A chronological sequence of events indicate, somewhat, that the leadership crisis in the 8thNational Assembly was meticulously planned. In this wise, the actors, the Senate President Bukola Saraki, and the Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, are merely dancing to the talking drums being played by an entrenched interest group that is determined, essentially with the advent of a new central government, to remain politically relevant in the undulating architecture of Nigerian politics. Clearly, from the events that transpired in the Senate and the House of Representatives, on Tuesday, June 9, the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, that has a controlling majority in the bicameral legislature never envisaged that its hard-earned majority could be bandied away by its own legislative foot soldiers.
Enamoured by his mantra of ‘change’ through which it muscled its way into the presidency, its leaders were apparently unprepared for such a devastating blow below the midriff brokered by its Senators and members of the House of Representatives with the active connivance of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP, which has ruled the country for 16 years. In all five times that elections were previously conducted in the National Assembly when the PDP enjoyed a mouth-watering majority, the PDP never deigned to contemplate ceding any of the leadership positions in both the Senate and the House of Representatives to any other party.
The leadership of the PDP once failed on June 6, 2011, to shepherd its members in the green chamber to elect its preferred candidate, Mulikat Adeola-Akande, as Speaker, the position, nonetheless, still went to a former Chief Whip, Aminu Tambuwal, then, a member of the PDP, who emerged as Speaker with the vociferous and active support of the opposition parties. Having thrust a foothold in the leadership of the Senate, with the emergence of Senator Ike Ikweramadu as the Deputy Senate President, who had served on two previous occasions, in the 5th and 6th Senate in the same capacity when Senator David Mark was Senate President, the PDP, is indeed, pooh-poohing the credentials of the ruling APC to effectively manage an Elephantine federal government.
AND YOU AGREE?
As it is, different power blocs in the APC are now scheming to hijack some power centre’s so that they can effectively position themselves and their preferred candidate for the 2019 presidential election. In all that is just and noble, the primordial and emerging power blocs within the APC jostling for political power and relevance are not being fair to President Buhari because their squabble is giving a sorry impression that the president is weak and the president should move fast to nip this regrettable cocktail of distraction in the bud.
To recall General Montgomery’s aphorism: “My definition of leadership is the capacity and will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character to inspire confidence”. In the first place, President Buhari needs to inspire confidence in the leadership of the APC so that he can effectively rally the influential power brokers within the leadership brackets of its party towards a common purpose of change in the nation’s utterly warped polity on whose crest he was elected president. In the second place, the leadership of the APC should not make statements that portray the president as weak or who by virtue of the quadrilateral alliance that culminated into the formation of the APC cannot command or give directives to some persons or groups within the APC. In the third place, lawmakers of the APC should not because of their personal ambition conduct themselves or make statements that expose the leadership of the APC to public odium and ridicule. The challenge before Buhari is to rally all the power centers’ in the APC to key-in into the actualization of his vision of change for Nigeria. 
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