President Muhammadu Buhari called it “constitutional” but Barnabas Gemade the ranking senator from Benue and leader of “Unity Forum” which was behind Ahmed Lawan’s bid for the leadership of the 8th Senate, said it wasn’t. Whoever was right between the president and the senator, it is now obvious that the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) failed to learn the lesson of the debacle of the erstwhile ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which produced Aminu Tambuwal, now governor of Sokoto State, as Speaker of the 7th House of Representatives in defiance of the decision of PDP leadership four years ago.
The cloak and dagger drama which has now produced Dr. Bukola Saraki as Senate President against APC’s preference for Lawan followed almost exactly the same plot as that of Tambuwal’s, with the two political parties merely swapping places as culprit and victim and the difference that, unlike his predecessor, the new president did not hesitate in accepting the decision of the legislators even though he did express some reservations about Saraki’s tactics.
The first time I wrote about this political drama five weeks ago, my choice for Senate president was George Akume, a former Benue State governor and minority leader at the time. At that time the APC National Working Committee had reportedly zoned the job to the North-Central and it looked like the race was Saraki’s to lose to Akume, both of them from the same zone; Saraki had, by words and deeds, all this while made no secret of his ambition to head the Senate as a prelude to his bigger ambition of being president of the whole country.
My choice of Akume, as I said then, was essentially because I thought it would go a long way in healing the deep wounds of the decades-long nasty and bloody Christian/Muslim conflicts in the North which had been a big source of the region’s economic retardation and, by extension, the whole country’s.
Even then I knew my choice was based more on hope than on Akume’s real prospects; long before the March/April elections it was an open secret that Saraki had built a formidable network of support for the realization of his ambitions not only within the ranks of party leadership. He was also widely known to have built an even wider network of support among prospective senators across party lines.
The scales seemed to have turned against Saraki only when, in spite of the then President-elect Buhari’s oft repeated declaration that he had no preferred candidate for the job, his body language seemed to suggest, at least to some party leaders, if not all, that his preference was for Lawan. For this reason, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, for one, shifted his formidable support for Akume to Lawan, having apparently calculated that this was the only way to achieve his goal of installing his protégé, Hon. Gbajabiamila, then House minority leader, as its speaker.
As things have now turned out, it seems everyone opposed to Saraki had underestimated the capacity for political subterfuge of this apparently worthy scion of the late undisputed godfather of Kwara State politics and leader of the Senate during the Second Republic, Dr Olusola Saraki. For, constitutional or not, the younger Saraki’s successful coup of June 9 against the decision of the party leadership to support Lawan takes the gold in political gamesmanship.
It is a measure of his success that his strategy has left his adversaries fuming in great anger and frustration. “The purported election of Senator Saraki and Dogara as Senate President and Speaker respectively”, fumed Mr Joe Igbokwe recently, “is a clear transgression of both the tenets of democracy and party politics.” Igbokwe is a spokesman of the Lagos State chapter of the APC and his anger merely echoed that of his boss, Tinubu, who had said he would not even recognize Saraki as Senate president, a sentiment re-echoed by Gemade when he told reporters after Saraki’s election that “This process which remains unconstitutional cannot confer legitimacy on the elected Senate president.”
As the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the president, Malam Garba Shehu, said on Channels Television during one of its flagship programmes, Sunrise Daily on June 10, there was no doubt that Saraki employed underhand means to achieve his ambition. In what was clearly a grand conspiracy in cahoots with the PDP Senate caucus, he and his group in the Senate ignored the president’s invitation for a meeting to reconcile the APC federal legislators an hour ahead of its inauguration at 10 am on June 9 and got himself nominated unopposed and elected by 57 senators, mostly PDP, while the other group numbering 51 waited for the meeting with the president at a different venue. Apparently he feared, admittedly with some justification, that the meeting would be used to make him submit to the outcome of the party’s straw poll the day before in which Lawal emerged as the party’s choice.
In the face of this political sleight of hand by Saraki, it is understandable that many an APC chieftain have been calling for him to be disciplined. The extremely angry ones have even called for his sack. Almost all of them have also blamed Buhari’s advertised indifference to the outcome of the election of the leadership of the National Assembly on the altar of non-interference with the other arms of government for Saraki’s successful coup.
Those who now blame Buhari for the APC debacle have, as I’ve said at the beginning of this piece, apparently not learnt from the same debacle that befell PDP four years ago. It also seems they lack an understanding of the workings of party politics in a presidential system when they lament the absence of party discipline in the country.
True in both the parliamentary model of democracy we once practiced and the presidential democracy we now practice all elected office holders hold their offices solely by the grace of political parties. But the notion of party discipline, i.e. the ability of members of parliamentary groups to get members to support party policies and decisions, is much weaker in the presidential system than in the parliamentary one, the simple reason being the lack of clear separation between the executive and legislative arms of government in the parliamentary system as is the case in the presidential.
This means legislators can defy party decisions in the presidential system without bringing down a government which in turn means party whips don’t have the imperative to constantly crack their whips to get members into line that party whips do in the parliamentary system. In the American type of presidential system we have largely modelled ours after, party disciple is particularly weak because elected office holders feel more loyal to their constituencies, geographical or ideological, than they do to political parties.
At any rate those who argue that if Buhari had intervened decisively in the choice of the National Assembly leadership, APC, as the new ruling party, would’ve saved itself the embarrassment of having a PDP senator as deputy Senate president, ignore the fact that Saraki might still have won, in which case APC could have suffered an even worse predicament than it is in.
So rather than cry over spilt milk, APC will serve Nigerians and itself better if it fosters the separation of powers among the three arms of government even as it ensures that the arms cooperate with each other in making policies and programmes that are in the overall interest of society rather than in the interests of only a few.
On his part, Saraki should know that there is widespread public perception that as governor of Kwara State and subsequently as one of its three senators he seemed to have served himself more than he had served society, as is apparent from how little his state has made any progress under him. Much of the public’s concern about his emergence as Senate president stems from this perception. He should know that the public will be on the watch out to see if he will cooperate with the new president in enacting laws and making pro-people policies or, as was the case under PDP, they’ll watch to see whether he will preside over a Senate that is anti-people.
