Great political drama is afoot in Kwara State. Dear readers, let us leave bombers, bunglers and the ailing Nigerian state alone this week for a trip to the land of Dadakuada music. In Ilorin, a fascinating and superbly choreographed royalist soap is winging its way to a fateful climax. It is absolutely riveting, a combination of Dallas and Dynasty with the old King Lear thrown in.
The stage is set. The firecrackers are crackling to the resounding beat of war drums in the eerie background. The sanmoris, the jamas, the onitijus, the onigogos and the fanatical hordes of Oke Suna—the quarters of the faithful—are watching with keen interest. These foot soldiers with their core of itinerant Muslim preachers, politicised clerics, jaded jihadists and other spiritual wannabes have always been the real power behind the throne since the Islamic coup of Malam Alimi , and they make the former fiefdom of Afonja such a fascinating sociological case history.
But don’t forget that Napoleon once famously observed that a throne is only a bench covered with damask. The end of a political dynasty or its metamorphosis is here. There are echoes of fierce ambition, of filial impiety and political perfidy. There are hints of a fey and slightly unhinged king Lear about to preside over the dissolution of his own political empire.
The main protagonists are very well known. In one corner of the royal ring prowls the aging political pugilist and much lionised avatar of Kwara politics, Abubakar Olusola Saraki, an outstanding surgeon of politics if ever there was one. A man of superhuman energy and vitality combined with extraordinary political dexterity, Saraki has grafted and sutured together a durable political dynasty which has endured all stress and storms. Like all thoroughbred feudal monarchs, Saraki does not take hostages. Behind his jovial and avuncular comportment lies steely glint and an iron will of implacable severity.
In the other corner, Saraki’s son and heir now unapparent, Abubakar Olubukola , crouches with tigrish fortitude and in fine feline fettle, too. Bukola’s imperious airs of feudal entitlement and his occasionally fatuous and ill-judged pronouncements on national matters may not endear him to many, but there is little doubt that he has proved himself a formidable political dead ringer of his famous father. After eight years of being in charge of Kwara state, the medical doctor on permanent sabbatical has cobbled together a canny alliance which has sent his father and benefactor packing from the royal castle and now threatens his political supremacy.
As far as political intrigues go, this is the father of all biological coups and the ultimate designer baby of political patricide. Thrown into the ring with them as hostage and hostess is the favoured daughter and latest pretender to the throne, Olugbemisola Saraki. A serving senator of the Federal Republic, the fetching and delectable Gbemisola is no Benazir Bhutto, the redoubtable daughter of the East, who had to face off her vagabond and wayward brothers to grab the ultimate laurel. It is more like a sea lioness being thrown into pool of crazed sharks.
But complexities and contradictions do abound. A democratic throne is a violent oxymoron. Modern Nigeria itself is a land of rowdy contradictions and at this point in time there is no point in ruffling feathers about the peculiar sociological and cultural milieu of Kwara state. Suffice it to note for now that baring a violent revolution in Nigeria which abolishes its last vestiges of feudalism, it is virtually impossible to win back in peace time what you lost on the pre-colonial warfront.
Had William Shakespeare lived around this time in post-colonial Nigeria, his extraordinarily fecund imagination would have found much grist to its ever churning mill. But even the great bard of Stratford-Upon Avon would have been forced to accommodate new pressing and urgent realities. King Lear has come to Agbaji, but the old royal baggage remains in Elizabethan England.
In King Lear, we see a sick, tired and worn monarch in a fit of senile grandeur trying to divest himself of his royal patrimony. In other words, a king is presiding over the dissolution of his own empire among his beloved daughters. His condition is as simple as it is simple-minded: protestations of love and devotion from the daughters. While the first two, Regan and Gonerill, faithfully and opportunistically began singing sonnets of love, the third, Cordelia, promptly demurred, claiming that there is indeed no art to find the mind’s construction on the face. The father promptly disinherits her, inviting a calamity of unimaginable magnitude.
Had King Lear been a modern day monarch, he would probably have been diagnosed as manifesting the onset of senile dementia clinically known as Alzheimer’s Disease. He would have been sanctioned or eased from the throne. As usual with Shakespeare, while he was rhapsodising about the nobility and stoic lack of guile of an older world represented by the old king, he was also foreshadowing the arrival of a more complex and complicated society mediated by the Industrial Revolution and its urban pathologies. The new man is epitomised by Edmund with his ubiquitous savvy and Machiavellian audacity of courage.
As he took his case against his own son to the crowd of faithful in his Ilorin GRA redoubt with the cogency and the clinical clarity of an absconding medico, there was no sign of senile dementia in the older Saraki. Although now betraying signs of the depredations and corrugations of age, Abubakar Olusola Saraki was as nimble-footed as he was quick-witted. His beloved son has been misled by idiots, a furious democratic monarch charged. His logic is simple and compelling: if you subscribe to a royalist code of succession and benefited immensely from it, you cannot change the code in midstream. By toying with this sacred and divine order, the son has joined the former henchmen of his father in the gallery of infamy and political treachery.
This is all well and good, but there is something about Saraki senior which reminds one of the medieval rulers in the epoch of classical feudalism. Like King Louis of France who famously retorted that “l’etat c’est moi!!”, Saraki elder is proclaiming: “Kwara state is me!!!.” This monarchical veto and autocratic fiat is incompatible with a democratic dispensation. Like a medieval ruler, Olusola Saraki attributes divine wisdom and absolute infallibility to his choices which jars with the idea of the citizen as a discrete sovereign in his own right. It is noteworthy that the camp of the son has been quite muted in its response and diplomatically coy about taking the battle frontally to the old man’s quarters. With the reins and levers of power firmly in his hands, Bukola appears content with running rings round his old man before moving for the kill with a little help from the federal might. A plebeian intruder who was rude to the founding father was quickly slapped down and sent to political Siberia.
Having prevailed over all his former associates turned mortal adversaries such as Adamu Attah, Shaba Lafiagi and lately Mohammed Lawal, it will amount to an epic irony if the older Saraki were to succumb to his own son in a royal battle of wits and will. That would be divine justice of punitively poetic proportions.
Having seen the inside of government and governance for eight years, what Bukola Saraki seems to be saying is that there is time for everything. Even for a famous First Family, the patriarch’s wisdom cannot approximate to the collective wisdom of the people. The retort will be that the son was a political nobody before his father enthroned him and he is in absolutely no position to query his benefactor except he is succumbing to dark and sinister sibling rivalry and filial ingratitude masquerading as public order and morality.
In all this, the vaster multitude are nothing but bemused spectators in a play of giants. This has always been the case with this northernmost outpost of the old Yoruba Empire. Have cavalry and Islamic charms and will travel. Afonja, its old Yoruba ruler, a courageous but feckless generalissimo with remote maternal roots to the Oyo royal lineage, was the last coup maker of the empire. He demanded and eventually got the suicide of the last king, Awole, after accusing the latter of plotting to eliminate him.
After Afonja himself was sent down in a palace coup with a hundred arrows embedded in his body, making him stand in stiffened erection like a crusader’s effigy, a succession of Fulani emirs were treated with absolute scorn and contempt by the warlords. One of them, Moma, was assassinated in 1895. In the case of the gifted but half-crazed Balogun Karara, he routinely marched on the capital from his Offa redoubt installing and removing emirs at will until the colonial intervention put an end to the road show.
This is the suzerainty that Olusola Saraki inherited by default. Ilorin has not always been the political hunting ground of the Sarakis. In 1964 when Saraki, a freshly qualified doctor from Britain, attempted to run as an independent candidate for the House of Representatives, he was given an electoral black eye and forced to beat a humiliating retreat to his Lagos base. But he rallied, deploying the allure of increasing prosperity and the power of guileful generosity.
By 1983 when he helped the UPN’s Cornelius Tunji Adebayo to trounce Adamu Attah, the sitting governor, Saraki had become the undisputed political boss of Kwara. But queries about his ambiguous pedigree and dubious lineage persist. Till date, there has been no response to a devastating riposte from Abdul-Ganiyu Abdul-Rasaq, the notable Ilorin lawyer, that Saraki’s father was an Abeokuta indigene who only came to Agbaji for Koranic studies. But even then, the current rulers of the famous city are not indigenes themselves. In Saraki, Ilorin was merely obeying its old logic of political warlordism combined with spiritual predation.
There are tantalising possibilities in the current face off between father and son which show that history often moves forward by lurching sideways. If the elder Saraki were to prevail against his son, would he have the courage and bloody-minded audacity to bring the full weight of treason against his adored son? If on the other hand, the younger Saraki succeeds in vanquishing his father would the old man, now worn and exhausted by age and political misfortune, suffer the fate of cruel banishment like the old King Lear?
Either way, something tells snooper that the bell is tolling for the Saraki dynasty in Kwara. If Bukola prevails, he would have succeeded in opening up the democratic space in Kwara in a profoundly ironic and paradoxical manner. This in spite of himself and his decidedly reactionary worldview which he ventilates with imperial arrogance.
If on the other hand the father trumps the son, he would have succeeded in installing the first female executive governor in the history of the nation, a feat that has eluded far more progressive enclaves. If this feat were to be achieved in a harshly patriarchal bastion of feudal politics, it will show the cunning of history on spectacular display. Judging from what we have heard of her, nothing will then stop Gbemi from washing some dirty family linen in the public space if only to permanently see off her disloyal brother.
Every success contains the germ of eventual failure. There may be not much to choose between feudalised democracy and democratised feudalism, but history is still unfolding. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a political sadist cruelly taunted his bedridden father. “This is one deal old Joe cannot fix”. It looks like this is one deal Oloye cannot fix. King Lear has finally arrived in Agbaji. But it will be noted by many generations to come that a major political physician once passed through the plains of Kwara.
