Buhari presidency more exciting than first thought By IDOWU AKINLOTAN

By IDOWU AKINLOTAN

Senate President Bukola Saraki will be the first person to tell anyone who accuses the Buhari presidency of dullness of making a terrible mistake. He should know. Since Dr Saraki’s enthronement in early June as Senate President, or more accurately, since his seizure of the Senate throne, he has not had a day of respite. He is unlikely to have a minute of respite anytime soon. The Nigerian presidency is a very strong one indeed. And while everyone, including his party members and feared federal agencies, is busy reading the president’s body language and second-guessing him, Dr Saraki has chosen to construct a contrasting and countervailing body language of his own, hoping presumptuously that the president would read it and probably subordinate his own beneath the Senate President’s. There is no other way to explain the stalemate in the Senate or make sense of the cold-shoulder the president has given him.

Except Dr Saraki himself, perhaps no one else knows what emboldens the Senate President to chart what he whimsically and idealistically describes as legislative independence. Might the president’s “I belong to everybody and belong to nobody” inauguration euphoria be responsible for Dr Saraki’s chutzpah? Or, having fought many battles and won handily, including

familial ones, the Senate President has begun to feel invincible and ecstatic. Whatever the reasons, Dr Saraki is standing pat and daring all-comers. He will fight in the hills of the EFCC; and he will brawl in the plains and fields of the Code of Conduct Tribunal. He will neither retreat nor surrender. Nor, apocalyptically, will the president. There is in fact no disputing the fact that on the Senate front, President Buhari will keep the country electrified and entertained.

Furthermore, while the president refuses to shirk any battle, keeping both the country and his enemies riveted on his sanguinary pastimes, he is himself providing more excitement than his languid frame and dour look seem capable of giving at face value. He may be quiet, reserved and distant, yet his sometimes forlorn look belies the searing comicalness and pugnacious vivaciousness lying behind the uncompromising facade. “Back in Nigeria,” he told his bemused US audience during his July visit, “they already call me Baba-go-slow.” He is, it seems, capable of the most withering self-deprecating humour, indeed more enthralling than former president Olusegun Obasanjo’s unending bucolic and sometimes prurient exclamations. During electioneering, his running mate’s surname was a surprising tongue-twister to him; but after inauguration, even calling the name of his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), got inextricably intertwined with his former party, the Congress of Progressive Change (CPC).

As the country reveled in his magnificent juxtapositions, out streamed his interminable gaffes. He would discriminate between those who voted him massively and those who were niggardly with their votes, he intoned, with no one sure whether he meant it the way he spoke it — brutally and maliciously frank. Reflecting his considerable unease with scheming politicians, he disclosed in France last week that he was reluctant to form his cabinet, for ministers were after all superfluous and zestful makers of noise. He probably meant it. To many Nigerians, it was a Freudian slip; but to him, it was an obscenely honest statement that perfectly mirrored his worldview. When he summons his first Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, how would he look the superfluous noisemakers in the face? With the same sang-froid disposition that has characterised his neo-democratic experience? Or with the icy, expressionless stare those who voted for him seem to approve of?

Despite himself, the reed thin President Buhari will provide capital mirth for Nigerians. He is tinkering with the economy and seems to be recording success without an economic blueprint; and he has midwifed inexplicable fortitude and quietude in the polity, again without a political blueprint. For all anyone cares, he may soon mediate a new social ethos without paying attention to its building blocks. What is, however, evident is that he is giving the country things, to the delight and entertainment of every patriot, and to the frustration of the nitpicking Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The country is in for four years of Buhari drama: let the playwrights ink their pens, the caricaturists sharpen their pencils, and the satirists their wit.

ref: http://thenationonlineng.net/buhari-presidency-more-exciting-than-first-thought/