First, you bungle a process leading to the election of National Assembly leaders. Then, you compound the error by rejecting the result of an election conducted on live television because, even though the winners are your party members, they were not the ones that party leaders preferred.

Next, you rain insults on the country's Number Three and Number Four citizens and accuse them of the highest political crimes. Afterwards, you threaten to drag them before a party disciplinary panel, a ruinous proposition in Nigerian politics. Finally, without an apology or a word of regret, you step back from the brink and say the National Assembly leaders were "duly elected" by their colleagues. There is no teacher in Nigeria, even one not registered by the Teachers Registration Council, who will mark APC's script in the 10-unit course Political Strategy 101 and not give it an F.

As soon as Abubakar Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara were elected Senate President and House Speaker on Tuesday, APC's spokesman Alhaji Lai Mohamed issued a very bellicose statement saying "Bukola and Dogara are not APC's candidates. Neither are they candidates of a majority of its National Assembly members-elect for Senate President and House Speaker." The question is, did the Constitution say anywhere that the Senate President and House Speaker must be supported by party leaders or even by a majority of ruling party members? To that extent Alhaji Lai had no point.

Only ten weeks ago, APC leaders were very happy when former president Goodluck Jonathan telephoned President Muhammadu Buhari and congratulated him on his election victory. That was an election involving 28 million voters in which many things went wrong but Jonathan still conceded. APC is rejecting an election involving only 450 people. This nearly brings it at moral par with Jonah Jang/Godswill Akpabio of the 16 is greater than 19 infamy.

According to Lai, the National Assembly election outcome "is nothing but a monumental act of indiscipline and betrayal to subject the party to ridicule and create obstacles for the new administration." He said "some people, based on nothing but inordinate ambition and lack of discipline and loyalty, will enter into an unholy alliance with the very same people whom the party and indeed the entire country worked hard to replace and sell out the hard won victory of the Party. There can be no higher level of treachery, disloyalty and insincerity within any party."

Now, now. Not a word there about how APC started, then abruptly halted the process of zoning the offices. Its National Working Committee actually zoned the Senate Presidency to the North Central zone, though its NEC never met to ratify or repudiate it. To that extent Bukola Saraki was right to aspire to the office. The party leaders' later decision to try to give the post to the North East could only be attributable to the manoeuvre by the South West caucus and its powerful leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, to avoid creating the impression that both Senate President and House Speaker are Yoruba speaking. This could weaken Asiwaju's hand is subsequent jockeying for plum Executive positions. It was for the same reason that President Olusegun Obasanjo prevented Chief Sunday Awoniyi from becoming PDP chairman in succession to Chief Solomon Lar. So it was a crude regional manoeuvre masquerading as party discipline.

President Buhari's stance on the election was also strange. His Special Adviser on Media and Publicity Femi Adeshina issued a statement soon afterwards and said, "President Muhammadu Buhari has noted the outcome of the just-concluded election of leaders of the National Assembly. The president would rather that the process of electing the leaders as initiated and concluded by the All Progressives Congress (APC) had been followed. Nonetheless the President took the view that a constitutional process has somewhat occurred."

Not a word of congratulations to the victorious men. The president's wish that the process initiated by party leaders be concluded forgot to mention that it was the president himself who truncated the process when he declared at a party caucus meeting to consider the national working committee's zoning proposals that he saw no reason why the members should not be left alone to choose their leaders. If the party had zoned the posts, the contest could have been less acrimonious. To say that a constitutional process "somewhat occurred" was also strange; Jonathan did not say in his concession phone call that the 2015 election "somewhat adhered to the Electoral Act."

The next day, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity Garba Shehu said Bukola Saraki and the Clerk of the National Assembly Salisu Maikasuwa should have delayed the Senate’s inauguration because they were aware that President Buhari and the APC leadership had arranged a meeting with APC senators at about the same hour. Shehu said both Saraki and the Clerk should have extended that respect to Buhari by postponing the inauguration but they failed to do so. Let us be blunt here; was it not the president who issued the proclamation for the inauguration to take place at 10am on Tuesday? How could he then fix another meeting and expect it to supercede his proclamation which has the force of a decree? Maikasuwa was totally correct to go ahead with the inauguration at the hour set by the proclamation. How would APC have liked it if Buhari's inauguration on May 29 had been delayed by several hours because Jonathan fixed an impromptu meeting with Supreme Court Justices?

Last Thursday APC's National Chairman Chief John Odigie-Oyegun finally said the party had decided to put the matter behind it and move ahead. He said "the party is now disposed to working with Dr. Saraki." He said of the Senate President, "Of course he has been duly elected by his colleagues. We have a reality and we must live with it…We have faced greater challenges before and this too shall pass away. This may not even be the last time. We come out every time stronger and more determined."

Coming out weaker is more like it. APC leaders squandered a lot of moral capital by disputing a transparent election result. They spilled more political capital by hurling insults at two men who had just been catapulted by their colleagues into top positions in the party caucus. It is true that for a partyman to connive with another party to grab a key position fully fits the definition of what is called here anti-party activity. Yet, APC has no moral right to condemn it because only four years ago its ACN, ANPP and CPC elements played a key role in electing Aminu Waziri Tambuwal as House Speaker despite his party's zoning the post to the South West. What goes around must come around.

Certainly, if overall national and party cohesion are the point of consideration, it is much more advantageous for APC to produce a Senate President from the North Central than from the North East. Most Nigerians outside the two zones do not think there is much of a difference between the North West and North East zones, or what is called "the core North." No two zones in Nigeria are as similar as these two, in political terms. Major Gideon Okar went so far as to excise and expel the two zones from Nigeria. Many North Easterners thought at the time that the crimes Okar accused them of were mostly perpetrated by North Westerners and even some North Central elements that were indistinguishable from core Northerners, such as Ibrahim Babangida.

APC leaders spread the rumour that their opposition to Saraki was because there are petitions against him at EFCC. The question is, what prevented EFCC from arresting and prosecuting him since 2011 when he left the governorship of Kwara? A man cannot be expected to forfeit all his ambitions just because someone failed to dispose of petitions against him. If Bukola had been cooling his heels at the Ikoyi Prison last Tuesday, he wouldn’t have bagged the Senate Presidency. Besides, what stops EFCC from going ahead with its case now since the Senate President has no constitutional immunity from prosecution?