It all looks as the clash of desperate and vaunting ambitions. It is, and a lot more. Mr. Bukola Saraki, who emerged senate president from the pit of political debauchery and vicious backstabbing of his political party, evidently believed that Nigeria is a sort of unfinished family business.
Son of the former senate majority leader in the second republic, the late Senator Olusola Abubakar Saraki, an acclaimed strong man of Kwara politics, who made several attempts at Nigeria presidency, Mr. Bukola Saraki is seizing every opportunity to position himself for the top job that would promote his family to the equivalent of the Bush family in the United States of America.
But to be fair to him, it is not only Mr. Saraki’s ambition that is at the root of the rumpus in the federal parliament. The old political establishment who did not intend to organise any election in the first place, let alone, the one it would loose is actively regrouping and reinventing itself, taking advantage of the institutions, it has previously corrupted and perverted to undermine the change Nigerians voted for.
To ambush the change Nigerians voted for, the old establishment would need the oversight and legislative powers of the federal parliament and use it for meddlesome and obstructionist purpose.
With the obvious rebellion of the parliamentary caucus of the ruling All Progressive Congress, APC, in which the party’s directive was spurned and mocked, the party would have to reflect on whether it is a party in the first place and whether it actually wants to be a party.
However, before the reflections on APC and its challenge to be a party, a reconstruction of the rumpus in the National Assembly and its underlining currents might be appropriate.
The inauguration of the Senate and the quick makeup of its leadership have every trappings of nollywood razzmatazz. A section of the ruling party senators, hefty number of fifty one of them have gathered at the national conference centre, less than 10 kilometers away from the National Assembly complex, venue of the senate inauguration ostensibly for a meeting convened by the leader of the party and president of the country.
At exactly 10.00am Mr. Maikasuwa, clerk of the National Assembly, walked into the Senate chamber, called for nominations of the senate leadership. In a jiffy, Mr. Saraki was nominated unopposed and was sworn in.
Mr Maikasuwa should tell Nigerians when else he attended issues in the National Assembly with such surgical precision, that 51 senators could not have been waited for, even if they were stuck in a traffic hold-up not to talk of answering a call of their party leadership.
Mr. Maikasuwa may claim to have followed the rules, but it will be interesting to open the book of the National Assembly bureaucracy to see how much of its rules, he has complied with, in a precise manner.
With a clear intent to hand his colleagues a fait accompli, Mr.Saraki assumed the Senate leadership with questionable legitimacy even with a legal binding procedure. Having tricked his way to the senate presidency, Mr.Saraki would need more explosive political gymnastics to remain in office and the drama is only beginning to unfold.
Snubbing his party leadership on the question of other principal officers of the senate is a concomitant follow-up to his desperate act of grabbing the senate presidency by the jugular.
As if humiliating his party by attaining the senate leadership through the backdoor is not enough, he showed an unbridled contempt by riding on the back of the parliamentary rump of the defeated Peoples Democratic party, who gladly extorted a concession of pairing Mr. Saraki, with Mr. Ekweremadu as the deputy senate president, a position the man has held for eight years while his party was in the majority in the Senate.
However, it is not so much a rebellion of a parliamentary faction of the ruling party that is at play in the National Assembly and especially in the Senate but a spirited effort of the old political establishment to re-establish itself in a strategic key national institution aimed ominously to obstruct, undermine and even compromise the president Buhari agenda of securing and effectively managing Nigeria for the benefit of Nigerians, a creed of political philosophy that is totally alien to the just deposed parasitic and predatory political establishment and the socially-alienating order, they established and presided over, for nearly two decades of Nigerian recent history.
A patent challenge for President Muhammadu Buhari is how to neutralise the reincarnation of the old political order either through confrontation or co-operation with yours sincerely preferring the later.
The physical combat in the House of Representatives chamber over the same issue of principal officers, bear the same trajectory in intention and purpose as the Senate brouhaha.
However in all those jigsaws, the ruling APC has enormous lessons to learn and President Buhari has critical options to consider.
However, having won power at the strategic centre, the APC would have to consider the task of party building, different from an effective electoral and propaganda machinery, it was.
First is to draw a clear distinction between party membership and supporter. While party membership revolve around the core of the party ideals, principles and philosophy, the support base thrive on the programmes and manifesto of the party.
It is much simpler to buy into a party programme and manifesto as a supporter but require a deeper affiliation to understand and identify with the ideals, principles and philosophy to which only, the convinced would internalize.
It would been curious in a ‘normal’ political party as the APC leadership clearly made clear that it did not subscribe to be the principles of zoning and yet its parliamentary rebels continuously shout that its current distribution of principal officers in the house is in conformity with zoning formula.
Therefore, if APC wish to be a party, it would have to examine first its membership threshold. This however does not mean restriction of membership as that would be unconstitutional.
It should establish a benchmark for membership where only eligible members who understand and share in its principles can be admitted. In other climes membership application of prospective members of a political party can subsist for as long as possible until the party is convinced that the prospective applicant understand and shares in the party philosophy.
In that case, the party would have taken proactive steps to mitigate the confusions instigated by rebels without a cause, the scenario that the ruling APC has found itself now. This does not stop a party from been mass-based. The mass-based parties of the immediate post independence period in Africa, whether the Kwame Nkrumah led CCP in Ghana or the ANC in South Africa is so, in orientation than in membership.
If the APC wants a party, disciplined and coherent, it could start now to build one but currently, it is not one. President Buhari whose legendary bank of 12 million voters and supporters spanned the more than a decade of his political struggle have now ample opportunity to organize them, especially if his party, the APC seem unable to aggregate this existential political capital.
For a start, President Buhari’s bank of dependable supporters can be mobilized into horizontal committees for the defence of change, as alternative political base should the core of the fair weather elites whom he currently congregates in the APC decides to act their true colour by chickening out of change.
For now, the rebellious faction in the national assembly are the rump of the old order, who opportunistically hiked a ride on the mantra of change knowing full well that their interests are better served in the preservation of the old order.
The national assembly rumpus by and large is a foretaste of the things to come but with tact, it can be confined to elite infighting while president Buhari moves on to secure Nigeria for Nigerians.
Mr. Charles Onunaiju, a journalist, wrote from Abuja.
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