Boy!!!!!!

Was it great seeing Bukola Saraki
docked finally! It took the resilience of
a brave, no-nonsense Judge Danladi Umar to
demystify and bring down to mother earth
the arrogant Saraki. From now on, no Nigerian,
no matter how highly placed, would consider
himself above the law. Henceforth, the Super
Ministers of yesteryears; the Mercurial
Governors of the past, who thought they had
escaped with their loot, will no longer know
peace. Twelve years...12 long years since
Saraki filed a phony asset declaration form
and he is being called to account for it. In
Nigeria…in this same Nigeria where just a
few months ago, corruption was not considered
stealing according to its President? Thank
God almighty that we are witnesses to this
revolution.
Senator Bukola Saraki in Court facing
charges of corruption
Apparently, Saraki didn’t get the circular
that the era of impunity; the era of “nobody
can touch me”; the era of “pull my lips so I
can spit” are all gone. He still thinks we are in
the Jonathan era when the President could
just call over to the IGP or EFCC Chairman’s
office and tell them who to NOT prosecute. He
thinks we are in the era when the President’s
body language and total demeanor
discouraged judges and law enforcement
agencies from prosecuting corrupt officials.
Somebody needed to pass the memorandum
over to the Senate President’s office, wake
him up from his dream and let him smell the
coffee. Judge Umar did that for us. These
are different times, my friends.
The rant from Saraki acolytes is that he is
being victimized because he is the Senate
President. Please come off that nonsense. Sell
that balderdash to those hangers-on who feed
off the crumbs from your table. You are a
victim of greed, kleptomania and arrogance
tripod. The arrogance…is it not the same
arrogance that made you to describe your
Vice President as an “ordinary commissioner”
when he tried to mediate the NASS crisis you
started simply because VP Yemi Osinbajo was
a commissioner in Lagos when you were
governor?
Obviously, Saraki believed that nobody who
held a position considered lower than his would
ever rise to a position higher than his in the
future. So, nobody from Kwara, or from any
other part of Nigeria, who held a position
beneath that of governor could ever hold a
position higher than whatever Saraki holds at
any point in time. Such childishness! Is it not
the same arrogance that got him to thumb his
nose at the APC leadership when he was asked
to help the party save face by allowing their
preferred candidates to occupy other Senate
leadership positions; this after he had
colluded with his PDP friends to disobey and
embarrass the party in his inordinate quest to
become Number Three citizen? Is it not the
same arrogance that got him to remark: “the
President can go to hell. I don’t need him. He
needs me to succeed” when he was asked to
go and mend fences with Buhari over the
crisis that followed his ascension to the
Senate presidency?
They begged him…oh; did every reasonable
party official not beg him? But he did not
budge. They also warned him. When a man
continues to climb the tree past the branches
and past the leaves, he is about to fall to the
ground. Saraki’s dog failed to heed the
hunter’s whistle. Instead, he lined up Atiku
Abubakar behind himself. In tow too was the
Emir of Ilorin who could hardly breathe
without Saraki’s handout. They both told him
to keep doing his macabre dance; that they
had his back. And he kept dancing. He failed
to note that the time when Atiku influenced
anything was long gone. And that only in parts
of Ilorin could the current emir call the shots.
Saraki lined up those whom the Buhari anti-
corruption crusade has reduced to
inconsequential, political paperweights and
paper tigers. He was heading straight for
perdition but did not know it. For someone
with so much baggage, it has to be the height
of tomfoolery or sheer obscene arrogance for
him to remain in no-speaking terms with both
the President and the Vice President and
expect everything to be honky-dory.
Even if President Muhammadu Buhari was
inclined to helping the Senator out of his
self-inflicted wound, how could he have gone
about it? Call Judge Umar and tell him what?
“Stop prosecuting my good, incorruptible
friend, lover of the people of Kwara and
doyen of my party’s leadership”? No. It is not
in Buhari’s DNA to intercede on behalf of
characters like Saraki who were born with the
silver spoon in their mouth, placed in positions
of trust and privilege, but who plundered
their nation’s wealth and then continue to
wear the toga of arrogance and petulance
that know no bounds
The obscene nature of his arrogance is
reflected in the way he was brought up and
the way he lived his life till date. From the
day he came into limelight as senior officer
at the now-defunct Societe Generale bank,
through his entire time as governor and his
election as Senator, graft, greed and power-
drunkenness had been his middle names.
Hundreds of people, including a close relative
of mine, lost their entire life-savings at
Societe while Saraki was in charge there
recklessly issuing all sorts of huge loans
without collaterals. Word on the street was
that the loans were made to people and
entities fronting for Saraki or his father.
What was also clear was that while all
investors in Societe lost money, Saraki and his
father made money in leaps and bounds.
By his own admission, Saraki, in 2003 had
N51.5 million in Nigeria, 2.9 million pounds
sterling and $400,000 dollars in his
domiciliary accounts. He owned at least eight
properties in Nigeria worth more than N2.2
trillion. He also owned eight properties in
London – all purchased about the same time in
2003 and worth more than $12.6 million. These
did not include 15 automobiles (bought
between 1997 and 2002) ranging from a
Ferrari to 10 Mercedes Benzes, with four of
his vehicles being bullet-proof – all valued at
more than N263 million. In short, before (and
I mean BEFORE!) he became governor in 2003,
Saraki was worth a whopping N10.2 billion!
This, for a man who did not own a single
factory and was not manufacturing anything!
After that, Saraki governed Kwara State for
eight years. Your guess is as good as mine as
to how much more he made while in charge of
Kwara State funds in the middle of the oil
boom.
This is the kind of sleaze that the Code of
Conduct Bureau was set up to detect and
prevent. And some gullible Saraki loyalists are
crying “victimization” when they are actually
the victims of his kleptomania. Rather than
trooping from Ilorin to Abuja to provide
useless “moral support” for someone who has
stolen their children’s future as they did
when he was arraigned, these hungry and
rented supporters ought to be calling for
Saraki to resign his Senate seat so they could
send someone else whose probity they can
vouch for to represent them. It is confounding
seeing these hapless people empathizing with
someone who has been indicted by the police
for forging documents with which he got
elected as Number One lawmaker in our
country; whose wife is yet to clear her name
in the corruption charges she is facing with
the EFCC and who has stupendous wealth far
beyond his legitimate earnings.
But if the hungry and hapless ordinary people
did not know better, what about the 50-plus
Senators who were so vicariously traumatized
by what is happening to Saraki that they
trooped to the Tribunal to provide support for
this embodiment of all the vices we pray that
our children eschew? How could any
reasonable and responsible person be proud to
be led by an entity like Saraki who lacks
sound moral upbringing and who is driven by
extreme kleptomaniac ideation for the
purpose only of satisfying his unbridled,
vaulting ambition? Curiously, I have not heard
a single governor make a statement
condemning any of Saraki’s alleged crimes or
his attempted flight from justice. In other
climes, party leaders and all sorts of national
leaders will lead the chorus of those asking
Saraki to resign and stop bringing the
hallowed chambers of the Senate into
disrepute.
How shameful did it look, watching on
television that Saraki lawyer…the obscenely
fat, apparently equally undisciplined Joseph
Daudu, clutching at straws like a drowning
man trying to eke out a safe landing for
Saraki? It was indeed a fall from grace to
grass for both attorney and client. If a
secondary school class monitor got ridiculed
like that, he would resign his position. But
knowing Nigeria and Nigerians, Saraki will sit
tight shamelessly. At the very next sitting of
the Senate, one Senator should rescue the
legislative institution by moving the motion to
strip Saraki of his seat as Senate President.
That is the honorable thing to do if the
Senators have any modicum of respect for
themselves and for Nigerians.
I refer the reader to a piece I wrote on this
website last month - “Buhari Dead Serious
about Corruption – Masu Gudu Su Gudu (Run
if you Must)” in which I opined that this
President’s anti-corruption freight train will
run over anybody in its way. Big-time
politicians like Saraki need to listen to little
people like me who give them free counsel and
fair warning. Interesting days lie ahead for
Saraki and his ilk that have milked Nigeria
dry.

source: http://saharareporters.com/2015/09/22/kirikiri-future-saraki-abiodun-ladepo

Patiently waiting like a vulture to see what will become of this case.