If it seems churlish to bring up yet another tawdry matter involving Dr Bukola Saraki at a time he is battling desperately to save his increasingly tenuous political future, the blame belongs squarely in his camp.

The matter centres on the investigation, concerning which little has been heard lately, of the status of the instrument on which Saraki and his confederates relied to foist him on the Senate as its president and Ike Ekweremadu a stalwart of the minority PDP, as deputy president.

I will return to that issue presently.

After Saraki had forlornly employed every trick on and off the statute books - aided by a trainload of some of the most senior attorneys in the business - to block the Code of Conduct Tribunal from putting him in the dock on charges of perjury, he declared that he was glad he was finally getting a chance to prove his innocence in a court of law.

It was as if the CCT and those he has accused of subjecting him to "political persecution" had prevented him from having his day in court.

Testimony by the first prosecution witness has pointed at malfeasance on Saraki's part on a scale almost beyond belief. But one has learned not to jump to conclusions in these matters. The hallowed principle of audi alteram partem - Hear the other side - must be our guide. Besides, our laws presume an accused person innocent until he or she is proven guilty.

Still, it does not help Saraki's cause in the least that several days into his trial, he was named in leaked documents - the so-called Panama Papers - purportedly detailing all manner of shady transactions in shell companies based in offshore tax havens, along with some of the world's most powerful and influential figures.

His answer to the charge that he failed to declare assets belonging to his wife as required by law was that the assets at issue belonged to his wife's well-heeled family. Not so, says his wife's attorney. The assets belong to Mrs Toyin Saraki, not to her family, the attorney has asserted. If true, this disclosure can only complicate matters for Saraki

In whatever case, it has strengthened calls for Saraki's resignation from his Senate colleagues, civil society organisations and diverse groups. They are saying that, given the charges arrayed against him, he has lost the legitimacy and moral authority to remain in office. And they have vowed to embark on demonstrations to press their case.

All this, Saraki has said dismissively, is the work of his "political foes" out to turn his ongoing trial into a tool to damage his "political career."

Some career!

Such people, he said through his ill-used chief spokesman, Yusuph Olaniyonu, had started distributing money and other materials to faceless civil society organisations, market men and women associations and other shadowy groups with a view to instigating demonstrations in Lagos, Abuja and Ilorin.

Saraki should know, being a past master at such things.

"They believe that the ongoing trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal provides them the opportunity to stampede Dr. Saraki out of office so that their defeated objective of getting their lackey into the office of Senate President will be realised," the statement continued.

Blaming everyone except himself as is his trademark, Saraki added: "This is another desperate move by these spineless (emphasis mine) politicians to achieve through the back door what they failed to realise on the floor of the Senate."

Here, Saraki, sly as ever, is resorting again to the threadbare claim that his "election" to the office of Senate president over the objections of his "political foes"- in actuality the hierarchy of the ruling APC and all but a handful of the APC majority in the Senate —was the root cause of his problems. But the Code of Conduct Bureau's investigations predated his so-called election and were grounded substantially on petitions filed by public interest groups in Kwara where he had reigned as governor for eight rapacious years.

There was always something underhanded, insidious and smart-alecky about the process through which Saraki, in stark pursuit of his personal ambition, conspired with all 49 members from the Opposition PDP and nine renegades from the APC to wrest control of the Senate from the ruling APC.

The extant rules stood impregnably in the way of this creepy project. So, new rules had to be devised and pressed into immediate service. To create the illusion that everything was being done by the book, make it clear from the outset that the exercise was undergirded by the Senate's own rule-book, to wit: Standing Orders 2015 "as amended."

That phrase, designed to assure the public that scrupulous adherence to law lay at the heart of the process that threw up Saraki and Ekweremadu as the Senate's leaders, instead gave away the game in a manner the conspirators had not envisaged.

It immediately begged several searching questions: Amended by whom? When? Where? And how?

When the 7th Senate was prorogued, the law in force was the Senate Standing Orders 2007 "as amended," according to the best authorities. And until the Senate convened to elect new officers, it transacted no official business whatsoever.

So, how did Standing Orders 2007 (as amended), which required all members of the Senate to participate in the nominating and voting for the Senate president and deputy president morph into House Standing Orders 2015 (as amended), which states rather lamely that members of the Senate are entitled to participate in voting for Senate president and deputy president?

The import of this disingenuous phrasing in the 2015 document is that any senator who did not participate in nominating and voting for the Senate leaders had done so by choice. It was designed to put a seal on the legislative coup Saraki and his confederates were planning to stage with just one-half of the Senate membership present and voting.

As far back as July 2015, the police had determined that the document at issue was a forgery. The Director of Public Prosecutions of the Federation, Mohammed Diri, issued a legal opinion concurring in that finding and recommended that those behind it be identified and charged with criminal conspiracy, forgery, breach of official trust, and unlawful assembly.

Toward that end, the legal opinion also set forth some questions the police should answer definitively, namely: Who authorised promulgation of Senate Standing Order 2105? Who published it? Who approved it? Who paid for its publication? Who distributed it?

The Ministry of Justice, then headed by immediate past Solicitor-General of the Federation and permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Abubakar Yola, also concurred in the legal opinion and stated that the Senate leadership election, based as it was on forged documents, was null and void.

But the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, AbubakarMalami (SAN), who took office four months after the legal opinion was issued has not formally entered nolle prosequi, but that is the practical effect of his being disinclined to commence prosecution.

Cui bono? Whose interest is he serving? Whom is he protecting?

The police seem just as disinclined to pursue investigations to answer the questions formulated by the DPP. Again, cui bono?

What more will it take to move the nation's chief law officer and the nation's law enforcement agency to discharge their duties as spelled out in the Constitution that those who confected House Order 15 and their proxies have so brazenly subverted?

Despite all the buffeting, Saraki has served notice to the "spineless politicians" aforementioned and their misguided agents that he would not allow any distraction to take him away from his responsibility as President of the Senate and Chairman of the National Assembly.

Some responsibility!

It is almost as if the post is his birthright.

He is either practically unconscious or he is too far gone in his hubris and his overweening sense of entitlement to see that the game is up.