Friday, May 12, 2015: as I write this column, a meeting is being held between the President, Muhammadu Buhari, all elected members of the APC in the Senate and the national leaders of the new ruling party. The intention is to resolve the crisis sparked by the ‘coup’ carried out against the party by Senator Abubakar Bukola Saraki through the brazen manner in which he aligned himself with the defeated former ruling party, the PDP, to get himself elected Senate President. It is likely that by the time this column is published on Sunday, May 14, the crisis would have been resolved to the satisfaction of the bickering parties involved in the crisis. This is unlikely, but it is not completely impossible. We are still very close to the era of the PDP’s rule, together with its accustomed habit of lurching endlessly from one crisis to another. Thus, if this particular crisis is resolved, the new ruling party may very well lurch into another one and this will continue until the ghosts of the PDP years have been laid to rest or sent permanently into the netherworld of historical oblivion. Meanwhile, in this article, I wish to reflect on some rather extraordinary aspects of Saraki’s “coup”. As we shall see, the big lesson, the important “take-away” from this ‘coup’ is the frank and sober recognition that though PDP was electorally defeated, the defeat is yet to extend to the party’s deep roots in the subsoil of the endlessly amoral ethos of political elites in all our ruling class parties.

As the details of the Saraki ‘coup’ have been widely reported, I shall draw attention in this article only to those aspects that I consider the highlights. For me, perhaps the most salient of these highlights are those indicated in the bizarre ‘arithmetic’ in the title of this article: 49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari. Saraki belongs to the APC, though of course he was once a chieftain of the PDP. Because a caucus of his new party, the APC, chose someone else to support for the Senate Presidency, Saraki dumped his party and went to the PDP from which he got the overwhelming majority of the votes that gave him the Senate Presidency. But please note that even with 49 votes, the PDP could not have secured the position for Saraki precisely because 49 is 6 votes shy of the simple majority of 55 that any contestant needs to win the Senate Presidency. This in effect means that in this bizarre “arithmetic”, 8 is at the very least as important as 49: Saraki absolutely needed those 8 defectors from the APC that linked up with the 49 PDP Senators to produce the winning majority of 57. But then, along comes the most critical number in this “arithmetic” of electoral sleaze, this being Buhari’s 1. Before I come to a discussion of this most significant number in this “arithmetic” permit me to briefly dwell on a few other details of Saraki’s pact with the PDP in open defiance of his party and its electoral victory in the recent general elections.

As part of his pact with his former party, the PDP, Saraki and his 8 APC accomplices rewarded the PDP with the posts of the Deputy Senate President (Ike Ekweremadu, Enugu-West) and Senate Leader (David Mark, former Senate President). It should be noted here that as soon as the leadership of the PDP sensed that the APC senatorial body had fragmented into factions jockeying for leadership posts, it instructed all its members to act together to align with Saraki’s disgruntled faction and exploit the situation to the maximum extent possible. In the event, the capture of the posts of Senate Leader and Senate Deputy President by a party still licking the wounds of a massive electoral rejection by Nigerians is nothing short of spectacular. This has to be one of the exceptions in modern political history in which a defeated party that has less than half of the total number of seats in a legislative chamber nonetheless wins the posts of Senate Leader and Deputy Senate President. Indeed, as Buhari meets with the two bickering factions today with a view to mending broken fences, this anomaly in which the Nigerian people elected APC only for the PDP to defeat the APC in the Senate will be on everyone’s mind.

This leads directly to the issue of the most important number or integer in our strange ‘arithmetic’, this being Buhari’s 1 that combined with PDP’s 49 and APC’s 8 to make Saraki’s ‘coup’ possible. Admittedly, this was/is a non-casting vote for the simple reason that the President is not a member of the Senate. With regard to this single all-powerful Buhari vote that is more virtual than actual, perhaps the most important observation to make here is that in the course of this week when this crisis has unraveled, Buhari’s position has evolved gradually to the point where today he is meeting with both the Saraki and Lawan factions. His very first view, as expressed by his Special Adviser (Media and Publicity), Femi Adesina, was that though regrettable and against the interest of the party, Saraki’s election as Senate President was a fait accompli that had to be accepted if only because it “appeared to have followed due constitutional process”. Indeed, Buhari in this first response to the crisis went as far as to assert that he was willing to work with whoever the lawmakers elected.

To say the least, these were astonishing remarks from the President. The first observation is completely erroneous since close to half of Senate members were absent when Saraki’s election took place, a situation that has about it all the marks of the many infamous instances when the PDP conducted its primaries or impeached state governors and assemblymen with only a fraction of members present. Particularly troubling in this first response of Buhari was the assertion that he had no preferred candidate for any leadership posts in the National Assembly and was willing to work with whoever the lawmakers elected. Please note that this assertion was not made in a vacuum; it was made after the PDP had aligned with Saraki’s minority faction within his own Party, the APC and as part of the deal elected David Mark as Senate Leader and Ike Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate Leader. Above all else, please note that Buhari expressed these initial viewsafter the entire leadership of his own party, the APC, had rejected Saraki’s ‘coup’ absolutely without any equivocation. Indeed, note too, that Saraki has thanked the President again and again for not siding with the Party leaders in rejecting his election as Senate President.

There is a more sinister view of Buhari’s role in Saraki’s “49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari” coup against his party, but I remain unsure whether or not there is any credence to it. This is the view that Buhari and the Presidency may have as a matter of fact deliberately lured most of the APC Senators away from the Senate when the inauguration of the 8th National Assembly and the vote on the Senate Presidency took place. The story is that the inauguration of the new National Assembly had been postponed and Buhari was instead going to meet all the APC Senators at the National Conference Centre to try to resolve the crisis between the two factions. Saraki and his defectors stayed at the National Assembly and went on with the election; meanwhile, the President never showed up at the National Conference Centre to meet the Lawan Unity Group. This story, this view is not implausible. For me, it just stops short of providing elements of action and reaction, words and deeds that would indicate that this early in his administration, Buhari is already so wary of the constraints of party discipline and party supremacy on the presidency that he was willing to clear the path for Saraki to go outside the APC to clinch the post of Senate President.

At any rate, by the end of the week, definitely by Thursday evening, indications were coming from the Presidency that Buhari was moving away from regarding Saraki’s coup as a fait accompli and also that the President is a party loyalist. And so in place of Femi Adesina, Special Adviser (Media and Publicity), one so-called Presidential Spokesman, Garba Shehu, did the rounds of media outlets to express a distance between Buhari and Saraki, together with the staff of the National Assembly that had participated in Saraki’s election. Mr. Shehu indeed went as far as to assert vigorously that Buhari respects and would uphold the supremacy of the party that brought him to power. Moreover, Shehu asked the public to take note of the fact that the President had not called Saraki or any of the other putative winners of the National Assembly leadership posts to congratulate them.

It is deeply symptomatic of how much this crisis within the APC is embedded in the legacy of the PDP that Buhari himself has not personally uttered a word on the crisis. This is, quintessentially, the PDP style, from presidents to governors: responses to crises rocking the party and the nation to their foundations are left to special assistants and spokespersons. This is meant to leave all guessing, all musing on exactly where the boss stands. Buhari even appears in this matter to have directly copied Jonathan’s distribution of duties between Doyin Okupe and Rueben Abati in his own two “voices” this week, Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu. In this pair of media stand-ins for the President, one person, like Okupe, was blunt, bullish and simplistic while the other, like Abati, was more media-friendly, nuanced and conciliatory. In the end, both but represent two sides of the same coin, this being the “coin” of a conception and a practice of power that stands sovereign over party, nation and the people.

This is part of the PDP legacy. If by the end of this week we still do not know exactly where Buhari stands in this Saraki ‘coup’ against the APC, if we still have to get his feelings and thoughts from his double-headed media representatives, know, dear reader, that the PDP’s astonishing gains in the Senate elections this week run much wider and deeper than we realize.

Biodun Jeyifo

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