers Council (NSC).
Hon. Sheriff, a popular name in the political sphere in Yobe, is an experienced grassroots politician who rose to the limelight in the 1990s and set history as the first and only youth in his 20s to be voted into the House of Representatives, representing Karasuwa, Nguru, Machina, Yusufari federal constituency on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
At 26, Bashir, he was appointed to serve as sub-committee chairman of the House Committee on Fertiliser Procurement and Distribution.
With the formation of APC in 2014, Bashir served the party in various capacities such as chairman APC congress committee in Ogun.
Under the guidance and recommendation of Governor Mai Mala Buni, the then national secretary of the APC, now Governor of Yobe, and immediate past Chairman of the APC Extraordinary Convention Committee, Bashir was saddled with another responsibility as chairman of the APC National Assembly Elections Screening Committee in Ogun. Since 2014, Bashir has served the APC on different committees as a member, an assignment which makes his resumé the most impressive in APC national headquarters.