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A Word for Saraki’s Wife -By Emmanuel Uchenna Ugwu

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Toyin Saraki, Wife of the Senate President.

Toyin Saraki, Wife of the Senate President.

 

Toyin Saraki can help salvage the scrap of the life of his irreparably damaged husband. Or she can catalyze his absolute self-destruction. She can prevail on Bukola to focus exclusively on his court trial. Or she can encourage him to sustain his soul-destroying moonlighting as the Senate President of Nigeria.

Bukola has metamorphosed from a rogue model, to a pathetic lameduck, to a schizophrenic caricature of Sleeping Beauty. His continued stay in national limelight earns him more opprobrium. But he is a narcissist that relishes the saga of his own disgrace. He prefers life as a celebrity with a halo of vultures over his head!

Bukola’s condition obligates the Saraki family to swiftly retrieve him from the public arena. A mad man’s kith and kin does not huddle with other spectators to watch his toe-curling nude pageantry in the village square: They lure him home and tame him. They intervene for the sake of their shared name.

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’Saraki’ has become the dominant presence in the Nigerian echo chamber of villainy today. The saturation coverage of his messy and smelly trial is due, in part, to his occupation of a pride of place in Nigeria. And the ad hominem telling and retelling of the absurdity of a senate president-in-the-dock has served to solidify ‘Saraki’ as the metaphor for heist.

That invocation of ‘Saraki’ –a surname already diminished by the politics of their departed patriarch –in that light of an anathema threatens to impose a burden on the innocents that happen to bear that name. That burden of relational guilt which every partaker of that name recognition will struggle to shrug off will be disproportionate to any vicarious thrill that having Bukola as a trophy relative yields.

Bukola has proved himself to be immune to reproach. The spit of the entire country in his face has not sufficed to humiliate him. He would cling to ‘power’; even when all he has and is is weakness. He has such a pathetic self-esteem that he requires public office or its façade to exist!

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But if he is still receptive to reason, to logic, to counsel, his wife is best placed to save him.

Her work of redemption is not an excruciating messianic mission. It does not require her to carry a heavy cross up a steep hill. It is a simple chore. A wife’s duty to find the most appropriate time, place, and tone to tell his husband the truth –the truth that will set him free.

She must impress on him that there is no plausible rationale for him to continue his ridiculous charade. He cannot continue to parade himself as the ‘Senate President’ when the position loudly declares him an impostor, lacking the dignity, presence and gravitas that an eligible occupant ought to be possessed of.

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As it stands, he doesn’t serve Nigeria in any positive way. He is empty of credibility. He is poor in public goodwill. He commands no respect. He is just a nagging nuisance in high place!

Though he still plays the part, Bukola does not have the legitimacy of the Senate President of Nigeria. He assumed the office through a farce executed by forged senate rules. And the very fraud of his election was perpetrated in the absence of half of the members of the senate.

But if the procedure of his ‘election’ counts for nothing, the emerging prima facie evidence of his culpability confirms that he is a degenerate who is qualified to lead only his shadow!

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His trial just started. But the preliminary tales out of the proceedings predicate that he is one of the most vicious kleptomaniacs that have ever happened to Nigerians. The spectacular instance in which he made his aides dump public funds into his bank account in 70 installments in one day –a case of stealing like there’s no tomorrow! –recommends him as more worthy of a dank prison cell than a cozy public office!

Many decent Nigerians want Saraki out of their sight. They are repulsed by the sight of him working shifts in the dock and the third most powerful office in the land. They are scandalized that he drags the dock into the senate and drags the senate into the dock –without compunction.

Toyin must tell her husband that he is no leader. He is an ordinary peddler of a title. A tainted politician without clout or carriage.

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She must tell him he needs to cop to reality and resign. He needs the refuge of a hermit more than the exposure of a haughty, scandal-prone corrupt dignitary.

Of course, this proposal is premised on the idea that Toyin is Bukola’s qualitative ‘better half’. That is, that she is significantly less depraved than her man. The presumption is, at best, gracious flattery: It is in conflict with her records.

Toyin’s records show that Toyin was her husband’s accomplice in the looting Kwara State during his governorship. She laundered money at his behest. And she misappropriated a multi-million naira bank loan in her own right as ‘first lady’!

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She also cultivates the optics of sycophancy like Bukola. When EFFC invited her for interrogation last year, she was not chastened. She was not scandalized by the gravity of allegations of wrongdoings she had to answer to.

She organized her husband’s loyalists into an ‘entourage’. She had sitting senators and members of the House of Representatives trail her tail as she walked into Idiagbon House. They idled away the entire five hours her interrogation lasted: And escorted her back home afterwards.

This behavior furnishes a solid premise on which a tentative hypothesis about her character may be formed. That hypothesis is that Toyin might well be his husband’s clone. Actually, the degree of the overlap of their dispositions can be stretched to account for the occurrence of the marriage of the star-crossed lovers!

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It is very possible that Bukola’s foolhardy defiance does not hinge on the promise of certain senators to swim or sink with him. The number of loyalists who escort him to his trial has progressively tailed off as his chance of political survival shrinks.

Saraki’s staying power may be her woman. She may be the one pouring steel down his spine. The one that tells him he must fight to the death rather than let his detractors by break his spirit.

It’s fair to make this inference because of near impossibility of the counter presumptive reality.

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I wager that this private disaster would not have escalated into a national crisis if she had deigned to use feminine soft power to get him to vacate the chair. She has an intimate knowledge of how his mind works more than anybody in his orbit. If she had brought that knowledge to bear on his psychology and ego, the odds are that she would have succeeded in telescoping this endless nightmare. `

But our history shows that spouses of Nigerian politicians are seldom a good influence. Since they share in the glory of their mate’s position and often take the initiative of constituting themselves into an alternate authority, they are more inclined to urge their beloved to continue in power. They tend to encourage their partner to sit tight even when resignation is the only apparent commonsensical option in view.

In times of upheaval, especially when the peace and stability of a state or a nation hangs by a thread and when a man’s exit would most assuredly deescalate tension, his power-hungry lover –always his most implacable sycophant –is likely to restrain him from acknowledging the voice of the street. The partner prods the discredited official, behind the curtain, to tarry till the dawn of the worst possible endgame.

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Their manipulation, though subtle, is not as subliminal as witchcraft. Their constraint is loud, brash, and even violent. It takes the shape of hostage-taking.

Taraba State provides a recent example.

Danbaba Suntai survived a plane crash. The accident left him brain-damaged. Yet, his wife, Hauwa, refused to do him the favor of ridding him of the burden of governorship. She elected to stage, in concert with her husband’s allies, puppet shows that saw them fly him into the country, install him on the governor’s chair, and motion him to murmur incoherently before the press!

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Mrs. Suntai’s forerunner in the business of the use of an incapacitated husband as a pawn was Turai, the wife of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

Yar’Adua became terminally ill in the first year of his tenure. At some point, he lost the capacity to function as a leader. Yet, his wife declined to detach him from the presidency. Instead, she and her husband’s aides filled the vacuum and ruled an agitated Nigeria by conspiracy. It took a deus ex machina to avert the country’s descent into anarchy.

Toyin must help evacuate her mortally flawed husband from the office of the senate president. Even if she is unconcerned that his time-poor darling dozes in the dock, she should do it because his personal tailspin need not imperil the government of a country of 170 million people!

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immagugwu@gmail.com
@EmmaUgwuTheMan

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