Revenge is a dish best served cold. This popular phrase could best describe the last weekend action of Senator Gbemi Saraki, the sister of Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki. The pretty Gbemi is extremely happy at present. For some years now, the war of attrition between the two famous children of the strongman of Kwara politics, late Dr. Olusola Saraki has been raging and has been far from abating. The beef between the two siblings is deep-seated and it has been on for nearly two decades.
Aside the unhealthy rivalry over family estate common among the silverspoon children, politics has further driven a wedge between the Saraki siblings. The real tussle between them began in 2006 when the Senate President, who was on the verge of completing his eight-year tenure as Kwara governor, declined to support their father’s proposal to get Gbemi to succeed him. Instead, the former governor, who was then in the PDP, backed incumbent Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed as his successor. In anger, Gbemi and their father left the PDP to form a new party, Allied Congress Party of Nigeria, on which platform she ran for governor but lost to Bukola’s candidate. As if that was not enough, in 2011, Bukola took over Gbemi’s seat in the Senate thus leaving her in a political wilderness and denied her political relevance in the state. And Gbemi has since kept her wounds fresh and waited with bated breath to take her pound of flesh on her brother. The last Presidential and National Assembly elections presented her with the opportunity to strike. And she indeed struck with her contribution to Bukola’s defeat and loss of his Kwara Central Senatorial Seat last Saturday. Gbemi, it was learnt, played a very strategic role in knocking her brother off the political high tower.
Spotlight gathered that Gbemi had to suspend her ambition for an elective position in the state and mooted her involvement with the APC so as to give strong winds to the party’s intense campaign against Saraki and his political structure.
Gbemi, an economics graduate of the University of Sussex, UK, was first elected a member of the House of Representatives in 1999 on the platform of the All People’s Party, APP, before being elected a Senator in 2003 and 2007 as a PDP member. At 54, Gbemi, a mother of three, is super single and a dead ringer to any beauty queen any day any time. She was once married to businessman Otunba Segun Fowora, son of late Engr. Eric Ademola Fowora, the Fesogbade of Ikija Ijebu.