I don’t understand this. Senator Abubakar Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara are Senate President and Speaker of the House respectively, and their party, the APC is bellyaching. I am befuddled. Shouldn’t the party be jumping for joy that both lawmakers were voted and by popular vote? The party is kicking because none of them is the ‘anointed’. There are talks of going to court for violating party lines. This is hokum.
Soon after Saraki and Dogara struck a deal with the PDP that propelled them to the legislature plum, the Spokesman of the APC. Lai Mohammed spoke. For the first time, by my account, the nimble footed and even ‘mouthed’ Lai didn’t ‘speak’. He threw tantrums. He issued threats. He got diminished. His press statement Tuesday evening did damage to his reputation. He came across not as a spokesman of the ‘governing’ party but the mouthpiece and the sidekick of ‘owners’ of the party. His ranting on Channels television laboriously dissing PMB as a ‘product’ and not ‘a leader’ of the APC secured his place as lap dog of vested interest bent on leashing the party at their level of control.
The harangue that passed as press statement was disastrous. In moments like that, the party ought to have held it horses, put on a huge plastic smile and exploit the loopholes the overtly ambitious forgot to cover in the coup that was the election of Saraki and Dogara. I am a layman in matters of law of the constitutional variety, but the election of the new leaders can’t stand a rigorous legal inquisition.
It may be constitutional but it is clearly illegal. Its sleight of hand, the patent brand of the new helmsman of the Senate, is all too glaring. Over 51 Senators were disenfranchised. They didn’t boycott. Secondly, pundits would argue that there is documented evidence asking for the proclamation of the Senate be delayed by an hour from 10 am to 11am because of a planned meeting of the APC apparatchik with the president. The dissenting Senators are headed to court armed with this and probably more. This is a rational course and recourse. But for APC to wear its heartbreak on its chest like a medal and crying ‘treachery’ and ‘betrayal’ makes laymen like me sneer in disbelief and recall a similar scenario four short years ago.
Recall, if you will, in 2011,ACN, the mutant APC encouraged Aminu Waziri Tambuwal a PDP stalwart then, to rebel against his party. He became Speaker. In that year Saraki got to the Senate. He watched. He learned. Payback is a bitch. Excuse the diction.
But I hasten to ask who is APC? Or what is APC? It stands for All Progressive Congress. Like the spluttering PDP, APC is an amalgam of strange bedfellows disunited by ideology and vision. Its originators chiefly ANPP, CPC and ACN and latter day joiners APGA and splinter PDP managed to find a common ground in the form of an overwhelming desire to kick out an underperforming government headed by good man Ebele Jonathan.
Those who know the nucleus of the APC said it was a party dead on arrival. Former Presidential ‘attack’ lion and latter day “bastard” Doyin Okupe boasted that if the cobbled APC lasted a year, we should call him a bastard. The name has stuck. Against great odds APC survived and made history as the only opposition coalition to unseat a government via the ballot. The road to was tortuous. It swam oceans of hurdles, bore blizzards of misery. Its presidential candidate derided and mocked. Intimate details of his private life lay bare and misrepresented.
Buhari’s emergence as the flag bearer is solely the effort of Tinubu and to a lesser extent Amaechi. That explains in part, why a grateful Buhari conceded the VP slot to Tinubu’s nominee Yemi Osinbajo.
Truly Tinubu looms large in the APC. This makes some people uncomfortable. Truly Tinubu has a tendency to micro manage his political kingdom. This has served him well in the Southwest where he wields considerable influence. Transferring that to the national space truly discomfited some leading to the emergence of Saraki and Dogara.
The jostle for 2019 has began in earnest. The drama that enacted itself on the floor of the two chambers of the National Assembly is a vivid pointer. Few political stargazers saw the coup d’état that produced Saraki and Dogara.
Picture an underdog in the race for both posts and the images of Saraki and Dogara would crystalize.
There were reasons the duo were not the top dogs. Saraki especially had and still does have a profile that is intimidating and an unquenchable appetite for power. He is seen as wily, slippery and among the extremely hateful, treacherous- perfect mix to checkmate Tinubu’s hegemony.
