The jury is now more or less out on the validity of the legal instrument on which Dr Bukola Saraki and his confederates relied to foist him on the Senate as its president and Ike Ekweremadu, a stalwart of the minority PDP, as deputy president.
The most generous construction one can put on it is that it is a desperate interpolation. The police who have scant regard for nuance have called it a forgery. Others have gone farther and called it a brazen forgery, and a transparent one for that matter.
Don’t take my word for it. Read the report of the police, as summarised in the weekend papers. Even more crucially, read attorney Jiti Ogunye’s brilliant and indissoluble forensic analysis for this newspaper and some online publications last week.
There was always something underhanded, insidious and smart-alecky about the process through which Saraki, in stark pursuit of his personal ambition, conspired with all 49 members from the opposition PDP and nine renegades from the APC to wrest control of the Senate from the ruling APC.
In execution, the whole thing was shot through and through with indecent haste, in the absence for good reason of roughly one half of its 108 members, the goal being to create on the ground a set of accomplished facts. Too bad if the operation came across as the parliamentary equivalent of a street mugging, the usual apologists said. Politics is a game of wits and one side simply outsmarted the other. Get over it and play smarter next time.
The old rules stood formidably in the way of this creepy project. So, new rules had to be devised and pressed into immediate service. To create the illusion that everything was being done by the book, make it clear from the outset that the exercise was undergirded by the Senate’s own rule-book, to wit: Standing Orders 2015 “as amended.”
That phrase, designed to assure the public that scrupulous adherence to law and lay at the heart of the process that threw up Saraki and Ekweremadu as the Senate’s leaders, has instead given away the game in a way the conspirators could not have imagined. For it immediately begs several questions: Amended by whom? When? Where? And how?
When the 7th Senate was prorogued, the law in force was the Senate Standing Orders 2007 “as amended,” according to the best authorities. And until the Senate convened to elect new officers, it transacted no official business whatsoever.
So, how did Standing Orders 2007 as amended morph into House Standing Orders 2015 as amended? Was this the handiwork of ghosts? Almost everyday, we hear of ghost teachers, ghost public servants and ghost towns. But ghost senators?
The closest thing to an answer to this overarching question has come from an unidentified official of the Senate’s secretariat. The 7th Senate had ended its run, but the 8th Senate was yet to be inaugurated. So, there was a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. So the vacuum had to be filled — if only to avert nature’s wrath, he might have added
The extant rules had served the Senate well. If they had not, they would have been thrown out long ago. The problem was that, as they stood, they could not be employed to advance the agenda of usurpation that Saraki and his confederates had in mind.
The dodgy 2015 enactment, it is now clear, was a disingenuous solution to a manufactured problem, the problem being to get Saraki ensconced in the Senate president’s chair at all cost and by whatever means, and Ekweremadu in the deputy president’s chair, as a reward to the PDP for giving aid and comfort to Saraki’s personal agenda.
It was designed to establish facts on the ground that the polity would have to live with. It did not matter that the process by which they arrived at it was in flagrant breach of the Senate’s standing rules, an impregnable barrier to the ignoble project they were about to launch.
The 2007 Standing Orders (as amended) enjoin any member seeking any amendment to the rules to give a written notice to the Senate president, providing details of the proposed changes. Within seven days of receiving the notice, the Senate president will send a circular detailing the amendments and have it printed in the Order paper.
The member proposing the changes will get a chance to talk about them from the floor. Following that, the Senate will decide by a simple majority whether to consider or reject the proposed changes. If the Senate votes against the changes, the matter ends there.
But if the Senate decides to take up the matter, two-third of the members must vote affirmatively before the proposals become a part of its rules.
This foregoing is the process the Senate should have followed if it was minded to respect its own rules. But why submit to a labyrinthine process with an uncertain outcome when you can “amend” the pesky law in question, an amendment in this case meaning, for all practical purposes, cooking the statute books?
Even in Nigeria where “anything goes” and nothing is impossible, this is without precedent. The Senate in whose name this tawdry transaction was consummated is going to come out of it hugely discredited. So also will those members who orchestrated and have been celebrating it as an achievement that will guarantee the “independence” of the legislature.
They have by their shabby tactics cast a penumbra of uncertainty over the prospects of the new administration’s agenda and the national yearning for change expressed so unambiguously in the recent general elections.
The public they claim to serve is surely entitled to feel betrayed.
The whole thing is being seen, rightly, as a test of President Muhammadu Buhari’s resolve to root out corruption in the body politic.
Thus far, he has handled the challenge with credit. If this had happened in the time of former President Goodluck Jonathan, it would have been smothered by all the obfuscation and the dilatoriness that rented crowds and hired publicists masquerading as “Abuja-based public affairs commentators” ever ginned up. The police leadership would never have risen to the professional challenge.
The matter is now before the courts. Given the issues at stake, the courts will have to accord it accelerated hearing. Until it is disposed of, the Senate cannot in good conscience transact any business, with Saraki and Ekweremadu officiating. Any such business will come tainted with a heavy presumption of illegality, given the overwhelming evidence that their ascendancy was founded on illegality.
The Senate will therefore have to stand adjourned.
Sure, the administration has already lost a great deal of momentum by its excessive caution and stands to lose more if the Senate goes into a long recess. But it is better for the polity, for democracy, and for the rule of law, to ensure that when the Senate acts, it does so with unassailable integrity and authority.
This is no time for shabby compromises dressed up as a “political solution.” The ongoing criminal investigation must be allowed to work its way through our institutions. For, in an exact sense, Senate Order-gate is also a test of the capacity of those institutions to guide and lead at a time of grave national crisis.
