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Tag: Bukola Saraki

  • Why APC must expel Bukola Saraki

    Why APC must expel Bukola Saraki

    The All Progressives Congress (APC) in its attempt to house those dispersed from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) may have unwittingly taken among its faithful, whose hands may be those of Esau with the voices of Jacob.

    APC must first scan its membership to rid it of enemies that are posing as friends within the party while working as thorns ready to choke the lush vegetation of the party. Many of them are in the APC to run with the agenda of the PDP and the earlier they are recognised and neutralised the better for the survival of the APC.

    There is no hesitation on my part that the first person to be neutralised in the bid to make APC have the peace and unity to carry out its programme and ensure success as a government is the person of the current Senate President. The man known as Senator or do I address him as His Excellency Bukola Saraki, the scion of the Saraki dynasty of Ilorin should have no part in the APC now or ever. He is a chip of the old block of Oloye Olusola Saraki who also at one time was recognised for his role in the politics of the country.

    Any keen observer of the social, political, historical trends of the Saraki family will bear me witness that the Sarakis are not known to have true allegiance to a political order unless it will feather their own nests to the detriment of others in the party. The late Oloye invented the act of political duplicity in Nigeria and the son seems to be honing it to perfection.

    Perhaps some snippets about the political style of the Oloye in his heydays as the grandmaster of Kwara politics will trigger the memories of many Nigerians about his unsavoury methods which are being deployed by the son. Many followers of Nigerian politics may have dismissed the event then as insignificant or mere coincidences but they were a pattern consistent with the man in achieving his aims of squeezing the party for his own advantage.

    In the Second Republic, Oloye fell out with Attah over the issues of the 1983 elections for which he felt he was not properly “recognised” for the role he played in the victory of the governor. He turned against his party to bring the rival in the person of Cornelius Adebayo of the Unity Party of Nigeria to power. Many attributed the anti-party stance of the Oloye to the failure of Attah to ensure that the flow of the pecuniary gains were commensurate with the stature of the man who was pulling the political strings in the state.

    During the aborted Third Republic, the man raised political chicanery to a height unknown in this clime. In his campaign programme and in the run down to the primaries of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the Oloye had two political campaign posters; one for the North, another for the South-West.  In the poster for the North he is known as Alhaji Abubakar Saraki while he answers Oloye Olusola Saraki in the posters meant for the South-West. For running with that kind of style there was certainly no way he could have pulled the wool over the eyes of party members who saw beyond his antics.

    As a foundation member of the All Peoples Party (APP), it is on record that while many of the party members were supporting the party with their money and goodwill, Oloye refused to contribute any significant amount for the running of the party. A mild drama played out in 1999 to buttress his unwillingness to support the cause of a party unless his interests are uppermost. I was at this period the Special Assistant on Media to Chief Mahmud Waziri, the then National Chairman of the APP. Waziri launched an appeal fund for the party to prosecute the party’s election campaigns where Oloye Saraki was running for nomination as the party’s presidential candidate.

    The man who wanted to be president held on to his purse and vehemently refused to contribute to the party’s funding of campaigns until well after the councils and governorship elections. Also contrary to the party’s financial regulations that all donations should be made in the name of the party, he wrote a cheque of N20 million in the name of Chief Waziri asking as well that the donation be given publicity. His intention was to have Chief Waziri to endorse his candidacy and also cause disaffection among party members. The plot fell flat on its face just like his two-faced political posters.

    Fast forward to APC and we see a replay of the antics of Oloye Saraki in Bukola Saraki. For his over vaulting personal ambition, he has started a storm in the party that will set the members against each other and the party on a deadly course of attrition. With a sleight of hand, he has played the cards and secured for his loyalists, the principal offices in the Senate to the utter consternation of the APC. His emergence as Senate President has set in motion, the tone of the Senate that will make laws for Nigerians in the next four years unless the spirit of rancor, indiscipline, distrust and brigandage is quickly and effectively exorcised.

    This flagrant disobedience of the party will create other dangerous antecedents for the party if the Senators who have been given positions in the Senate refuse all entreaties to retreat and surrender their positions. Imagine an APC-led government with the position of the Deputy Senate President in the hands of a PDP Senator in the hue of Senator Ike Ekweremadu is tantamount to giving all legislative powers to the PDP. This office is too powerful to be left in the hands of the PDP and unless Saraki is removed one way or the other from that seat, the Senate will not know peace and by extension the APC and the nation will continue on the downward spiral that the PDP experienced.

    The APC got to this cross road because it failed to check its flanks for men and women with a long history of working against party interest. It is abundantly clear that the work for the APC has just begun. Removing PDP from power is now certainly not the end but the beginning of more work. The party must go back to its bag of strategies to find the formula for removing the vestiges of the rogue attitude in many of the members it gave shelter from the PDP. Bukola Saraki is the face of this odd character in the APC and it is only that move that will bring a semblance of sanity into the party and ensure its grip of the political future of the country.

    –Ayela, a veteran journalist is based in Lagos

     

  • Young Nigerian professionals to meet in Abuja


    The Nigerian Young Professionals Forum (NYPF), has urged young business owners and entrepreneurs across the country to register for the Young Nigerian CEO's conference. The conference, which is scheduled to hold at the International Conference Centre, Abuja on Monday, 3rd August, would host President Muhammadu Buhari as the Special Guest of Honour as well as Senate President, Bukola Saraki, Guest of Honour.

    According to a statement by Dr. Nuhu Atta, the Executive Secretary, the conference with the theme, 'Promoting Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Building Economic Leaders for Tomorrow', will focus on key sectors ranging from Agriculture, Oil and Gas, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Blue Sea Economy (Marine), Manufacturing/ Processing and the Creative Industry. There will be industry specific break-out sessions to interact with world-class business leaders. "The value proposition of the conference includes share ideas and business models that can be adapted by young entrepreneurs in key growth areas; interact with business leaders at the industry specific break-out sessions during the event; discuss challenges they encounter in their various operations and explore global solutions; and fashion out strategies to harness the provisions of micro-credit facilities and intervention funds from government agencies for entrepreneurial development," the statement reads. The Young Nigerian CEO's conference is organized by NYPF, a Non- Governmental Organization composed of young Professionals from different fields of human endeavours, coming together under a unified platform to achieve three (3) major objectives, namely; creating sustainable livelihood for young people, engender purposeful leadership and social democratic inclusion, and encourage young people's participation in governance and the economic process. Speakers at the conference are Peter Jack – DG National Information Technology Development Agency; Denzil Kentebe – Executive Secretary Nigerian Content Development Board; Alexander Amosu Chairman, CEO - KAMSON luxury group; Alistair Soyode Founder, CEO - BEN TV and Moses Siloko Siasia, Chairman, CEO – Mosilo Group.

  • 8th Senate will be more focused – Saraki

    8th Senate will be more focused – Saraki

     

    [dropcap]P[/dropcap]resident of the Nigerian Senate, Senator Bukola Saraki,  has on Tuesday said that the 8th Senate would resume to better legislation following the break.

    Saraki said this on Tuesday through his social media platform adding that the senate under his presidency will be capable of producing watershed legislative interventions

    According to him: “As the Senate resumes today, it’s expected that the recess would, have in no small measure help us consolidate stability of National Assembly.

     “Now is time to move as one house in one direction to fulfill the promise we made to our constituencies that gave us our mandate.

    “It is time we remind ourselves of the solemn promise to deliver real change, which can’t be achieved in atmosphere distracted politics.

    “Elections are over; Nigerians didn’t put their lives on the line for politics but for responsible leadership that can deliver good governance.

    “Our mandate is not to come & play politics; our mandate is to be solution providers for the numerous challenges that bedeviled our country.

    “We have insurgency threatening very existence of our country & fabric of its unity from NE, we are facing dire streak due to mismanagement.

    “We have leadership task of turning challenges around through purpose driven lawmaking & Nigerians will not forgive us if we abdicate.

    “We can only achieve real change by working together & time is now. Before recess, we started process of laying down marker for new Senate.

    “8th Senate would be a much more focused legislative session, capable of producing watershed legislative interventions,” he said.

    [news_list display=”tag” tag=”Saraki, Bukola Saraki, NASS, National Assembly, 8th NASS” show_more=”on”]

  • Lesser Hajj: Saraki decries Saudi’s Visa policy

    Lesser Hajj: Saraki decries Saudi’s Visa policy

    Senate President, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki has criticized the entry visa issuance policy of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Nigeria for this year’s lesser hajj.
    Saraki who arrived Medinah on Saturday listened to complaints from some Nigerians who are performing the lesser hajj.
    He noted that the Saudi authorities, unlike other embassies in the country, refused to articulate a visa policy which potential visitors to the holy land can follow and obtain their entry visa without any difficulty once they meet the requirements.
    “The present process in which visitors to Saudi must go through a third party has created artificial bottlenecks now being exploited by the travel agents and the embassy officials.
    ” Our people are now made to suffer indignities arising from conspiracy between the embassy officials and the so-called agents. The process is fraught with corrupt practices,” Saraki said in a statement by his Special Adviser on Media, Yusuph Olaniyonu.
    The Senate President said some Nigerians informed him that they had to send their passports through Saudi embassies in other West African countries where the cost of the visa was less and they did not need to go through the hardship experienced in Nigeria.
    “It is unimaginable the amount of money people paid to get visa for this year’s lesser hajj and we do not want that to repeat itself for the hajj proper coming in a few months’ time. You know this religious rites and obligations are very important to our people and so, despite these inconveniences, they still struggle to get here and we have a responsibility to ensure this exploitation and inconvenience stop immediately,” Saraki said.
    He reassured Nigerians who complained to him that the Saudi visa policy will be one of the issues the Senate will look into when it resumes plenary later in the month.
    He said that the Saudi authorities as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Abuja will be engaged to find a lasting solution to the problems of visa issuance to Nigerians by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
    The Senate President further called on all Nigerian Muslims on lesser hajj and those at home to devote the last days of Ramadan to pray for peace, security, development and progress of Nigeria.
    He urged them to specifically ask for Allah’s intervention in the search for a lasting solution to the Boko Haram crisis in the North-Eastern part of the country and for God to help President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to revamp the economy of Nigeria.

  • Bukola Saraki and the Nigerian problem

    Whenever I mention Senator Bukola Saraki, I find myself having to speak from different perspectives. First and foremost, he is one of the highest elected officials in the government of our viciously mismanaged, poor and stumbling country.

    But more closely, in our Yoruba culture, I have to regard Bukola as a son. His father, Dr. Sola Saraki, and I were about the same age – if Sola and I had been born and raised in the same traditional Yoruba town or village, we would have belonged to the same age-grade association or Egbe Ibile, and that is supposed to create a certain peer loyalty.  Moreover, Sola and I considered each other as friends.

    We did not know anything about each other when we first met in the Nigerian Senate of the Second Republic in 1979, he elected from Kwara State and I from Ondo State. For most of the four years 1979-83, each of us was so engrossed in our legislative and party duties (he as Majority Leader from the NPN and I as Secretary of the UPN Parliamentary Caucus) that we didn’t particularly relate to each other. But towards the end, we somehow gradually established some mutual empathy. And by the time we both came out of the Buhari Military Government’s detention in 1984, we had become much closer. Sola invited me to join him when he made his first return home after his release from detention, and I saw a whole night of very fond and tender reception by his Ilorin people.

    I congratulate Bukola for his successes in Nigerian politics – his elections and long tenure as Governor of Kwara State, and now his position as Senator of our Federal Republic. I have met many people who regard him as one of the likely bright lights of Nigeria’s future politics.

    From that hope-filled perspective, I sincerely wish that Bukola had not been part of what has been happening in the Nigerian Senate in the past few weeks. I have read the long statement he made to the media. I admire the way he went all out – open-mindedly canvassing and talking to Senators from every party – in his bid for the position of President of Senate.  That is how the democratic political game should be played.

    I don’t know, however, what one should make of his story that some persons wanted or tried to kidnap him in order to foil his Senate presidential bid, but as a father I would urge him to let go of that story. It sounds too much like a self-serving, self-justifying, fabrication – certainly, the kind of thing that can return to hunt Bukola in his future political career.

    And, more importantly, although he says he was not aware that APC Senators were asked to meet with President Buhari somewhere else, the moment he found that most Senators of his own party were not present in the Senate Chamber, he should not have rushed along to get himself elected as President of Senate in that kind of circumstance. I don’t know whether the laws mandate that the inaugural meeting of the Senate and the election of the officers of the Senate should be done at one and the same first meeting of the Senate. I doubt it though. I remember that on October 1, 1979, the Senate chamber was not ready for us, and we inaugurated the Senate, broke up in minutes, and returned days later (when the chamber renovations were completed) to hold a full meeting and to elect the officers of Senate.

    Since a whole 51 Senators out of the 59 belonging to Saraki’s own party happened to be absent from the Senate on May 9, respect for the orderliness of governance, and for the greatly needed stability of our country, should have dictated that the elections of Senate officers be not rushed through that day – or at least at that very hour. As things have now developed, as things now stand in our country, it is going to be extremely difficult to convince most Nigerians, and most foreign observers, that the Senate proceedings of that day were not deliberately rushed so as to make way for Saraki’s election as President of Senate. And that, believe me, is very far from good – for Saraki, and for our country.

    There is a time for everything, and there are times when some things are not merely inappropriate but downright hurtful. In the condition of Nigeria since the presidential election of last April, the widespread perception of manipulations in the Nigerian National Assembly has been very hurtful indeed. Here is the reason. For decades, crooked manipulations of the processes of governance, and unbridled corruption, have ruled supreme over the affairs of Nigeria. In some Nigerian leaders’ unreasoning push to accumulate power and resources at the federal center for their own ethnic and personal purposes, Nigeria’s federalstructure was essentially destroyed, local and regional development initiatives were ruined, and our people were handed over to oppressive and hopeless poverty.

    In the outcome, our country has been coming progressively closer to collapsing and imploding. In the Muslim parts of our country, some of our brightest youths became attracted to religious fundamentalism and violence. Ultimately, one of their terrorist groups became a very major threat to our country, seizing and controlling large swathes of territory in the North-east, and enjoying freedom to kill, wreck and destroy in most parts of the North and Middle Belt – including even the federal capital city of Abuja. Moreover, poverty and bitterness are breeding various kinds of rejection of Nigeria in virtually all parts of Nigeria.

    At what was beginning to look like the absolute peak of these troubles, one man named Buhari came forward promising to suppress corruption, straighten up Nigeria, restore sanity, and give Nigeria the chance to survive and revive. A leading politician from the South-west, Bola Tinubu, championed Buhari’s cause and provided the energy and means to put him before Nigeria. A lot of Nigerians didn’t like Buhari much, but most finally decided to give Nigeria the chance that he was promising, and they voted to give him the presidency. Across the country, hope seemed to start to revive.

    But then, unhappily, what looked like the same penchant for crooked manipulations, the evil force that has long been battering Nigeria, reared its head in the Nigerian Senate, followed by the House of Representatives. All of a sudden, hope seemed to vanish all over again. Even though we all know that there are other factors in the slowing down of the Buhari take-off, as well as in the growing cracks in the Tinubu-Buhari team, the feeling is likely to be strong  for a long time in the future that the happenings in the National Assembly started it all off.  And the story of the happenings in the National Assembly cannot possibly be told without having Bukola Saraki and his Senate presidential ambition squarely in the centre of it.

    It doesn’t look good at all. There are now growing speculations that influential Northern forces that are opposed to the Buhari agenda of anti-corruption and change, or that want to re-establish the bogey of “Northern Domination”, have been behind the developments in the National Assembly. That makes the picture much worse and much more troubling. The big questions now are: How would the record being made these days affect the future of the National Assembly barons concerned? How indeed would it affect the future of fragile Nigeria itself? In the latter case, we may soon begin to see.

  • Saraki the innocent

    It took the controversially-elected Senate President Bukola Saraki 18 days to reconstruct the story of his emergence from his own point of view. And when on June 27 he personally narrated to journalists how the whole thing happened on June 9, his tale stretched the imagination.

    He said: “I can tell you today that I was in the National Assembly Complex as early as 6:00 in the morning and I stayed in a car in the park from 6:00 in the morning till quarter to 10:00am…All I was monitoring was how people were arriving at the complex. It was at quarter to 10:00 that I got information that the Clerk to the National Assembly had entered the Chamber.”

    Saraki continued: “So I got out of the small car I was inside, stretched myself and put on my babariga because I didn’t have it on before then. I walked from the car park into the chamber.”

    His moment-by-moment narration conveniently left out interesting details. For instance, just out of curiosity: how small was “the small car”? Saraki sounded like he hoped to make a point by introducing the adjective “small.” It sounded like a case of “hypocritical humility.”

    The highpoint of his pointlessness came when he said: “Before I knew it, my election had come and gone.” In other words, it all happened in a flash – did he mean like flash fiction?  But, evidently and evidentially, not as quickly and suddenly as to suggest that Saraki was unprepared, or that the direction of the drama was unanticipated, or even that the event was unplotted.

    The eventual cementing of a strange and strangulating leadership combination at the helm of the country’s upper legislative house is a source of wonder, just as Saraki’s post-event crocodile tears are unbelievable. He was quoted as saying: “It is unfortunate that we have a PDP man as Deputy Senate President. It is painful. It is painful for any APC member because we went through the struggle. That was not what we signed for.” Saraki added: “But it has happened; but it is unfortunate and it is not fair to put the blame on one side because it is a combination of errors and miscalculations that led us to have what we have.”

    His developing denial of party supremacy, manifested in his own defiant pursuit of position and his subsequent downgrading of the party’s choices, may well be at the heart of the self-identified “errors and miscalculations.”  But Saraki seems too self-absorbed to appreciate the fundamental nature of his own miscalculation error.

    It would appear that Saraki’s meet-the-media session had a redeeming feature, though. Perhaps unwittingly, he said: “I want my action to speak more than what I say.”  Saraki must be familiar with the idiom “Actions speak louder than words.” So far, his actions have said so much about the worthlessness of his words.

  • Open letter to Dr. Bukola Saraki

    Open letter to Dr. Bukola Saraki

    • “Dear Dr. Bukola Saraki,

    I have restrained myself from commenting on the confusion that the NASS has suddenly become under your watch for many reasons, top of which was because I felt some conflict was normal in a political party that was a marriage of necessity amongst warlords with differing political orientation and philosophy. I however assumed that since we fought so hard together to effect Change for the sake of country, you all will be guided by the patriotic zeal to put Nigeria first…I guessed WRONG!

    Frankly, I had no angst that you emerged Senate President because, as the Senate Rule says, it is an election of one by his peers. You actually had a right to aspire and most Nigerians were willing to cut you some slack on the issue… however, you were too impatient and hasty by the ambush strategy you employed…tantamount to a hostile

    takeover of the Upper Chambers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria!

    If you had been less arrogant and desperate, you could have still won that election with all the APC Senators in the Chambers…but you needed to prove a point ( one wonders to whom) and in that power drunk stupor, you mortgaged the Change millions of Nigerians labored for; some lost lives and limbs for what you treated with disdain by ceding your Deputy position to the PDP in exchange for their support! That was the height of insensitivity sir!

    As if that was not enough disrespect of our collective mandate, today,you openly defied your party again by disregarding the party’s choice of principal officers in spite of a formal letter to that effect! In other words, Senator Saraki, you became a law unto yourself and a sole political platform which incidentally is not known or recognized in our constitution.

    In view of these your recent actions, one cannot but ask “who exactly do you think you are sir?” Are you greater than the collective will of a people? Why must you throw the nation into turmoil simply because you want your way? Did Nigerians vote for you to dominate the political space or dictate our priorities for us? Was your name on ANY ballot paper in the last elections? Save for your senatorial constituency, did you traverse the 36 states and Abuja canvassing for our votes?

    Just in case you have conveniently forgotten, Nigerians voted in their majority for the APC, a political party that sold its CHANGE vision to us. We rejected the PDP with its TRANSFORMATION agenda that was leading us nowhere fast. For you to reintegrate the PDP into our CHANGE government just because of your singular ambition is to exalt yourself above and beyond all of our collective wills…that is unacceptable sir!

    It has been rumored that all this disrespect is about posturing for 2019. I sure hope not! How do you expect us to entrust our collective destinies to a man who cannot be accountable to Authourity? If you are too haughty to submit to your party, the platform upon which you were elected into the Senate, who will you be accountable to if you

    ever become President? The adage says “morning shows the day”.

    Mr Senate President (by hostile takeover) it is no longer amusing neither is it entertaining anymore. It is now getting really annoying and downright irritating. All the carrying ons need to stop forthwith as you are fast losing the goodwill bump you had when Nigerians thought you were a victim of an imposition cabal. It is now clear to all that you are most probably the aggressor and not the victim. Sole dictatorship is no longer in vogue as a political ideology. Even the bible says “two heads are better than one”. No matter how erroneous your party position might appear to you, as commonly said in boarding schools back in the 1980s, you “Obey first, and then

    complain!”

    Please sir, as much as I really don’t want to burst your bubble, this is really NOT about you! It is about millions whose daily livelihood is threatened by an economy on the brink of collapse; It’s about millions of children whose education is inadequate and irregular; it’s about millions of unemployed youths whose future is bleak unless the change that they braved intimidation and oppression for starts to happen fast! Those are the headlines we want to wake up to; those issues are what we expected to dominate our airwaves not your personal tussle for power in your own self delusory “Game of Thrones” soap opera. Enough already please!

    This is definitely NOT the CHANGE we voted for!”

     

    From Babatunde Ebenezer Temitayo Adedamola

    Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State.

  • Saraki’s consolidation trips

    Among the few trips Senate President Bukola Saraki has undertaken since he emerged president of the senate, his visits to former military head of state, Abdulsalami Abubakar, and former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, stand out for what they signify. Senator Saraki has been under some strain concerning the manner he emerged Senate President. With 51 All Progressives Congress (APC) absent from the senate on June 9 on account of a meeting they were to hold with President Muhammadu Buhari, the senate leadership election was conspiratorially held by affirmation in a matter of minutes. The snap ‘election’ was held perhaps because Senator Saraki had defied his party which preferred other candidates for the senate’s leadership positions. Since then, neither Senator Saraki nor his party had known peace.

    To mitigate the doubtful legitimacy of his position, Senator Saraki has embarked on panic trips to the nation’s opinion moulders and respected former leaders, especially the vociferous ones among them. This is where Gen Abubakar and Chief Obasanjo come in. The Senate President visited Gen Abubakar last Thursday, and Chief Obasanjo last Friday. It is not clear what they discussed, but it is almost certain he is attempting to legitimise his heretical move against his party, especially the aspect of conspiring to elect a PDP senator as the Deputy Senate President. Whether Senator Saraki can force a fait accompli on his party is not certain; but if he is to secure any legitimacy at all, he will have to do it through his party, not by the imprimatur of party outsiders.

  • Saraki as President of the 8th Senate

    Saraki as President of the 8th Senate

    President Muhammadu Buhari called it “constitutional”, but Barnabas Gemade, the ranking senator from Benue and leader of “Unity Forum”, which was behind Ahmed Lawan’s bid for the leadership of the 8th Senate, said it wasn’t. Whoever was right between the president and the senator, it is now obvious that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) failed to learn the lesson of the debacle of the erstwhile ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which produced Aminu Tambuwal, now governor of Sokoto State, as Speaker of the 7th House of Representatives in defiance of the decision of the PDP leadership four years ago.

    The cloak and dagger drama, which has now produced Dr. Bukola Saraki as Senate President, against APC’s preference for Lawan, followed almost exactly the same plot as that of Tambuwal’s, with the two political parties merely swapping places as culprit and victim and the difference that, unlike his predecessor, the new president did not hesitate in accepting the decision of the legislators, even though he did express some reservations about Saraki’s tactics.

    The first time I wrote about this political drama five weeks ago, my choice for Senate president was George Akume, a former Benue State governor and minority leader at the time. At that time the APC National Working Committee had reportedly zoned the job to the North-Central and it looked like the race was Saraki’s to lose to Akume, both of them from the same zone; Saraki had, by words and deeds, all this while made no secret of his ambition to head the Senate as a prelude to his bigger ambition of being president of the whole country.

    My choice of Akume, as I said then, was essentially because I thought it would go a long way in healing the deep wounds of the decades-long nasty and bloody Christian/Muslim conflicts in the North, which had been a big source of the region’s economic retardation and, by extension, the whole country’s.

    Even then I knew my choice was based more on hope than on Akume’s real prospects; long before the March/April elections, it was an open secret that Saraki had built a formidable network of support for the realisation of his ambitions not only within the ranks of the party leadership. He was also widely known to have built an even wider network of support among prospective senators across party lines.

    The scales seemed to have turned against Saraki only when, in spite of the then President-elect Buhari’s oft-repeated declaration that he had no preferred candidate for the job, his body language seemed to suggest, at least to some party leaders, if not all, that his preference was for Lawan. For this reason, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, for one, shifted his formidable support for Akume to Lawan, having apparently calculated that this was the only way to achieve his goal of installing his protégé, Hon. Gbajabiamila, then House minority leader, as its speaker.

    As things have now turned out, it seems everyone opposed to Saraki had underestimated the capacity for political subterfuge of this apparently worthy scion of the late undisputed godfather of Kwara State politics and leader of the Senate during the Second Republic, Dr. Olusola Saraki. For, constitutional or not, the younger Saraki’s successful coup of June 9 against the decision of the party leadership to support Lawan takes the gold in political gamesmanship.

    It is a measure of his success that his strategy has left his adversaries fuming in great anger and frustration. “The purported election of Senator Saraki and Dogara as Senate President and Speaker respectively”, fumed Mr. Joe Igbokwe recently, “is a clear transgression of both the tenets of democracy and party politics.” Igbokwe is a spokesman for the Lagos State chapter of the APC and his anger merely echoed that of his boss, Tinubu, who had said he would not even recognise Saraki as Senate president, a sentiment re-echoed by Gemade when he told reporters after Saraki’s election that “this process, which remains unconstitutional, cannot confer legitimacy on the elected Senate president.”

    As the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the president, Malam Garba Shehu, said on Channels Television during one of its flagship programmes, Sunrise Daily, on June 10, there was no doubt that Saraki employed underhand means to achieve his ambition. In what was clearly a grand conspiracy in cahoots with the PDP Senate caucus, he and his group in the Senate ignored the president’s invitation for a meeting to reconcile the APC federal legislators an hour ahead of its inauguration at 10am on June 9 and got himself nominated unopposed and elected by 57 senators, mostly PDP, while the other group numbering 51 waited for the meeting with the president at a different venue. Apparently he feared, admittedly with some justification, that the meeting would be used to make him submit to the outcome of the party’s straw poll the day before in which Lawal emerged as the party’s choice.

    In the face of this political sleight of hand by Saraki, it is understandable that many an APC chieftain have been calling for him to be disciplined. The extremely angry ones have even called for his sack. Almost all of them have also blamed Buhari’s advertised indifference to the outcome of the election of the leadership of the National Assembly on the altar of non-interference with the other arms of government for Saraki’s successful coup.

    Those who now blame Buhari for the APC debacle have, as I’ve said at the beginning of this piece, apparently not learnt from the same debacle that befell PDP four years ago. It also seems they lack an understanding of the workings of party politics in a presidential system when they lament the absence of party discipline in the country.

    True in both the parliamentary model of democracy we once practised and the presidential democracy we now practise, all elected office holders hold their offices solely by the grace of political parties. But the notion of party discipline, i.e. the ability of members of parliamentary groups to get members to support party policies and decisions, is much weaker in the presidential system than in the parliamentary one, the simple reason being the lack of clear separation between the executive and legislative arms of government in the parliamentary system as is the case in the presidential.

    This means legislators can defy party decisions in the presidential system without bringing down a government, which in turn means party whips don’t have the imperative to constantly crack their whips to get members into line that party whips do in the parliamentary system. In the American type of presidential system we have largely modelled ours after, party disciple is particularly weak because elected office holders feel more loyal to their constituencies, geographical or ideological, than they do to political parties.

    At any rate, those who argue that if Buhari had intervened decisively in the choice of the National Assembly leadership, APC, as the new ruling party, would’ve saved itself the embarrassment of having a PDP senator as deputy Senate president, ignore the fact that Saraki might still have won, in which case APC could have suffered an even worse predicament than it is in.

    So rather than cry over spilt milk, APC will serve Nigerians and itself better if it fosters the separation of powers among the three arms of government even as it ensures that the arms cooperate with each other in making policies and programmes that in the overall interest of the society rather than in the interests of only a few.

    On his part, Saraki should know that there is widespread public perception that as governor of Kwara State and subsequently as one of its three senators, he seemed to have served himself more than he had served society, as is apparent from how little his state has made any progress under him. Much of the public’s concern about his emergence as Senate president stems from this perception. He should know that the public will be on the watch out to see if he will cooperate with the new president in enacting laws and making pro-people policies or as was the case under PDP they’ll watch to see whether he will preside over a Senate that is anti-people.

  • Senate will prevent revenue leakages – Saraki

    Senate will prevent revenue leakages – Saraki

    President of the Senate, Senator Abubakar Bukola Saraki, on Tuesday said the 8th Senate will work to prevent revenue leakages in the country.

    Saraki, who spoke while receiving members of the Civil Society Groups that visited him in Abuja, said the Senate under his leadership would not only be people-centered but ensure the interest and welfare of Nigerians.

    He said: “As duly elected representatives of the people, we will work closely with every stakeholder in our onerous task of building a prosperous, secured and egalitarian society where the dividend of democracy will be felt by the people.”

    The Senate President said the upper legislative chamber is ready to work harmoniously with the groups, adding that their engagement will fast-track the developmental goals of this administration.

    He urged the groups to be more proactive and constructive in their approach to issues, saying, “I recognize the importance of the CSOs in nascent democracy. You have done creditably well so far.

    “On our part as legislators, we will be open, transparent and accept to work together as a team in order to transform our abundant resources to the betterment of Nigeria and Nigerians.”

    Saraki assured that the Senate under his leadership will be steadfast and improve in its oversight functions.