The Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, is in the news once again for the wrong reason: He is going back to court to face criminal charges. It is, therefore, not surprising that his impending reappearance at the Code of Conduct Tribunal has generated tension within the Senate, especially between the Like Minds Senators, who supported his election, and the Senate Unity Forum, consisting of Senators who supported Senator Ahmed Lawan, the establishment candidate. Beyond the Senators, however, sharp divisions have also developed among lawyers, civil society groups, columnists and pundits, and the general public.
The divisive issue is whether or not Saraki should remain the President of the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria while answering charges on corruption and false declaration of assets. Should the nation be put through the agony of watching the Senate President’s agbada or babariga flow from the Senate Chambers to the dock in the courtroom?
Those who insist that Saraki could, and should, combine the roles of Senate President and criminal defendant rest their case on his presumed innocence until proven guilty. They are largely Saraki’s supporters, such as Like Mind Senators, who put self-nterest over and above public interest.
True, there are also Senators, who want Saraki out of the way so that they could install their own man as the Senate President. The majority of those who advocate his resignation are more concerned about the public interest. They detest the spectacle of their Senate President combining his official role with that of an alleged criminal.
While it is true that Saraki should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, it is only in Nigeria that a number three citizen in the country would sit tight on his official seat, while facing criminal charges. Let’s be clear about the 13 charges as they are not light. They include false and anticipatory declaration of assets; contravention of the law prohibiting public officials from operating foreign bank accounts; and fraudulent conversion of public funds for personal use.
The international community is replete with examples of public officials in Saraki’s position, who resigned. Some did, even before they were officially charged with wrongdoing, being swayed by considerations of public probity, integrity and national interest.
For example, as recently as September 2015, Egypt’s Prime Minister and the entire cabinet resigned, following a corruption scandal, which led to the arrest of the Minister of Agriculture, who had resigned even before his arrest. The government resigned in connection with allegations that government officials took bribes to help businessmen illegally acquire state land.
Just about a week earlier, President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala submitted his resignation after a judge issued an order to detain him in the customs fraud case, which already led to the jailing of his vice-president and the resignation of several cabinet ministers.
Ten years earlier, Tom Delay, the Majority Leader in the United States House of Representatives, otherwise known as the Congress, resigned his position, following his indictment by a Texas grand jury on criminal charges that he had conspired to violate campaign finance laws by seeking donations to his political action committee from the now defunct Enron and other corporations.
One more example: The 37th President of the United States, Richard Nixon, who gave us the -gate suffix to political and corruption scandals, resigned in 1974 rather than be impeached for covering up illegal activities of his party members in the Watergate affair.
The big lesson from these cases is twofold. One, the public officials involved respected the simple rule of propriety that a public figure should not combine his or her official role with that of a defendant in a criminal case. They avoided the desecration of their official positions and the integrity of their offices by resigning before being charged or tried. These are politicians who took the appearance of guilt very seriously.
Two, accordingly, they all acted in the public interest by not super-imposing their ego or ambition over their (potential) indictment for criminal wrongdoing. Tom Delay, for example, must have realised, and fellow Congressmen must have emphasized, that the person in the dock for a criminal trial would be larger than himself. The Majority Leader of the U.S. Congress would have been deemed to be in the dock.
Similarly, Michael Martins, Speaker of the House of Commons in the British Parliament, resigned as Speaker and as a Member of Parliament, not because he was alleged or indicted but because the parliamentary expenses scandal broke under his leadership.
On the other side of the Atlantic, John Boehner also resigned both as Speaker and Member of Congress, leaving us with these words: “My first job as Speaker is to protect the institution. It had become clear to me that this prolonged leadership turmoil would do irreparable harm to the institution … I will resign from the speakership and resign from Congress”. Mind you, Boehner had neither a civil nor a criminal case to answer; he was only concerned about the integrity of the office of the Speaker and about his public image as the leader of a divisive Congress.
It would now appear that Saraki views his job differently as the Senate President. Rather than seek to protect the institution of the senate presidency, he sees his job as holding on to the office and dragging it to court with him. Yet, there are local precedents for him to emulate. Two of his predecessors in office, namely, former Senate Presidents Adolphus Wabara and the late Chuba Okadigbo, were indicted for corruption charges, but they both resigned from the exalted seat before trial.
I am, perhaps, less surprised at Saraki’s behaviour than at the behaviour of fellow Senators seeking to protect him at the expense of the institution in order to protect the so-called “juicy” committees he had assigned to them. I am also surprised at the death of outrage in this country all because, as argued in some quarters, Saraki is only being politically prosecuted, a point Saraki himself made when he first appeared in the dock. So, what?
After all, only an illiterate politician would not know that, all over the world, members of the opposition and dissidents within the ruling party are often the most likely candidates for prosecution. The question, though, is: Would Saraki have been prosecuted at all if he had no skeleton in his asset declaration forms? A careful review of his political pedigree, including his rise to the Senate presidency, shows that the fault really is not in the prosecutors but in Saraki himself (see “The trials of Brother ‘Jeroboam’ Saraki”, The Punch, September 29, 2015).
True, Saraki should be presumed innocent until proven guilty; but he should fight for his innocence as Saraki, not as Senate President. As American observers would put it, it ain’t pretty to see a sitting Senate President in the dock over criminal charges. It is shameful for Saraki. It is shameful for the Senate and the entire National Assembly. And it is shameful for the nation.
PUNCH
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