If you were reading this on the morning of June 6, you would have heard the ticking of the clock, the harbinger of birth and death. If you were reading it on the afternoon of the same day, you would have heard the dying foot steps of time taking the eighth national assembly towards the sunset of history. Life revolved on the axis of to-ing and fro-ing. This way, it reduces some current big men to mere mortals as former big men and elevates some middling men into current big men above mere mortals. It is the ritual of life, the ritual of time.
When the 9th national assembly is inaugural sometime next week or so, it would follow this time-honoured ritual. There would be noticeable absences of men and women at the receiving end of life’s to-ing and fro-ing ritual. Some of them were ranking law-makers in the senate and the House of Representatives with eight, 12 or more years of legislative experience under their belt. You would do well to remember that the former senators would still be addressed as distinguished senators. The title lasts them for life.
At moments like these, I am given to the rather vague pre-occupation of wondering about life and the bitter-sweet dishes it chooses to serve each one of us at various times in our lives. In the unquestionable wisdom of life, it confers no permanent status on any conditions. One lorry owner knew that a long time ago. He reminded us of that with these words painted on his lorry: No condition is permanent. So, gains, losses; victories, defeats.
It may be difficult for a man who can no longer be numbered among our current big men and women in the hollowed chambers of the national assembly, courtesy of the quirks of democracy and the verdict of the ballot box, to heave a sigh of relief at the change in his political fortune. The loss of power makes men feel naked. Still, I wonder if, given all that he was subjected to by the unforgiving executive arm of government in all of four years, Dr Bukola Saraki would not be tempted to heave a sigh of relief that his tough times as senate president and head of the eighth national assembly are over.
It had been a turbulent four years for Saraki. Politically, he is now what young people call a floater, usually used to describe a girl who cannot find an attachment at a night party. His political base, Kwara state, has been wrenched from him by the same forces that gave him no peace as senate president. This is a considerable loss for him and his family. His loss has pulled the hands of his family from the political dynasty, power, reach and control in the state. He inherited the state from his late father, that astute politician, Dr Olusola Saraki, a senator and one of the princes in the NPN political kingdom in the second republic. He made the state his political fiefdom as the anointer-in-chief of political aspirants.
The state has now slipped out of the hands of his son. The Saraki mystique, like Teflon, has won off, inviting the political enemies of the family to dance on its political grave. Political resentment builds up slowly but inexorably. And like ants, it eats its victim from the inside out. Political resentment is made up of two powerful and lethal human emotions: fear and jealousy. Although we worship those who play god, we still fear them and are jealous of them. And when they fall, we celebrate it with a screaming newspaper headline: how are the mighty fallen.
I have met the former senate president a couple or more times. Each time, he struck me as an honest politician trying hard, against all the odds, to do an honest job in helping to move this behemoth of a nation forward as a law-maker. I think he is smart too. Only a smart politician like him could have weathered the onslaught of the presidency from almost the moment he took office in controversial circumstances. It would seem that his smartness ultimately became his undoing politically.
Saraki became senate president without the blessing of the leaders of his political party, APC. He out-smarted them by courting and winning the support of the opposition party, PDP, his former party on whose platform he ruled Kwara state as governor for eight years and even as senator. When PDP imploded in 2014 through a combination of factors I need not go into, Saraki was one of its lights who saw the flittering lights of greater political opportunities in the nascent APC and ditched PDP. The party lost power in 2015. Saraki’s share of the spoils of the APC power hunt was the senate presidency. The manner of his winning that important political trophy without doing obeisance in the shrines of his party moguls, pleased them not at all. President Buhari continued to chafe at that for four good years.
The senate president was hauled before ICPC on charges of false declaration of assets. The law accepted his own facts and the government was left with rotten eggs in its face. The senate was then invaded by thugs who snatched the mace, the revered symbol of legislative power, from the senate in plenary. The mace was later found abandoned on a side street in Abuja. But the thugs were faceless. The law has never been able to deal with those who commit crimes but have no faces and, therefore, cannot be identified. You do get the point.
Almost every bill passed by the senate or the national assembly was ignored by Buhari. Three times the amendments to the Electoral Act were submitted to the president for assent and three times he vetoed them. The last time someone counted the number of bills submitted to the president for his precious signature, there were 44 of them. It is easy to see that because of Saraki the president sabotaged laws made for the good governance of the country.
This is not really about Saraki and the political misfortunes that befell him. It is really about the quirky ways of our national politics. Politics is rooted in power and the quest for power. The quest for power has drawn and re-drawn our political map a countless number of times in only 20 years of our democracy.
This is not about to change, even with the hand picked leadership of the 9th national assembly by the ruling party for two reasons. One, humility is obligatory at the conferment of power on the chosen. Once the instrument of power is safely in their hands, katakata. The endless friction between godfathers and their godsons is my evidence.
Two, men seek power to arguably positively change their societies. But power soon seizes them and changes them instead. Most often, power brings out the worst in men and women. Power makes sense only in the way and manner it is exercised. It is impossible to hold power and not submit to its intoxication.
The curtain has come down on the Saraki era, the most fractious so far, in our national assembly. As we bid the man good bye, let us hope that the end of his era would herald a new and more productive executive-legislative relationship for the good of the country. That, of course, would largely depend on a) the willingness of the president to be more democratic in fact and temperament and b) the capacity of the new national assembly leadership not to be an expensive rubber stamp of the executive at the expense of good governance.
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