By a larger plurality, and for the second time in months, the Senate has passed a vote of confidence in Senate President Bukola Saraki over his apparent face-off with his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and perhaps the president himself, Muhammadu Buhari. After a six-week recess, the Senate resumed plenary last week, and immediately, some 83 senators rose in unison to endorse the leadership of Dr Saraki. The first vote of confidence by 81 senators in late July boasted two fewer senators in Dr Saraki’s wagon. Who knows, by the time a third vote of confidence is held, for it will certainly be held as long as the ruling party is in suspended animation, perhaps nearly all of the country’s 109 taunting senators would endorse their embattled leader. Last week’s larger plurality, according to reports, was predicated on the senators’ continuing dismay at what they describe as meddlesomeness of external forces in Senate affairs. The insinuation is not lost on anyone, for even Dr Saraki himself pointedly disclosed where his troubles were coming from.
The vote of confidence was prompted by Dr Saraki’s arraignment for offences connected with false declaration of assets, which the animated prosecuting counsel said he needed just two days to establish beyond doubt. Neither the mere fact of charging Dr Saraki in court, nor the fear of proving the Senate President as untrustworthy, nor yet the possibility of presenting him with the moral conundrum of leading Nigeria’s highest lawmaking body on shaky ethical ground, was enough to temper the enthusiasm of the 83 senators from biting the bullet. For both the consenting senators and the Senate President himself, what assumed paramountcy were the motives behind arraigning Dr Saraki before Justice Danladi Umar of the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) and the independence of the legislature, not the substance and merit of the court case.
In the view of Dr Saraki, the court case indicated nothing but persecution. He argues that by breaking ranks with his party over the zoning of legislative leadership positions, he was consequently being unfairly and needlessly harassed. But the legislature, he sermonised, must be independent of the executive arm if democracy was to flourish. It is not clear whether he believes himself. But from all indications, senators, at least the 83 who endorsed him, identify with Dr Saraki’s point of view, and regard the ethical dilemma facing the lofty and incomparable position of the Senate President as secondary to the battle for legislative independence with which they have canonised his defiance. Both in the tribunal and the resumed Senate plenary, Dr Saraki managed by sheer sophistry to frame the argument according to his liking and in his own ethically distorted worldview. Said he: “I wish to reiterate my remarks before the Tribunal, that I have no iota of doubt that I am on trial today because I am President of the Nigerian Senate, against the wishes of some powerful individuals outside this chambers. And to yield ground on this note, is to be complicit in the subversion of democracy and its core principles of separation of powers as enshrined in our constitution. This, in your wisdom, is what you have done by electing me to be the first among all of you who are my equals.”
The monstrosity of Dr Saraki’s arguments find parallel only in the perverted logic of a man who excuses his life of crime on the grounds of parental neglect or societal and economic inequality. It is indeed possible that Dr Saraki has found himself before a tribunal today because he disagreed with his party and possibly even the president, though he has tried strenuously to dissociate the president from the court case. But for a senior lawmaker of Dr Saraki’s calibre to conflate party politics with the juridic circumstances of his alleged offence is to stretch logic and morality to their elastic limit. Unfortunately for everyone, particularly the senators, the two cases are not only distinct, the court case even takes precedence over the merit of his Senate leadership election and the so-called independence of the legislature. The court case, when it is over, will establish whether he is morally qualified to occupy the lofty position he claimed grandly and extravagantly that his colleagues bestowed upon him in June as primus inter pares.
If senators refuse to be persuaded by the argument of those who insist on the court case proving or disproving Dr Saraki’s bona fides, it is either they lack the quality their election supposedly conferred on them, or that at bottom they are themselves facing gargantuan ethical conflicts, or even worse, that they lack the depth, strength of character and wisdom required to discriminate between complex and interwoven phenomena. Left to the chafing senators who undiscriminatingly endorsed Dr Saraki last week, had they been asked to examine the quandary former US president Richard Nixon found himself over Watergate in 1972-74, they would have blamed partisan politics for his woes rather than judge the matter on merit, and dismiss the erring president as ethically misled and unfit to hold the high office he was voted into. On Thursday, observers saw a thaw in the relationship between President Buhari and Dr Saraki during the celebration of the Independence Day anniversary at Aso Villa. Even if the smiles between the two indicated a thaw, it is unlikely to affect Dr Saraki’s court case, let alone lead the federal government to a withdrawal or amelioration of the case.
Not only will the trial go on, irrespective of anyone’s sympathies for Dr Saraki regarding his dispute with party leaders, the case will be diligently prosecuted and justice, sans politics, served. It is incredible that Dr Saraki wishes the case against him to be settled politically, as many intermediaries suggest. Should it be settled politically, it will not only destroy the ethical foundation of President Buhari’s anti-graft war, it will pervert the cause of justice in Nigeria and establish an impregnable dichotomy between the haves and the have nots, and between the influential and the ordinary citizen. Worse, it will presuppose two forms of justice in the land. The cocooned Dr Saraki does not give the impression of a wise lawmaker or leader; this may be why he continues to conflate the issues before him. But it is even more shocking that none of the 83 senators who passed a vote of confidence in him was able to deconstruct Dr Saraki’s troubles and judge appropriately.
Members of the House of Representatives are also reported to have unanimously mandated a willing Yakubu Dogara, the Speaker, to wade into the Dr Saraki/presidency/APC matter in order to find a political solution. They obviously see the trial as political. Perhaps too, some APC leaders believe the Saraki case should and could be settled amicably and politically. For Dr Saraki, however, the only way to settle the matter is to leave him to do what he pleases at the Senate, to enter into alliances that suit his purpose but hurt his party, and to frame the argument and its resolution along his peculiar politics and schizoid worldview. Speaker Dogara faced a similar problem in the House of Representatives, but he managed to settle the misunderstanding with extensive concessions. However, neither the president nor APC can assume the liberty to settle the case politically before the CCT adjudicates the matter. The short-term and long-term consequences will be too grave. Indeed, irrespective of the outcome of the CCT case, and given the way Dr Saraki has framed the stalemate in the party as a dispute between him and one or two powerful APC leaders, neither the Senate for which he craves independence, nor the ruling party that sometimes seems to vacillate so mysteriously, will know peace with a political settlement.
If the APC wishes to retain influence over its elected officials, if the values the president wishes to project are to endure and prosper, and if the legislature wishes to sustain a more realistic and lasting independence, they must not embrace the atrocious solution being foisted on them by Dr Saraki, his unreflective Senate supporters, and goody two-shoes House of Representatives sympathisers. Dr Saraki can continue to fight or arm-twist his party and party leaders, a right his position and privilege confer on him, and even plot to master the ruling party or outwit its leaders, as much as his ambition gives him wing, but the state, which transcends both him and his party, must resist being blackmailed into abandoning the CCT case. The public must also sensibly refuse to confuse the two issues. They are different, and no amount of intra-party squabble and interminable votes of confidence can expiate the infraction of the law federal prosecutors allege against the Senate President. Dr Saraki’s case is a bad one, notwithstanding the political intrigues he tries to insinuate into it, and it will in fact remain very bad irrespective of the sentimental blather lawmakers deploy to undermine public understanding of the issues. The 7th Senate was nothing to write home about in terms of the integrity, sanctity and dignity of lawmaking. The 8th Senate seems adamantly focused on going down that same or more monstrously vicious chute. The country should not indulge them even if the president were to relent.
