SaharaReporters not Thenigerialawyer has learned
from presidency sources that Senate President Bukola Saraki has
formed an alliance with a cabal within the Aso Rock Villa
determined on confusion and disorder rather than witness Acting
President Yemi Osinbajo assume full presidential powers.
The new balance of forces emerges as the cabal has found it
impracticable in the past few weeks to bring back ailing President
Muhammadu Buhari to the country.
Buhari’s doctors continue to insist he cannot function or run
Nigeria in his present state of health, but the cabal, which is
using ethnicity and religious sentiments to foment deep-seated
animosity against the Acting President, has continued to explore
its options.
To that end, it met recently in Saudi Arabia with Mr. Saraki,
led by Isa Funtua, a failed businessman who was owner of now
bankrupt Bullet Construction Company, while Saraki led some
senators. Also in the Senate President’s group were Ahmadu Adamu
Mu’azu, a former Bauchi State Governor and ex-chairman of the
Peoples Democratic Party chairman who fled Nigerian on exile, as
well as Bala Mohammed, a former Minister of the Federal Capital
Territory who is undergoing trial for money laundering.
Our sources say the cabal held several meetings with Saraki’s
team, the senators included having been sponsored to the lesser
hajj on fat allowances from the coffers of the National
Assembly.
At the meeting, the cabal decided on a number of options to
force Acting President Osinbajo out of power. The options include
bringing Mr. Buhari to Nigeria in whatever condition he might be.
That plan was to use the gravely sick president’s presence to
implement their agenda by
insisting he is not the first leader to become sick in office,
citing those countries whose leaders were sick but remained in
office.
That option created difficulties on account of Buhari’s
precarious condition, including lapses of lucidity. Sometimes, says
one of our
sources, the president does not even remember where he is. Besides,
Buhari often loses his voice as a side effect of one of the drugs
prescribed for him by UK doctors.
A second option considered by the cabal was to force Mr.
Osinbajo to accept current Attorney General of the Federation,
Abubakar Malami, as the Vice President. In that event, the cabal
would prevail on President Buhari to resign, provided that Mr.
Osinbajo agreed to drop all corruption cases against senators and
withdraw the Federal Government’s appeal against a verdict of the
Code of Conduct Tribunal that cleared Mr. Saraki of charges that he
violated asset declaration laws. In addition, Mr. Osinbajo would
commit to remove Ibrahim Magu from the chairmanship of the Economic
and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
One source said Mr. Saraki was opposed to the plan as he aspires
to become the VP so as to be assured of immunity from prosecution.
However,
cabal members favor Mr. Malami because they consider him somebody
who comes from the “core north” and would be more acceptable to
their base, a profile Saraki does not fit.
The third option weighed by the cabal was to create enough
political crisis in the country as to provoke a military takeover
of power. However, that option proved problematic when Western
diplomats sternly signaled that they would not accept a military
coup in Nigeria as such an intervention could lead to Nigeria’s
break up. Even so, one of our sources said the cabal members had
not altogether abandoned that option.
On his return from the hajj, Mr. Saraki held several meetings
with senators loyal to him and directed them not to entertain any
motion calling for Mr. Buhari’s resignation unless his own
position as the prospective VP was assured. On his part, Mr. Isa
Funtua met with numerous northern politicians, powerful civil
servants and military officers and warned that the North could not
afford to “lose power” to the Yoruba. He reminded them that, when
former President Umaru Yar’Adua died, the North ceded power to
Goodluck Jonathan, an Ijaw man they thought would be easy to
manipulate. However, within a few months of assuming the
presidency, Mr. Jonathan, he claimed, gave all the important
appointments “to his people.” He stated that the Yoruba were
way too smart to be left with power for the remainder of Mr.
Buhari’s term.
It is to be noted that the sudden resurgence on
Tuesday of senators’ obsession with removing Mr. Magu was not
a coincidence. Some top National Assembly sources revealed that the
demand for Magu to be fired was the first salvo in a planned set of
orchestrated moves meant to subvert the Nigerian constitution and
avert a potential Osinbajo presidency.
Osinbajo’s offense, according to the sources, is that he has
stood solidly behind the President in the nomination and preference
of Mr. Magu as EFCC Chairman.
The situation on Tuesday was so bad that while Senator
Eyinnaya Abaribe was moving a motion asking the Senate to declare
Saraki “Acting President,” Mr. Osinabjo was already back in Abuja
from his trip to the African Union summit in Addis Ababa.
Apparently, Abaribe and Senator Kabir Marafa did not know, and
Saraki shut down the motion pretending as though he had no prior
knowledge of it. However, several Senate sources told
SaharaReporters that Saraki had simply forgotten to inform Abaribe
and others involved in the plot that Osinbajo had returned to Abuja
overnight.
What Nigerians saw on Tuesday at the Senate was part
of the pre-arranged onslaughts against Osinbajo that were decided
in Saudi Arabia between representatives of the cabal and the Senate
President’s team.
In keeping with the agreements reached at their meetings in
Saudi Arabia, Senator Saraki and members of the cabal will in the
next few weeks continue to heat up the system and provoke disorder,
in the hope of encouraging a military coup.
The two groups’ fourth option is to cause enough problems for
Osinbajo that he will quietly resign because the coalition against
him believes he is not a politically ambitious person. That silent
option is known as the “Shonekan option,” referring to how Ernest
Shonekan was eased out by General Sani Abacha in 1993 shortly after
former President Ibrahim Babangida was forced out by a military
cabal in the wake of his annulment of the June 12 elections.
Under any of the options, a source confided that Saraki believes
that sooner or later, the presidency will be his to pluck.
One Presidency source asserted that cabal members who will
provide logistics for the move against Mr. Osinbajo include the
current Director General of the Department of State Services, Lawan
Daura, who is said to be fully bothered about his own fate because
of tons of insider DSS petitions and queries about him in the past
and now. It is believed Saraki has offered him protection and
retention in office under the new deal.
Daura is also expected to clamp down on social media and target
social media users including SaharaReporters. To achieve this
objective, Daura has reportedly sent a whole team of DSS operatives
to Russia to figure out how to achieve a social media shutdown.
The Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, who became the cabal’s
arrowhead, is said to have become somewhat more cautions, even
becoming close to Osinbajo, but our sources say this is a strategy
to elude scrutiny and suffer less pressure from the media,
especially as it has become clear Buhari may not return very soon,
or in good health. In the words of an Aso Rock source, “He has
become much more circumspect these days.”
But the Senate President, according to one principal Senate
principal officer, is “now the one calling the shots, calling
meetings of service chiefs at his residence to dish out
instructions that ought to be coming from the Acting President
because some of the representatives of the cabal he met with in
Saudi Arabia told him they would prefer him to be the next
president.”
A senator who pleaded anonymity said the preference for Saraki
is simply based on their shared horror of allowing Osinbajo to
clinch power with Magu as EFCC chairman. While the members from
both sides try to couch the rhetoric in ethnic terms, according to
him, “the real driving force behind this new working arrangement is
that Saraki will be the first politician to create a thief paradise
much like IBB of years past.”
Although not trusted by many of the Senate’s principal
officials, Saraki continues to wield considerable influence because
of the amount of resources and money he has made available to the
officials, including financial gifts to a number of senators using
official and personal means.
Indeed the Senate President, who was heavily implicated in the
Panama Papers, is also believed to have stolen at least N3.5
billion from the Paris Club refunds in recent weeks. While two
other governors indicted in stealing part of the funds have quickly
made refunds after they failed to get the protection they sought
from the presidency, Saraki has simply refused to return his own
part of the loot. And this partly explains his resolve to fight
harder now, an informed source explained.
He asked: “We know Saraki is wily and full of treachery,
everyone knows that, but what do you expect some of us to do if he
asks for our support? But Nigerians are not fools, the people
will sort him out.”
The source went on: “Don’t you remember how this man – Saraki –
even ruthlessly outwitted his own father and sister? The man
is currently not on speaking terms with Gbemisola Saraki and his
brother Olaolu. Or even more recently did you not see what he did
to Senator Ali Ndume? Ndume is still sitting in one corner sulking
today.”
That source said, “What the Aso Rock cabal don’t know about
Saraki is that if he gets what he really wants that is 2019
presidency ticket, he would deal with even the cabal members first,
particularly the DG, SSS.”
According to that particular Senator, “As we speak, Saraki has
the case files against the DG, SSS, including reports of how the
Chief of Staff Kyari and Mamman Daura handled some oil
deals—especially strategic oil deals involving UAE early in the
administrations—without the knowledge of the president. When the
president found out through the UAE government, he was
alarmed. Saraki has details of all these.”
But another source in the Senate concluded as follows: “Why
these people are able to run rings and play around the
Buhari-Osinbajo presidency is because the president has simply
refused to use its huge but informal arsenal to deal with either
the Senate President or members of the Aso Rock Cabal.”
Already, Nigerians on social media have been very loud in their
condemnation of the Senate President, many of them hoping the
presidency will act to call a spade a spade and rid the nation of
these foxes. Said one: “Somebody has to do it, this nation is
bleeding politically, this is needless and a waste of precious
time.”
To counter social media condemnation and backlash, Saraki has
set up a number of trolls operating principally from the APC
headquarters in Ilorin and Abuja, and through paid journalists and
social media influencers, with the objective of advancing his
narrative and halting the assumption to the presidency of a man he
once dismissed as a mere “commissioner” when Mr. Osinbajo invited
him to a meeting in the early days of the Buhari Presidency.
It is also understood that Saraki and his Senate friends are
working assiduously to use oil marketers to create a fuel scarcity
that would bring about great hardship and possibly kickstart the
disorder he hopes to achieve. Those marketers have been engaging in
secret meetings where they insist the federal government must pay
them N650 billion in unverified debt. Senator Dino Melaye and one
Senator Philip Aduda are helping to set up the fuel sabotage that
would lead to the scarcity.
SaharaReporters
SaharaReporters not Thenigerialawyer has learned
from presidency sources that Senate President Bukola Saraki has
formed an alliance with a cabal within the Aso Rock Villa
determined on confusion and disorder rather than witness Acting
President Yemi Osinbajo assume full presidential powers.
The new balance of forces emerges as the cabal has found it
impracticable in the past few weeks to bring back ailing President
Muhammadu Buhari to the country.
Buhari’s doctors continue to insist he cannot function or run
Nigeria in his present state of health, but the cabal, which is
using ethnicity and religious sentiments to foment deep-seated
animosity against the Acting President, has continued to explore
its options.
To that end, it met recently in Saudi Arabia with Mr. Saraki,
led by Isa Funtua, a failed businessman who was owner of now
bankrupt Bullet Construction Company, while Saraki led some
senators. Also in the Senate President’s group were Ahmadu Adamu
Mu’azu, a former Bauchi State Governor and ex-chairman of the
Peoples Democratic Party chairman who fled Nigerian on exile, as
well as Bala Mohammed, a former Minister of the Federal Capital
Territory who is undergoing trial for money laundering.
Our sources say the cabal held several meetings with Saraki’s
team, the senators included having been sponsored to the lesser
hajj on fat allowances from the coffers of the National
Assembly.
At the meeting, the cabal decided on a number of options to
force Acting President Osinbajo out of power. The options include
bringing Mr. Buhari to Nigeria in whatever condition he might be.
That plan was to use the gravely sick president’s presence to
implement their agenda by
insisting he is not the first leader to become sick in office,
citing those countries whose leaders were sick but remained in
office.
That option created difficulties on account of Buhari’s
precarious condition, including lapses of lucidity. Sometimes, says
one of our
sources, the president does not even remember where he is. Besides,
Buhari often loses his voice as a side effect of one of the drugs
prescribed for him by UK doctors.
A second option considered by the cabal was to force Mr.
Osinbajo to accept current Attorney General of the Federation,
Abubakar Malami, as the Vice President. In that event, the cabal
would prevail on President Buhari to resign, provided that Mr.
Osinbajo agreed to drop all corruption cases against senators and
withdraw the Federal Government’s appeal against a verdict of the
Code of Conduct Tribunal that cleared Mr. Saraki of charges that he
violated asset declaration laws. In addition, Mr. Osinbajo would
commit to remove Ibrahim Magu from the chairmanship of the Economic
and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
One source said Mr. Saraki was opposed to the plan as he aspires
to become the VP so as to be assured of immunity from prosecution.
However,
cabal members favor Mr. Malami because they consider him somebody
who comes from the “core north” and would be more acceptable to
their base, a profile Saraki does not fit.
The third option weighed by the cabal was to create enough
political crisis in the country as to provoke a military takeover
of power. However, that option proved problematic when Western
diplomats sternly signaled that they would not accept a military
coup in Nigeria as such an intervention could lead to Nigeria’s
break up. Even so, one of our sources said the cabal members had
not altogether abandoned that option.
On his return from the hajj, Mr. Saraki held several meetings
with senators loyal to him and directed them not to entertain any
motion calling for Mr. Buhari’s resignation unless his own
position as the prospective VP was assured. On his part, Mr. Isa
Funtua met with numerous northern politicians, powerful civil
servants and military officers and warned that the North could not
afford to “lose power” to the Yoruba. He reminded them that, when
former President Umaru Yar’Adua died, the North ceded power to
Goodluck Jonathan, an Ijaw man they thought would be easy to
manipulate. However, within a few months of assuming the
presidency, Mr. Jonathan, he claimed, gave all the important
appointments “to his people.” He stated that the Yoruba were
way too smart to be left with power for the remainder of Mr.
Buhari’s term.
It is to be noted that the sudden resurgence on
Tuesday of senators’ obsession with removing Mr. Magu was not
a coincidence. Some top National Assembly sources revealed that the
demand for Magu to be fired was the first salvo in a planned set of
orchestrated moves meant to subvert the Nigerian constitution and
avert a potential Osinbajo presidency.
Osinbajo’s offense, according to the sources, is that he has
stood solidly behind the President in the nomination and preference
of Mr. Magu as EFCC Chairman.
The situation on Tuesday was so bad that while Senator
Eyinnaya Abaribe was moving a motion asking the Senate to declare
Saraki “Acting President,” Mr. Osinabjo was already back in Abuja
from his trip to the African Union summit in Addis Ababa.
Apparently, Abaribe and Senator Kabir Marafa did not know, and
Saraki shut down the motion pretending as though he had no prior
knowledge of it. However, several Senate sources told
SaharaReporters that Saraki had simply forgotten to inform Abaribe
and others involved in the plot that Osinbajo had returned to Abuja
overnight.
What Nigerians saw on Tuesday at the Senate was part
of the pre-arranged onslaughts against Osinbajo that were decided
in Saudi Arabia between representatives of the cabal and the Senate
President’s team.
In keeping with the agreements reached at their meetings in
Saudi Arabia, Senator Saraki and members of the cabal will in the
next few weeks continue to heat up the system and provoke disorder,
in the hope of encouraging a military coup.
The two groups’ fourth option is to cause enough problems for
Osinbajo that he will quietly resign because the coalition against
him believes he is not a politically ambitious person. That silent
option is known as the “Shonekan option,” referring to how Ernest
Shonekan was eased out by General Sani Abacha in 1993 shortly after
former President Ibrahim Babangida was forced out by a military
cabal in the wake of his annulment of the June 12 elections.
Under any of the options, a source confided that Saraki believes
that sooner or later, the presidency will be his to pluck.
One Presidency source asserted that cabal members who will
provide logistics for the move against Mr. Osinbajo include the
current Director General of the Department of State Services, Lawan
Daura, who is said to be fully bothered about his own fate because
of tons of insider DSS petitions and queries about him in the past
and now. It is believed Saraki has offered him protection and
retention in office under the new deal.
Daura is also expected to clamp down on social media and target
social media users including SaharaReporters. To achieve this
objective, Daura has reportedly sent a whole team of DSS operatives
to Russia to figure out how to achieve a social media shutdown.
The Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, who became the cabal’s
arrowhead, is said to have become somewhat more cautions, even
becoming close to Osinbajo, but our sources say this is a strategy
to elude scrutiny and suffer less pressure from the media,
especially as it has become clear Buhari may not return very soon,
or in good health. In the words of an Aso Rock source, “He has
become much more circumspect these days.”
But the Senate President, according to one principal Senate
principal officer, is “now the one calling the shots, calling
meetings of service chiefs at his residence to dish out
instructions that ought to be coming from the Acting President
because some of the representatives of the cabal he met with in
Saudi Arabia told him they would prefer him to be the next
president.”
A senator who pleaded anonymity said the preference for Saraki
is simply based on their shared horror of allowing Osinbajo to
clinch power with Magu as EFCC chairman. While the members from
both sides try to couch the rhetoric in ethnic terms, according to
him, “the real driving force behind this new working arrangement is
that Saraki will be the first politician to create a thief paradise
much like IBB of years past.”
Although not trusted by many of the Senate’s principal
officials, Saraki continues to wield considerable influence because
of the amount of resources and money he has made available to the
officials, including financial gifts to a number of senators using
official and personal means.
Indeed the Senate President, who was heavily implicated in the
Panama Papers, is also believed to have stolen at least N3.5
billion from the Paris Club refunds in recent weeks. While two
other governors indicted in stealing part of the funds have quickly
made refunds after they failed to get the protection they sought
from the presidency, Saraki has simply refused to return his own
part of the loot. And this partly explains his resolve to fight
harder now, an informed source explained.
He asked: “We know Saraki is wily and full of treachery,
everyone knows that, but what do you expect some of us to do if he
asks for our support? But Nigerians are not fools, the people
will sort him out.”
The source went on: “Don’t you remember how this man – Saraki –
even ruthlessly outwitted his own father and sister? The man
is currently not on speaking terms with Gbemisola Saraki and his
brother Olaolu. Or even more recently did you not see what he did
to Senator Ali Ndume? Ndume is still sitting in one corner sulking
today.”
That source said, “What the Aso Rock cabal don’t know about
Saraki is that if he gets what he really wants that is 2019
presidency ticket, he would deal with even the cabal members first,
particularly the DG, SSS.”
According to that particular Senator, “As we speak, Saraki has
the case files against the DG, SSS, including reports of how the
Chief of Staff Kyari and Mamman Daura handled some oil
deals—especially strategic oil deals involving UAE early in the
administrations—without the knowledge of the president. When the
president found out through the UAE government, he was
alarmed. Saraki has details of all these.”
But another source in the Senate concluded as follows: “Why
these people are able to run rings and play around the
Buhari-Osinbajo presidency is because the president has simply
refused to use its huge but informal arsenal to deal with either
the Senate President or members of the Aso Rock Cabal.”
Already, Nigerians on social media have been very loud in their
condemnation of the Senate President, many of them hoping the
presidency will act to call a spade a spade and rid the nation of
these foxes. Said one: “Somebody has to do it, this nation is
bleeding politically, this is needless and a waste of precious
time.”
To counter social media condemnation and backlash, Saraki has
set up a number of trolls operating principally from the APC
headquarters in Ilorin and Abuja, and through paid journalists and
social media influencers, with the objective of advancing his
narrative and halting the assumption to the presidency of a man he
once dismissed as a mere “commissioner” when Mr. Osinbajo invited
him to a meeting in the early days of the Buhari Presidency.
It is also understood that Saraki and his Senate friends are
working assiduously to use oil marketers to create a fuel scarcity
that would bring about great hardship and possibly kickstart the
disorder he hopes to achieve. Those marketers have been engaging in
secret meetings where they insist the federal government must pay
them N650 billion in unverified debt. Senator Dino Melaye and one
Senator Philip Aduda are helping to set up the fuel sabotage that
would lead to the scarcity.
SaharaReporters