There is little doubt that the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC) botched the presidential and related federal elections. As perhaps has been the tradition, the current INEC and its commissioners failed both themselves and their nation. There were cases of late or lame starts, as there were of mixed-up materials, etc.
However, whatever it is, the elections have come and gone and with it some great and fancy names. One of the most prominent of the victims must be Dr. Bukola Saraki, the outgoing Senate President. Of all who lost the game, his is the most earth-shattering.
Yes, there are the Ajimobis, Kwakwasos, etc., but theirs were just the failure or collapse of individual or silo ambitions. Saraki’s fall, in contrast, is the fall of an empire. Unlike the rest of his class of electoral failures, Saraki was a true prince of power. He sits or used to sit atop the peacock throne his father fashioned and founded. For all practical purposes, it is not just that Saraki has fallen, it is that the Saraki political dynasty is no more. In fact, her undertakers may have began the sanitary duty of digging up her grave.
So what happened? How did an able prince throw away the kingdom that was bequeathed to him? If we are asked, we did provide the following for an answer.
Saraki has been touted a great strategist and has a string of victories to show for it. It is reputed, for instance, that he is on good and great terms with virtually all the political and business haymakers of the many zones in the country. How he manages to juggle that is a mystery to many. This is especially so if one considered that many others – Awolowo, for example, and lately Tinubu – seem only able to relate to minions from some zones. That is they have no real friends or allies in some regions. But Saraki transcends zones, with his alliance building genius. Give or take, this is a great gift for a warrior, politician or prostitute.
Also, when Saraki happened upon the Senate as its President, he ran and conducted the Senate as an impresario. And when the matter came to it, he fought off the presidency and agents like they were rabid dogs. And he won.
Yet, despite all these, Saraki’s greatest undoing was the greatest pan-Nigerian show he put up or thought he did. It is believed that Saraki and Amaechi – former heads of Nigeria Governors’ Forum – were the arrowheads that saw off former President Goodluck Jonathan from actualizing his reelection gambit.
So why did Saraki prime up and join forces to sack Jonathan? It is the poorest strategic miscalculation of his life. He didn’t need to. The accusation and follow up gang-up against Jonathan happened because Jonathan is a South-Southerner, a minority man. In other words, certain majority powers only saw Jonathan as a placeholder president. For being a South-Southerner, president Jonathan was due to underlying forces, weak. We can’t go beyond this because of space, but we have explained this in many of our books.
Anyway, because of this underlying foundational circumstances of the Jonathan presidency, a lot funny blokes, especially from the North-Central and the Southwest, saw a chance to play the false hero. However, for the dominant factions of the ruling north, there was only one game. It is that Jonathan is a placeholder president and his place, ”the presidency belongs to us.”
Whatever it is, we had to concede things to the north. They had the genius to sell the dummy to the Southwest and North-Central that the project of rejecting Jonathan was a patriotic and historic one. [Please see the confessions of a middle belter professor, who came too late to knowledge: The Ethnic Victory of 2015 and An Apology, By Moses E. Ochonu. https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2019/01/18/the-ethnic-victory-of-2015-and-an-apology-by-moses-e-ochonu/]
That is, people like Saraki were deceived or even fooled, there was a nation in peril to rescue. And that was the logic of his and others supposed enlistment into a phony rescue mission. But even if that was their first false step, the next was even more self-damning.
Now, in strategy, the iron lore is that you must start from the endgame, not the next move. And it is on record that Africans have a handle on the matter. For instance, to the Igbo, eje ana bu isi ije, loosely, winning the endgame is the beginner-game, in fact the only game. Thus, no matter how decidedly urgent a next move is – say sacking Jonathan – in strategy, your first duty is to begin with the endgame, or not enlist at all.
And as a practiced strategist, that is if he is one, Saraki should have known that in all, coalitions begin – including the coalitions to sack Jonathan – in unity but end or endure in crisis. The point is that in all coalitions-won wars, immediately the said war is over, the basis of the coalition collapses. This is an iron lore. So, in post-war engagements, rather than having a coalition of equals or pre-war winning ratios, a new hegemon emerges or attempts to emerge. And the fact of this is as ancient as Attic Greece, Thucydides et al.
So in strategic terms, there is nothing President Muhammadu Buhari did or didn’t do that is exotic. In other words, the isolation and weakening of Saraki were indicated. That he was pursued to the extent of being docked like a common criminal, only shows the virulence of the dominant victorious party factions, aka the Buhari group.