For Bukola Saraki, who like his illustrious father, is a successful trader and peddler of influence, nothing is impossible. He has never experienced failure. But now buffeted by one misfortune after the other, it seems his first taste of failure is not too far away. Unfortunately, instead of looking at himself on the mirror to see how his past has come to haunt him, he has continued to attribute his current travails to his political detractors especially his party leaders and elected colleagues who publicly disapproved of the underhand tactics he employed to emerge as Senate President.
His trial after his controversial emergence as Senate President started with observation by his colleagues in the Senate that the Senate amended rules employed for his election was forged, a claim confirmed by the police after investigation. That was quickly followed by the invitation of Toyin, his wife for questioning by EFCC over her handling of some contracts while her husband held sway in Kwara as governor. But this didn’t appear to have anything to do with Saraki’s aggrieved colleagues as the invitation according to EFCC was on the strength of a petition by Kwara PDP alleging unwholesome practices. And Saraki himself was soon to be dragged before the Code Of Conduct Tribunal for prosecution over ‘13 counts of false and anticipatory asset declaration which he made at the beginning and at the end of each of his two terms as governor’. Here again, as the commission has pointed out, the action was on the strength of ‘several petitions from various groups including ‘Kwara Freedom Network’, all bordering on abuse of office, misappropriation of public funds and money laundering’.
And when the case finally opened last week, the commission disclosed it found document from Saka Tinubu Saraki’s office containing the list of properties he allegedly “purchased from Presidential Implementation Committee on Government Properties and some that were bought from the Central Bank of Nigeria”. Michael Wetkas, a detective with EFCC told the tribunal how Saraki as governor diverted Kwara State government funds to pay loans he took to buy the properties. The commission also claimed Saraki paid back the loans with Kwara State government’s fund through his aides, one of whom lodged between N600,000 and N900,000 in the former governor’s account 50 times on a particular day. And when Saraki, a veteran deal maker finally takes the defence seat, it will be interesting to see the weight he will attach to ‘political detractors.’
Wetkas last Wednesday also told the tribunal that ‘Saraki collected salary as the governor of Kwara State for about four years after completing his second term in 2011’, a charge the Secretary to the Kwara State Government, Alhaji Isiaka Gold, has denied insisting Saraki was only collecting a pension of N578, 188.00 which increased to N1, 239,493.94 monthly from October, 2014 as other past governors in the country.” Until the tribunal says otherwise, we have no reason to doubt Mr. Gold’s claim. But if it is insensitive for a former governor-turned-senator to collect N1.2m as pension along with a senator’s huge salaries said to be highest in the world, Saraki alone bears the moral burden.
But Saraki’s long and harrowing Wednesday did not come to an end until Wetkas had presented documentary evidence showing that “First offer letter by the Presidential Implementation Committee to buy the property at 15A and B McDonald Road, Ikoyi, which Saraki claimed to have bought through Carlie Investments Limited in March, 2000, was dated November 23, 2006.’ And if the tribunal eventually finds that to be true, how can APC and some of its elected senators who were themselves victims of Saraki’s most audacious deal of his political career-trading away his party’s victory, be held accountable for a deal Saraki struck 15 years earlier?
But Saraki’s witch-doctors are at liberty to say anything no matter how asinine in order to earn their pay. If they insist Buhari, Oyegun, Tinubu and the Unity Forum senators are behind Saraki’s travails, an offshore dimension was introduced last week. A German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, identified four assets ; Sandon Development Limited, a vehicle used in acquiring a property on 8 Whittaker Street, Belgravia, London, in 2012; Girol Properties Ltd, which was registered on August 25, 2004 (a year after Mrs. Saraki’s husband became governor of Kwara) in the British Virgin Island (BVI); Landfield International Developments Ltd., registered in the British Virgin Islands on April 8, 2014, with Mrs. Saraki as sole shareholder; and Longmeadow Holdings Limited, which Saraki claimed belonged to his wife’s rich and famous family, were actually his and were only held in trust for him by his wife.
And now for those who talk of witch-hunting, our people have said if there are no cracks on the wall, there will be no hiding place for a lizard. A witch has always been suspected to be on the prowl since 1990 when Saraki allegedly got involved in an N9b deal which eventually led to the collapse of Societe Generale, a bank in which his father held controlling shares, and in 2009 when Erasmus Akingbola alleged that Saraki’s multi-billion naira deals contributed to the collapse of his bank.
I am not persuaded anyone should weep for Saraki because God Himself decreed we must reap what we sow. Saraki sowed the wind and he is now reaping the whirlwind. That he is haunted by his past is the truth he and some other fortune-seekers in the Senate have tried to reject. It is not an accident that the petition against Saraki, like the one against his wife, emanated from Kwara long before Saraki’s June 2015 deal. Authors of the petitions have owned up and in fact thanked EFCC for acting in the interest of the exploited people of Kwara. That he had to be whisked away by the police from stone-throwing juveniles in Ilorin praying ground during the last SALLAH celebration was enough evidence to show that the exploited citizens of Ilorin who assemble every year and made to struggle for a few naira notes thrown at them have become disillusioned. Kwara is an area Oloye Saraki, Bukola’s father had treated like a personal fiefdom for over 50 years before his son, a more vicious business man who bulldozes everything on his way, forcefully seized it, sending his father to untimely retirement, and some will say death.
If I am therefore asked, I will say Saraki’s enemies are not his political distracters. Saraki’s first enemy is Saraki himself. We can then proceed to add others like his friends who argue from both sides of the mouth claiming, ‘Dr. Saraki will not allow any distraction to take him away from Presidency of the Senate since an accused person is presumed innocent until he is found guilty’ while insisting Danladi Umar, the chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal cannot try Saraki because he has petitions filed against him at the House of Representatives and the Senate. Others include his unpatriotic ‘like mind senators’ who because of their greed wanted to make Nigeria ungovernable for Buhari by ‘stealing’ the deputy senate presidency which by convention belongs to the ruling party.
And finally we can add those who accuse a section of the media of being anti-Saraki and of helping Buhari to fight his anti corruption war ignoring the fact that there is no society where the press is neutral on social issues. They conveniently forget that not too long ago, another section of the press celebrated economic vampires, substituted Shettima’s truth with Okupes lies about the state preparedness of the military and for a price, provided platform for criminals and also justified Saraki’s perfidy with specious argument that he was protecting Buhari from the overweening influence of Tinubu and the Yoruba.
NATION
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