Following the emergence of Senator Bukola Saraki as President of the just-inaugurated 8th Senate, political think-tanks have deduced that President Muhammadu Buhari indirectly influenced the “loss” of the All Progressives Congress (APC) at the Upper Chambers.
It would be recalled that the APC leadership had on Saturday, June 6, 2015 handpicked Senator Ahmed Lawan as its candidate for the position, a decision that did not go down well with senators loyal to Senator Saraki.
Following the stalemate, APC governors on Monday, June 8, 2015 called for another meeting in order to mend fences and produce a united front in the election, a meeting said to be spearheaded by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.
The Saraki camp boycotted the meeting.
Sensing a divided house the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the early hours of Tuesday, June 9, 2015 adopted Saraki as its preferred choice, squashing rumours that it planned to upstage the APC and produce a candidate to wrestle the Senate presidency from the divided APC house.
In a bid to change the tide in favour of the APC, President Muhammdu Buhari, upon his return from the G7 Summit in Germany hurriedly assembled another meeting for the APC legislators, a move also boycotted by the Saraki camp of senators.
Many believe that the Buhari meeting, which was scheduled to commence at 9am at the International Conference Center, Abuja, impeded on the time which the inauguration of the 8th Assembly was planned to hold and subsequently resulted in the absence of the 51 Lawan loyalists from the Assembly proceedings, paving the way for Saraki to emerge from the election unopposed.
Some others say President Buhari’s decision to hold a meeting so soon to the Assembly inauguration stems from his lack of advisers who would have advised him against such.
