Saraki, the drowning fox

The choice of verb distorted the news headlines.
Bukola Saraki did not defect from the APC.
He was forced out.
“Was forced” is a passive tense, which connotes that the subject, that’s the senate president, did not take the action out of his own volition.
He was temporising.
But word leapt to his ears that a query letter was in offing from Oshiomhole’s office.
Saraki fled in spite of the billowy pride of his guinea brocade agbada.
You could not expect him to respond to the query.
The police had just chafed him, and Saraki scoffed back at the IG, acting above the law by not showing up at an invitation.
To wait for an APC censure would make him a query letter writer.
That would sully his status as a man some people have started to designate “Oga na master”.
He stepped out of the APC portal because he had to follow his troops, who had gone to prepare a place for him in the mighty PDP mansion he had earlier abandoned with regal flourish only few years ago.
Since his men had moved, the clamor revved up for him to scoot over to the other side of the senate aisle.
Some wondered why he sat transfixed.
But it was the immobility of indecision.
The plan had not panned out as envisioned.
Some bigwigs had retreated, like Wammako, who thunder into Sokoto last Saturday to show supremacy.
Shehu Sani, his near-bouffant hair unfazed by age, looked the other way as his drowning colleagues faded away.
So, Saraki goes over, his hands clipped like the authentic Baba Oloye.
And unlike Bukola, some of his colleagues disappointed him by baring their hands of a different political hue.
It was like what was said of the Renaissance and reformation era in far away Europe.
“Erasmus laid the egg”, went the saying.
“Martin Luther hatched it.
But Erasmus said the plumage of the bird was of different colour from what he expected.
Saraki and his gang laid the defection eggs but, in the fullness of time, some eggs did not hatch.
Saraki would call them bad eggs.
Saraki waltzed away as the leader of a minority.
He did not want to go over naked, exposed as the chief drowned.
Umar Duguri, Kaduna