On Monday, Bukola Saraki led a team of his closest senate collaborators on a visit to Maiduguri. Any rookie political analyst could have seen through the stage-managed trip, given the near-presidential halo around it, with hands pumping, photo ops with IDPs and a visit to the Shehu of Borno. On Tuesday morning, most newspapers carried a syndicated picture of the ‘august visitor’ waving to the IDPs. Never before in the history of Nigeria’s transition to civil rule since 1999, have we had a senate president determined to seize the public space like Bukola
Saraki.
Soon after he controversially snubbed his party to emerge, he began to hold court, receiving visitors, issuing statements and for all intents and purposes, wrestling limelight with Muhammadu Buhari, elected as President, with the executive powers that go with it.
Determined to defy the controversy around his emergence, Bukola Saraki is seizing political territory and desperately attempting to control the space of public perception as much as possible.
His ultimate goal remains presidency and he can’t even wait for 2019 before beginning to show his hands. The Maiduguri visit is the first attempt at testing the waters with a toe, and more such visits will come in the near future.
An opened Pandora’s box
But there are serious problems that Bukola Saraki continues confronting from the moment he opened the Pandora’s Box and in a manner of speaking, letting the genie out of the bottle, that morning of June 9th, 2015. He is fighting a battle against public perception because in many quarters in Nigeria, he has not been able to live down the feeling that he betrayed his party.
Bukola Saraki remains defiant and continues to ignore the APC and PMB’s openly expressed preference that APC senators bow to party supremacy; he fills positions with members of his own group, daring the party and PMB to do the worst!
Yet, he is deeply worried that so far, he has not been able to secure an audience with President Muhammadu Buhari. He took desperacy to a ridiculous height on Sallah day; refused to go for prayers in Ilorin, but rushed to Abuja Eid praying ground for a photo opportunity with PMB. He got a short shrift by being publicly ignored! The depth of his despair was made clear in an article published by many newspapers at the weekend, and written by Saraki’s Media Special Adviser, Yusuph Olaniyonu.
Titled “Let the lawmakers move on and work for Nigeria”, Olaniyonu expressing his principal’s troubled mind, stated that: “The President should maintain his earlier position not to get involved in legislative politics…
A way to send the right signal that he is ready to help the National Assembly build on the new found unity is for the President to now OPENLY MEET AND RELATE WITH THE LEADERSHIP OF BOTH CHAMBERS (my emphasis)”. So as is his wont, Bukola Saraki defied the APC, blatantly ignored PMB’s perspective but expects that this issue be resolved in his favour as a fait accompli.
And the fact that he was not allowed on the presidential entourage to the US visit also hurt him deeply and this was expressly stated by Olaniyonu: “We need to put behind us the past experience in which the President travelled to the United States for crucial bi-lateral discussion on several issues without any member of the legislature. That was an opportunity missed to give legislative backing to executive engagements”. But we know better. Angst was being directed at the fact that Bukola Saraki missed the photo-op with President Barack Obama.
It was therefore no surprise, when reports emerged this week that a very worried Bukola Saraki, unable to secure an audience with PMB, was corralling the Emir of Ilorin to service to find every opportunity for him to get to see the president.
There are also relatedly desperate efforts to press other traditional rulers into the same engagement. What should not be lost to Nigerians in all the developments is that while desperate to get a presidential audience, he nevertheless continues to defy the same president and party in respect of the extant problems arising from his demarche on June 9th.
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