Dr Bukola Saraki evokes the figure of the idle king in Tennyson’s Ulysses—a man who has known both triumph and adversity, surrounded at times by loyal allies and, at others, by no one at all. His political career is a study in momentum: within three decades, he rose from a senior executive role at a major bank to serve two terms as governor of Kwara State, entered the Senate in 2011, and, by 2015, had engineered his way to the presidency of the Nigerian Senate. Few Nigerian politicians have climbed faster or maneuvered more deftly. Yet by 2019, the machinery seemed to grind to a halt, leaving Saraki unmoored, a veteran leader without an obvious battlefield.

“How dull it is to pause, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use,” the poem says. The line could easily serve as a reflection on Saraki’s current predicament. Since 2011, he has harbored presidential ambitions and remained a key player on the national stage. Even after his tenure as governor ended, he maintained an iron grip on Kwara’s politics, quietly orchestrating events behind the scenes for another eight years. But ambition, once deferred, demands a new urgency, and in the shifting tides of Nigerian politics, staying quiet is the quickest way to be forgotten.

For all the talk about it being the turn of the South to rule for eight years, the only geopolitical zone to never actually produce a Nigerian president is the Middle-Belt; and for all the compelling talk about an Igbo presidency, at least history acknowledges Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was president of Nigeria until the coup of 1966. Saraki’s path, and the Middle-belt region’s exclusion, demand a more serious reckoning in the national conversation. Whether that conversation should be taking place towards 2027 is debatable; but even more uncertain is whether the answer lies within the PDP, the party where Saraki now holds fort. 

Saying it plainly, Saraki has an Atiku problem, and it’s been years in the making. He has had that problem since 2019 when he agreed to be the director general of the former vice president’s campaign, instead of focussing his energies on returning to the senate and consolidating his hard-fought power there. This distraction proved very costly, blindsiding him from the changing landscape back home and the blitzkrieg campaign of the otoge movement that established the APC – to which Saraki himself switched his state political machinery in 2015 – as the dominant power in the state for the tenth year. And with Atiku’s daily posturing on X, along with his body language and loud trumpeting about a coalition ahead of 2027, it seems the old man, who will be 80 next year, may be gearing up for yet another presidential run, his sixth since 2007. 

Saraki is also grappling with what political observers might call a Hillary Clinton-problem, not a matter of personality, but of public perception, and the baggage that comes with long years in the arena. Here is a man who was one of Nigeria’s most successful governors, who led arguably Nigeria’s most independent Senate, who comes from a political dynasty that has endured for over half a century, and who, by Nigerian standards, is still young. On paper, it should be a no-brainer for the party to rally around him and put him forth to Nigerians as a strong choice. This has yet to happen. And while a presidential candidate historically has only one shot as the party’s flagbearer, PDP has stuck with one man twice and failed, monumentally damaging its own prospects with its internal crises since 2022. After eight years of Buhari, it was clear Nigerians were eager for a new direction. But instead of uniting, the party effectively fielded three presidential candidates across three different parties, handing the APC a clear path to victory. Ironically, all three later claimed they had won, when in reality, they had simply cancelled one other out, and been outmaneuvered by Mr. Tinubu, who became president, fair and square. 

Which brings us to our next point about Saraki. This is probably the only politician who has actually played the kind of high stakes politics we witnessed ahead of the 2023 elections and won. In 2015, with the odds stacked against him, Saraki pulled off a political masterstroke live on television. He outmaneuvered his own party, the APC, a sitting president, and the party’s national leader – all of whom were backing their preferred candidate, Ahmad Lawan – and emerged as Senate President. If there was ever a day on which Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu was truly outfoxed, it was this. Resilience is the main currency of Nigerian politics and BukolaSaraki is among its shrewdest practitioners. After seizing the Senate presidency against the wishes of his own party, he spent the next four years under siege from corruption charges at the Code of Conduct Tribunal to investigations by the EFCC and repeated threats of arrest. Few would dispute that Saraki emerged with his political capital largely intact; battle-scarred, perhaps, but wiser for the experience and still very much a player. 

This resilience, however, is a double-edged sword. In Nigeria, political longevity often breeds suspicion and Saraki’s survival has added to the perception that he is a man too skilled at the dark arts of power for a nation that increasingly demands transparency. He may well position himself for another shot at national leadership, but his challenge is no longer just to win his party’s nomination, but to redirect attention to what he has accomplished in the decades since he was only a 37-year-old adviser to former President Obasanjo.  

Dr. Saraki has mostly stayed on the sidelines of the PDP’s internal crisis, only recently breaking his silence after the shocking defection of the Delta State political structure to the APC, an event that ended over two decades of PDP dominance in the oil-rich state. With confusion mounting and the party’s foundation steadily eroding, he has begun to demonstrate the kind of leadership the PDP urgently needs by calling for calm and rallying the troops. 

Saraki wants the presidency, but a vice-presidential slot would still represent a step up from his previous role as Senate President. It would place him within striking distance of the highest office, while allowing him to consolidate alliances for the future. His ambitions are not unique. By 2027, it will be twenty years since Alhaji Atiku Abubakar first began his now endless quest for the presidency, an odyssey marked more by defeat and frustration. The space Atiku occupies is increasingly seen as fully exhausted, a fact that younger politicians like Saraki should be keen to exploit. Meanwhile, figures like Peter Obi present a different kind of challenge. A paradigm of clawing self-interest, Obi has demonstrated a willingness to shift loyalties in pursuit of advantage and will likely move again to whichever platform best secures his footing ahead of 2027. 

At the end of the day, it is hard-nosed pragmatism, not sentiment, that may decide the next contest. Today’s purveyors of the great coalition are simply too angry and too bitter to make any sound judgements against a ruling party unlikely to give up power easily in two years. 

Saraki should step up and lead, but he must do so with caution. The trap of the idle king looms large: a former governor and former Senate president, still too young to be an elder statesman, yet at risk of becoming a relic of the past. Our political culture punishes hesitation; therefore Bukola Sarakimust choose whether to seize the day or be remembered merely as one who almost did.

–Owope writes from Lagos.