Beleaguered Senate President Bukola Saraki surpassed his own notoriety for inventiveness and grand-standing last week in various statements explaining and justifying his recent defection from the ruling APC to the PDP, from which he and his supporters had bailed out in 2015 when it was clear that the biggest party in Africa was doomed to go down to historic defeat.
There was nothing high-minded about it. It was a career move pure and simple.
It did not follow from ideology, much less conviction. To leader and follower alike, one political party is as good as another as long as it delivers the juice. Once its ability to deliver the juice in the usual quantities seems threatened, or it is time seek another party that can gratify their overweening sense of entitlement.
This scenario is all the more likely to occur when the party of their current sojourn develops vulnerabilities that might imperil its chances of re-election, as the APC is now circumstanced.
Four issues have above all made the Buhari administration especially vulnerable.
The first is the narrow base from which President Muhammadu Buhari makes some of the most important federal appointments.
The second is the murderous reign of cattle herders from the Sahel to the Atlantic coast. Each day brings with it blood-curdling tales of murder, arson, devastation, rapine, and displacement. For the most part, the government wrings its hands in abject befuddlement and promises to bring the marauders to justice. The very next day, the marauders strike on a more brutal scale.
The third is the dilatoriness with which urgent national issues are being handled, at a time that demands decisiveness.
The fourth is the gloomy atmosphere across the country, the pervasive feeling that things aren’t improving or improving fast enough, despite the Buhari Administration’s best effort.
The PDP, which took Nigeria to the edge of economic ruin and set the value system at nought has skillfully exploited these vulnerabilities to cast itself as the deliverer Nigeria is waiting for. Last week’s defections from the APC into the welcoming embrace of the PDP was supposed to signalise its resurgence and its unstoppable march back to power.
Regardless of the balance of forces in the Senate, it now has in its collection Saraki, who has always had one foot in the PDP where his soul belongs, and the other in the APC. For deputy Senate president, thanks to the self-same Saraki, it has an entrenched PDP stalwart, Ike Ekweremadu.
These are no minor trophies.
The Senate president used to be little more than a ceremonial office, but Saraki has parlayed it into an independent centre of power to delay, disrupt and obstruct Buhari’s agenda. No other Senate president in the world exercises the kind of power Saraki has arrogated to himself; none draws nearly as much on the public purse.
Saraki has vowed to remain president, a position he had usurped by fraud and kept by dispensing patronage, thanks to Buhari’s vacillation in enforcing party discipline – a vacillation that doubtless haunts him today.
Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, another PDP crossover who was also set to defect, has been hedging his bets – in case he finds his position unviable – further evidence, were any needed, that the defections were never rooted in conviction.
Saraki’s proxies are claiming that, even in Nigeria, there is precedent for members of the Opposition holding key positions in the legislature. As examples, they cite Ume Ezeoke of the NPP who served as Speaker in the NPN-dominated House of Representatives, and John Washpam, also of the NPP, who functioned as deputy president in the NPN-controlled Senate.
This brazen revisionism should not pass unchallenged.
The arrangement was a product of negotiations between the two parties. It also included allocation of cabinet positions to the NPP. Though the largest single party in the National Assembly, the NPN lacked an overall majority that would have enabled it to govern effectively, what with the strong UPN presence in the legislature.
When the marriage of convenience collapsed, each party went its separate way. It cannot therefore be cited as a precedent for Saraki’s tenacity of office.
Last week’s armed siege on the National Assembly was barbarous through and through. It is indefensible. Those who planned and staged it must be identified and brought to justice, and there should be no prevarication in the matter.
But that intrusion hardly justifies Saraki’s heated rhetoric and his grandstanding.
Hear him, at his chaotic “world press conference”:
“. . .The legislature, more than any other institution in this country, more than any other arm of government, represents the will of the people. We are elected by the people, and an assault on the legislature is an assault on the people of Nigeria. The forcible shutdown of the legislature was an unconscionable assault on a national institution, and thanks to all your efforts, the aggressors have been put to shame. . .”
In what ways, it is necessary to ask, has the legislature over which Saraki has presided in the past three years and run as a fief represented the will of Nigerians? And isn’t it rich that a person impervious to shame and noblesse oblige should talk of putting others to shame?
And this from the same press conference, about the siege and its masterminds:
“. . .They attempted to execute an illegal impeachment of the leadership of the Senate without the backing of the law, but they faltered. We are confident that, together, we shall always defeat acts of unconstitutionality. The rule of law shall always prevail. . .”
Saraki’s new-found belief in the rule of law – if belief it is indeed and just another instance of his accustomed posturing – is hollow through and through. Whether in his political career or in his business operations, he has always lived under the penumbra of the law. Ilorin and Kwara State, not forgetting Lagos and Abuja, are littered with the evidence. I say nothing of the Cayman Islands and other foreign shelters for wealth of dubious provenance.
In case Saraki has conveniently forgotten the underhanded, insidious and smart-alecky path he trod to “emerge” Senate president, how he conspired with all 49 members of the PDP and nine renegade members of the APC to wrest the position for himself and assign that of deputy president to the minority PDP, the APC be damned, here is a reminder.
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 for the 8th Senate, it transacted no official business whatsoever.
So, how did Standing Orders 2007 (as amended), which required all members of the Senate to participate in the nominating and voting for the Senate president and deputy president morph into House Standing Orders 2015 “as amended” which states rather limply that members of the Senate are entitled to participate in voting for Senate president and deputy president?
Back in July 2015, the police had determined that the document at issue was a forgery. The Director of Public Prosecutions of the Federation, Mohammed Diri, issued a legal opinion concurring in that finding and recommended that those behind it be identified and charged with criminal conspiracy, forgery, breach of official trust, and unlawful assembly.
Toward that end, the legal opinion also set forth some questions the police should answer definitively, namely: Who authorised promulgation of Senate Standing Order 2105? Who published it? Who approved it? Who paid for its publication? Who distributed it?
The Ministry of Justice, then headed by immediate past Solicitor-General of the Federation and permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Abubakar Yola also concurred in the legal opinion and stated that the Senate leadership election, based as it was on forged documents, was null and void.
But the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN) who took office four months after the legal opinion was issued has, without formally issuing a nolle prosequi, discontinued the case. Nor has he deigned to explain why.
The police seem just as disinclined to pursue investigations to answer the questions formulated by the DPP.
That is the background to the making of Senate President Saraki. Those who are now lionising him as a champion of democracy and the rule of law care little about his personal history.
They care even less about democracy and the rule of law, and about integrity in public life.