This minute, conversation segues to Bukola Saraki’s political chess game with Muhammadu Buhari. The Senate President duels with the President and vice versa. It’s the stuff random fetishes are made of; it’s lure to a passive press and ‘lore’ to an ignorant electorate. The permutations unfurl in real time; they are dramatic, mellow, pulse-quickening.
I place no wager on the likely outcome of the beef between the state officers. Like the proverbial cat and mouse, aides to the duo go gung ho against each other. In defence of their principals and desperation to feather their nests, they urge the citizenry to immortalise the damaged and the flawed.
Through the circumstances, aides and associates to Buhari and Saraki deploy wit and random wile eerily, summoning our sympathies for their plaintiff principals. Like frantic metamorphosists, they would clothe dross as gold and mask succour as infernal terror.
The perceptive listens to their eloquent drivel, incoherent rants and wanton justifications, in amusement, cautiously seeking the villain from the hero, the victor from the vanquished.
The unperceptive are quite captivated; since reality hurts, they accept desperate sentiments as ‘truth.’ It is their daemonic aria, a flight of decadent will and imagination. No thanks to this pathetic gang of vanishing minds, Nigeria suffers the possibility of self-destruct.
The scene prefigures the transition or ‘transformation’ if you like, of citizenship from gradual decline to rapid degeneracy. Let them bicker and bite their hearts out. I would wager, however, that when the dust settles on their discord, two victors may yet emerge, Buhari and Saraki; and the loser will be the electorate, as usual.
Saraki recently defected from the ruling party, All Progressives Congress (APC), accusing forces within the party of causing his exit. There is no gainsaying the relationship between Saraki and the ruling party was fraught by distrust at his emergence as Senate President in 2015, against the wish of the party’s leadership.
While his loyalists lament his subsequent trial, for alleged non-declaration of assets, which terminated at the Supreme Court’s ruling in his favour, as a premeditated offensive against him by political detractors; recent allegations of his connection to armed robbers, who robbed banks in Offa, Kwara State, killing over 30 people, rankles an ominous note.
The police say their investigations show that some of the armed robbers were Saraki’s political thugs and that he may have provided arms and logistics to them. Saraki has denied any link with the suspects, alleging a witch-hunt.
Thus, he quit the APC for the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), a move widely condemned as waddling back to gobble his vomit. Despite the spin accorded his return to the PDP, from which he hitherto defected to the APC in controversial circumstances, does it dispel his crunch politics?
Will it make him preferable to President Buhari, if eventually he achieves his ambition of vying for the presidency, come 2019, as a candidate of the PDP?
Buhari, nevertheless, restates his vision of romanticised ‘change’ to the applause of ardent, unquestioning loyalists and the outrage of his most virulent critics. Still, he relies on his epiphany of morality that the severely exploited and hapless citizenry are expected to die for. Buhari rode to power chanting change and promising a radical, progressive departure from the pilfering that characterised public office before his emergence.
Notwithstanding his shortcomings in handling the herdsmen crisis, one can’t help but admire his resolve to end Boko Haram’s terrorism and recoup the country’s looted public funds.
At his emergence as President-elect, the citizenry saw him as a saviour amid the ruling class’ primitive tribe of predators. Contemporary boondocks legend painted portraits of him as a warrior in wolf-skin vest, brandishing a shield of steeled morality and a stone-axe, forged to hack down monuments, that the corrupt ruling class built to entrench corruption.
Since the beginning of Nigeria’s democratic experiment, politics has evolved from airbrushed imagery of shady characters in newspapers, to the wild, insolent ire of an ignorant electorate, often in support of an individual or cause.
Ultimately, politicians loom imposingly as pimps and madams, treating the electorate as whores. In their estimation, the masses are meant to be dominated and abused. And once they have their way with them, they discard them like pieces of trash, until ‘re-election’ season.
As we approach 2019, the political hierarchies birthing and corrupting Nigeria’s ‘Change’ are on public display. How do we identify the hero from the villain, the upright from the corrupt? Of Buhari, Saraki, others, who is deserving of our votes?
Perhaps the one whose professed politics matches the vibrations of his soul; the candidate who validates his promises, ethics and projections by dependable philosophies of human existence.
He offers something more than “life-boat” solutions as lifelines by which we would derive satisfaction of our necessities, sow and harvest our fruits of hope and citizenship.
He is the one who successfully nullifies the insolence of our tribal mentality. We must have seen him attain and authenticate, a worthy equilibrium between, say, the expediency of wiping off our slums vis-à-vis the affordability of beautifully planned cities and suburbs.
He is the candidate who struggles to repair in wisdom and coherence, while we pick him apart, as he articulates his blueprint for providing good roads and electricity, standard health care and security, stable economy and quality education, among others.
He is the candidate without the shame of baggage and the chaos of dishonour.