By Lasisi Olagunju
I begin with a telling scene. In 2001, former Sports Minister, Bolaji Abdullahi, then a young journalist, visited the strongman of Kwara politics, Dr. Olusola Saraki, at his Lagos home. From his vast library, the elder Saraki presented his guest with a book: ‘Life in the Jungle’ by Michael Heseltine. “Politics is truly a jungle,” the old politician told the young journalist.
That moment stayed with me as I read Bolaji’s latest book, ‘The Loyalist: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice’, slated for presentation in Abuja on January 27. I was to review it at the event but for my phobia for Abuja and its toxins. The author, nevertheless, sent me an advance copy. I got it on Friday. This is my preview of the book.
From beginning to end, what I see here is Bolaji’s own version of D.O. Fagunwa’s ‘Ogboju Ode’, a forest thick with demons, trials, and betrayals. Former Ekiti State governor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, captures its essence in a cover blurb; he describes the book as an exploration of “the underbelly of human nature.” Aptly so.
The author started his political life as Governor Bukola Saraki’s Special Assistant, then commissioner for education. Later he became Goodluck Jonathan’s Sports Minister. Did he become minister because Saraki willed it? If the position did not come through Saraki, why did he lose it because of him? The book speaks on these.
‘The Loyalist’ is an unflattering, tell-all account of the author’s long association with Senator Bukola Saraki. It takes a brief detour into Nigeria’s ailments, then settles into a story of power, patronage, promise, and eventual separation after 22 years. It is a primer on godfather-godson politics and on what happens when loyalty is repeatedly tested.
Bolaji insists he set out to tell his own story, but he concedes that “in telling your own story, you tell other people’s as well.” He writes: “Nobody’s story has been as intricately connected with mine in the 20 years that this book covers as Senator Bukola Saraki’s… For most of the journey, I walked under his shadow… Therefore, readers will find that, to a large extent, this book is his story as well.”
I would argue it is even more Saraki’s story than the author admits.
Throughout the book, the boy sketches the boss as a man of effortless authority and magnetism—one who draws people in while holding them at arm’s length. Proximity here is never accidental; it is rationed, measured, controlled. Once, boss and boy shared a romance of duty, trust, and friendship. The early chapters bear witness to that bond. Later chapters show how politics devoured it.
What Bolaji is set to release is less a memoir of self than a study of a ruler—a cold, calculating king who “keeps himself in clouds,” to borrow from William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. Many orbit him; few approach; none fully enter.
The book runs to 13 chapters and 287 pages. Chapter Three, “Sowing the Mustard Seed,” is described by Olusegun Adeniyi, who wrote the foreword, as “easily the most important chapter.” Perhaps. I might have chosen the later chapters of raw politics, broken promises, and disappointment. Still, it is here that Bolaji takes a scalpel to power’s façade, slicing through the boss’ fine charm to reveal the architecture of control beneath.
He writes of Saraki: “He exuded an aura that appeared to attract and repel at the same time… It was as if he was surrounded by invisible fences… In the innermost chamber of his life, he resided alone, inscrutable, like a god.”
To write thus is to lay a living leader on a cadaver table. Power prefers action to autopsy. Bolaji’s disquisitive tendency could actually be the undoing of his politics. Who knows? In Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’, Caesar loathes Cassius because he “looks quite through the deeds of men”—a man too observant to be safely ignored.
The recurring theme of promise and disappointment runs through the book. Check this: In November 2016, Saraki urged Bolaji to accept the role of APC Publicity Secretary, warning: “I don’t want us to send someone who will see small money and turn against us.” Twenty months later, on July 27, 2018, Saraki hinted that Bolaji would soon be asked to quit that office. A consolation prize was dangled: the governorship of Kwara State. Three days later, Saraki asked him to resign and follow him back to the PDP. Bolaji complied. He pursued the governorship with total commitment.
One day, boss asked a cleric to pray for Bolaji’s success; Bolaji knelt before cleric and received the supplication into his life. Bolaji’s campaign ran out of cash, boss supplied cash. Days before the primary, boss quietly instructed delegates to support another aspirant. The directive leaked to Bolaji. Bolaji asked boss, boss did not confirm or deny it. The D-Day knocked. Without announcing it, boss doubled down on giving the ticket to the other man. A shattered Bolaji withdrew from the race. End of story. Or, as Shakespeare would have it in Richard II – Act 5, scene 5: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”
Disappointment recurs. Like photographs in a coffee-table book, the author lays them out for judgment. What emerges is a tactician who rationed intimacy, gave offices in the evening and withdrew them in the morning; a leader who made unreadability and unreliability a method. You could orbit his star, but are never allowed to explore it.
Some would argue that what this persona reflects is not cruelty but strategy for survival in a field of mines and betrayal. Perhaps.
Segun Adeniyi says readers will enjoy “Bolaji’s disquisition on Saraki’s persona.” Disquisition. The word is precise: exposition, interrogation, laying bare. Readers may enjoy it. The subject himself is unlikely to. To dissect power is to threaten its crown. Someone said leaders prefer to be felt, not explained. Power feeds on mystery.
The book also offers insight into how power was organised. Bolaji wrote: “Collective decisions presupposed the existence of a team, but he never built a team… No one ever had the full picture… There was always a game at play, with the end goal known only to him.”
Yet ‘The Loyalist’ is not only about a ruler and his follower. It is also a portrait of a wicked Nigeria that sees nothing wrong betraying its poor. As commissioner for education, Bolaji encountered schools without learning. “We soon found ourselves clapping for pupils in Primary IV” because they “could spell their names,” he writes. He experienced the bad and the ugly. He saw teaching jobs sold and teachers’ salaries siphoned by officials employed to enforce moral and academic standards.
‘The Loyalist’ is a beautiful book well written. But the content is a warthog in ugly details. It has a space for the Nigerian voter cashing in before elections. Bolaji recalls a hospital calling him because a man had abandoned his pregnant wife, left Bolaji’s number, and named him as the one to pay for a caesarean section. All politicians from Bola Tinubu to the lowliest of the low will easily connect with this. The Nigerian hangers-on is an albatross on their necks.
In the early chapters, Bolaji’s relationship with Saraki is rendered almost as governor and unofficial deputy. It was that close. So what became of everything? The answer comes quickly. At Pastor Tunde Bakare’s church in 2017, Bolaji heard a counsel: “Do not treat as optional those who treat you as their priority.” He wished he could send that message to his boss without sounding rebellious. He has now written a whole book to do just that.
It is a notorious notion that every book must have a last line; the question is whether it closes the story or merely ends it. On page 280 comes Bolaji’s final verdict: “Some relationships can only be saved through an amicable divorce.” It is a sad, dramatic closure.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
