By Godwin Etakibuebu
“Next week we shall delve into the role-function of the Presidency, Bola Tinubu, Bukola Saraki, the Aso Rock Cabal, the Fulani Elite Agenda, the Sokoto Caliphate, the Kanuri Empire and the Kaduna Mafia in shaping the destiny of Nigeria through the making and marring of the APC.”
This was how we ended discussing this topic last week. We are continuing with this promise today except that something more factual than comic was added to the narration within the course of last week also. And this new addition, being a dimension of the subject matter under discuss, need to be examined before moving to the role-function of those mentioned above.
Last week Tuesday 27 of March, 2018, Bola Ahmed Tinubu was re-beautified and re-admitted into the “APC Hall of Fame” by President Muhammadu Buhari, thereby deflating the ego of the National Chairman of the APC in a most humiliating manner. Just on Monday 26 of March 2018, the National Chairman, John Odigwie-Oyegun boasted that “issues about truncating the extension of the tenure of my Executive had been consigned to history”. By that announcement, he [Oyegun] declared his “last laugh” over Bola Tinubu.
That was however not to be as President Buhari, just 24 hours after Oyegun’s pronouncement, stormed the Party NEC meeting and set a shameful agenda for both Oyegun and the APC Governors who cooked the concussion of tenure elongation a few weeks earlier. He boldly and categorically told the gathering, in his welcome address [the timing of detonating the bomb was characteristically military], that “from the point-view of the Nigerian Constitution and the APC constitution, elongation of tenure for the Party’s Executive is illegal.”
With that perfect delivery, the President returned the last laugh, for now at least, to Bola Tinubu. The President had helped Tinubu in re-discovering himself and ego in addition to relevance, once again as a king-maker. Adieu to Chief Odigwe-Oyegun and his cohorts power brokers in the Party while it lasted, which could be traced to that very day and date of June 9, 2015 – the very day Bola Tinubu was disgraced out of power when all his candidates into position of newly inaugurated National Assembly were all defeated.
We established this fact last week when we discussed how Bukola Saraki was elected President of the Senate while all faithful Senators-elect of the APC were waiting to meet with President Buhari at the International Conference Centre. We narrated last week that the text message which summoned the Senators-elect for a meeting with the President fixed the meeting for 10 am while the inauguration of the 8th National Assembly by Presidential proclamation commenced by that time – 10 am.
The irony of that day was that the President did not meet those Senators-elect at the International Conference Centre nor any other place. Yet, the summon made it conveniently enough to remove the Senators-elect from the premises of the National Assembly for the crucial assignment of electing their officers, which could have been strictly Bola Tinubu’s appointee, albeit Ahmed Lawal from Yobe State as President of the Senate. Other nominees of Bola Tinubu for the offices in the National Assembly, both in the Senate and the House of Representative, fell by the roadside, courtesy of “a summon to meet Mr President” somewhere.
Last week however the game and tide turned in favour of the Lagos “Big Boy” when the President; always the game changer, intervened and restored a lost glory to whom the glory belonged. The good news of the intervention is the fact that “the President took away Bola Tinubu’s glory on June 9, 2015, when he summoned the Senators-elect to the ICC without meeting them and the President restored the same glory on March 27, 2018, when he met with the APC’s National Executive Committee – may his name be blessed”.
Let us keep this voyage of sailing on course because of the sacrosanct of last week’s promise which says that “we shall delve into the role-function of the Presidency, Bola Tinubu, Bukola Saraki, the Aso Rock Cabal, the Fulani Elite Agenda, the Sokoto Caliphate, the Kanuri Empire and the Kaduna Mafia in shaping the destiny of Nigeria through the making and marring of the APC.”
The role function of the President, or let us use the more liberal word of Presidency, in the analysis of this exercise is the reason of capturing the topic of this discussion “POLITRICKS OF BUHARI VERSUS TINUBU AND THE END OF APC”. What did the President or the Presidency do or did not do in against Bola Tinubu on June 9, 2015? Simply put, his summons of all the APC’s Senators-elect to meet with him at the International Conference Centre on that day was targeted in achieving one end-result, to wit: ensuring that all Bola Tinubu’s pre-arranged and pre-destined officers for the then incoming National Assembly was truncated.
The fear of Tinubu becoming too powerful, having nominated the Vice President, in controlling the National Assembly, both at the Senate and House of Representative, called for that tactical maneuvering of Mr President on that fateful day.
It did not really matter much either the coup idea of that day which scuttled Tinubu’s National political Empire originated directly from President Buhari or one of his lieutenants in the Presidency would always remained irrelevant in this matter. Suffice to say that it was a brilliantly planned and executed coup and it succeeded gallantly in truncating Bola Tinubu’s “political outreach”.
Why did the President do what he did; allegedly though? We will try to be brief here without going into the nitty-gritty of details. If that fast move was not pulled against Tinubu, he would have been left in total control of the National Assembly in addition to partly control of the Presidency because he nominated the Vice-President; though the Vice-President is almost like a “spare-tyre”, in the words of former President Obasanjo, as the Vee-Pee office lacked much of constitutional functionality except as assigns to him by the President.
The President had his own personal agenda in addition to his regional and religious agenda, just like any other person seeking to occupy any office, even as he ran for the presidency year in year out and he needed to implement this multi-faceted agenda. A more formidable Bola Tinubu could be a deterrent hence the need to “cut him to size” in one hand and in the other hand, the man; Tinubu “actually packed into his mouth more than he could consume without offending others’ status quo ante”.
There were more reasons [and there remain more] why the cutting to size of Bola Tinubu became drastic and continuous, including appointing Babatunde Raji Fashola; Tinubu’s immediate successor as Lagos State Governor, as a Minister with three over-sized ministries collapsing into his hands, without a single input from the Asiwaju. Yes, there remains a high-tension political matter that militated against Tinubu then and shall still militate against him after this “newly found love/honeymoon” would have come to an end in 2019, when Buhari would have returned elected. I foresee Tinubu having a very long weeping session into the very deep night when “the next down-sizing” shall take place after 2019. Let us leave this stargazing exercise into the future for another day and time.
On incumbent President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki; the Presidency calculated him to be “a lesser enemy that could easily be broken in the future than Bola Tinubu” when the calculus of “taming over-ambitious people” was being conceived. And as of that time the President and his die-hard cohorts saw, and read appropriately the political ambition of Saraki and they played along with him so quickly. This must have been the reason why the faithful Senators-elect of APC were “summoned” to meet with the President at the same time the National Assembly was being inaugurated. How come that Bukola Saraki and the types of Dino Melaye and others; all faithful addicts of the APC did not go to the ICC to honour the President’s “summon”? Nothing that day happened by accident. Everything was “a roll-call of arrangement”.
The calculation of Saraki “being a weaker enemy that could be broken easily” however metamorphosed into one big mistake because the man’s strength of character, his ability to gather and sustain followership and his tenacity to courageously charted goals were grossly underestimated by the presidency then. Even three years into the game the Presidency or the President is founding out that this same Bukola Saraki has become the most precious bride of Nigerian politics. He has become a de-facto [not de-jury anyway] king maker in the present Nigerian Political terrain. If the truth must be told, Saraki would have up to, at least, over 50 percent contribution to whoever might be emerging as Nigerian President, come 2019. He is now too large for the Presidency to be destroyed except by the ordination of God.
Having gone through some analysis on the role-function of the President, Tinubu and Saraki, expectation is becoming heavier on the remaining ones, which are mainly not human beings but institutions vis-à-vis Aso Rock Cabal, the Fulani Elite Agenda, the Sokoto Caliphate, the Kanuri Empire and the Kaduna Mafia. The Aso Rock Cabal is a selection of people from the North/East and North/West, hand-picked by a very few individuals and handed over to Buhari for the “effective running of the government in accordance with the agenda of the powers behind the façade”.
I have friends across the country and l have always, for the past close to 40 years, been moving about very freely around the country. I owe a great deal of loyalty to these friends around Nigeria. They; these friends, are more in the North than the South. It is therefore a sign of [my] continuous loyalty to these friends of inestimable value that l am refraining from discussing these institutions: the Fulani Elite Agenda, the Sokoto Caliphate, the Kanuri Empire and the Kaduna Mafia, as earlier promised. Discretion to defer when you could continue an onslaught remains a great valour of wisdom. It is for this reason that the Holy Bible says that “wisdom is profitable to direct”.
Godwin Etakibuebu, a veteran Journalist, wrote from Lagos.
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