Sai Baba’s wrestling tactics

When it comes to the sports, I am not considered a patriot. Every other authentic Naija supports an European Football League team. Naija fans are worse in proving their loyalty to those clubs than English fans are known for bleeding for theirs. Not even Trump could separate my love for the WWE. My Canadian hosts call it fake sport but as I breathe in (apology to Chris Jericho) the return of President Buhari after the intrigues, it reminds me of a typical WWE match.

In WWE fights, a wrestler throws his opponent outside the ring and tries to incapacitate him there; after a warning, the referee starts the slow countdown. Except in a falls count anywhere match, if both wrestlers are still outside the ring after the count of ten, the match is declared a draw. In a title match, the champion still retains his title. To lose a title, a champion must be beaten fair and square inside the ring.

Experienced wrestlers know how to beat the countdown; they keep pummeling their opponent until the dying minutes of the ten-count, then they rush back into the ring and jump back to finish the job. When this happens; the referee mildly protests, but must start the count all over again.

This best describes Sai Baba’s triumphal return on March 10 and his sagacious decision to allow Osinbade (sorry, I meant Osinbajo) to continue to act all weekend. It is a classical experienced wrestler’s tactic of beating the count. Constitutional lawyers argue that if the President had remained in his London hideout for three solid months even with his letter to the national assembly, he would have counted himself out of power. So, what he has done thus far is to step back into the ring, to avoid being counted out. Lawyers say that a 90-day absence causes parliamentary invocation of a clause rendering the president legally incapacitated and enabling Osinbajo to become defacto president. In that scenario the quondam foe - Bukola Saraki would have inched one step closer to his vaunted ambition by becoming vice president.

Well, the envisaged riots aside, no worse scenario could be imagined. A situation in which the ruling party loses the ‘control’ of the sinnate, (if ever they had one), to Ike Ekweremadu puts the PDP back in power. That scenario is not only undesirable, but unimaginable, and to the hawks who stand to gain, totally unbearable.

All these fizzle into the background as some try to poison the good relationship between Osinbajo and his boss. They claim that the vice president has shown more leadership clout and mileage in two months than his boss has shown in a year and a half. Such claims are not only in bad light, they are neither verifiable nor should they be verified because the presidency is a single ticket

Remember always that there are those who would rather drag Naija back to the locust years. These ones argue that the Naira was at least stronger with easy money flowing. But incurably optimistic Sai Barbarians vow that the path of reconstruction is paved with noble intentions and tarred with incredible pain, and that a revert to status quo ante would’ve seen the complete collapse of Lugard’s house