Last week, the nation had a lesson in optics. Or, shall we say, in optical illusion. What we see is important, but we know is better. But what do we know from all the optical histrionics around the APC presidential candidate when he flew to London?

The social media turned into a challenge in eyesight. They said Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was dead. They said, he was on catheter, his bald head shining beneath a benevolent nurse trying to raise him from his bed. She might even, in the eyes of the czars of human sight, be raising him from the dead. They said he had cancelled his campaign. He had turned over his campaign to his deputy. APC no longer had a candidate.

They quoted Reuters, the great news agency, for authenticity. Phone calls rang. Some media outfits limped in searching for facts. No basic journalism rules. They did not question but voted with their silence.

Nor was fact going to win out in certain circles. Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu’s spokesperson, revealed the optical delusion and mischief of the manipulators of human sight. They stuck to their bald vision. The bald was bigger in size than Tinubu’s bald. His paunch was bigger than Tinubu’s.  His face, broader and younger, was made from another tissue of DNA.

So, when the candidate responded with his own optical matter, the drama cruised to another scene. He was on a gym bicycle. But they say he was not on a gym bicycle, or he was on a gym bicycle but it was not last weekend. It was many years ago when he had good health. It was him riding a Fan Milk cart. Fan Milk must thank the APC candidate for an unsolicited online sway and gain. They milked Tinubu for mischief. The company must be in a milky way of profit.

A newspaper that had once gloated over his health situation responded with a dramatic headline: “Tinubu roars back.” Even then, it turned from a visual matter to an audio script. His voice also hummed in the video of another gym shot. Tinubu became a universal man of many Hollywood parts. He was in fainting fit, he was still as a corpse at the back of a bike, in a truck, etc. They made morbidity into a joke at a human being’s expense.

Then he seemed to be turning the joke on them. He appeared in a suit, a dapper guy like a CEO or diplomat. Then later, he turned out with two children, a boy and girl bubbling with the solicitude of their grandfather.

The London trip was over. The spry fellow materialised here in Nigeria, at the airport, in a blazer, his face afire with smiles as he hugged Kashim Shettima, Simon Lalong, Adams Oshiomhole, et al. At the end, mischief bowed to the chief. He won out with the sheer physical vitality of his swagger.

This whole issue began even before he had a knee surgery. Then he had it. They wished him a cripple when he had it. Ironically, when the vice president – bless his soul – had a similar surgery, they prayed for him. When Tinubu returned from his surgery, they lingered with malignant doubts. In their eyes, he was still not fit to run for president. They did not say Osinbajo was not fit to continue as Nigeria’s number two citizen. Talk about pharisaic morality.

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He ran for APC ticket. He did not sit at home. He was around, in the air and on the road. He even undertook a night ride from Sokoto to Zamfara, where he inspected the arboreal serenity of the northern backwoods. He was on television all the way. He even boasted in one of the states about his physical prowess in visiting every part. Not once did he falter. Not once did he faint. But prejudice must see what it must see.

Hence, they would turn the visual brio into infirmity. Some have said he should show his medical records. We should have a special medical council to reveal candidates’ health. I wonder in what planet they are inhabiting. If they cannot believe the facts of their eyes, is it the report of a shadowy committee? Those who hate Tinubu need no evidence to hate him. They just need him alive. Even if he dies, they will regret it. It would echo the lines of poet Walt Whitman, “My enemy is dead. A man divine like myself is dead.” When Nixon left office, he quipped, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” But he was still alive for kicking.

Those in the vanguard of Tinubu fake news are actually southerners who do not want to have a Yoruba candidate to support for 2023, especially if that candidate is one Bola Tinubu. They have been in the rear guard of anti-Buhari vitriol, especially because of his hegemonic policies. How could they live with a PDP that has hoisted a Fulani candidate in Atiku? To resolve their moral crisis, they saw a candidate, and viola! they found a hero. He is supposed to save them from hegemonic crisis. So they made common cause with the ethnic renegades who formed his core followers.

Such persons will not hear that he was mediocre as governor, that he divided tribe and faith under his watch, even repatriated non-indigenes, that he lies about what he achieved, that he fattens on statistical apocrypha, that he built a company while in office with one of our biggest supermarket. Even now that he is soliciting funds from his followers, no one remembers they regarded him as the no shishi candidate who is now milking them for chin chin. They won’t ask him to submit his offshore account. Let him make a sacrifice for his country. No. He must turn it into another entrepreneurial bombshell.

His followers, even those who call themselves intellectuals, would question every Tinubu claim, every ounce of success and doubt every evidence or even if he ever governed Lagos. Maybe Lagos is a myth like Atlantis. A newspaper reported his Chicago qualification. In spite of that, they are calling the university hoping to hear what they want to hear. As far as he is concerned, whatever he says, whatever he does, does not need the test of facts, but the poison of a cynic. They forget they have PHDs, or are professors. They are like the crowd in the Acts of Apostle, that “stopped their ears and charged forward.” Or Asahel, the soldier who looked neither right or left. It is one of the most potent stories in the Bible that few of our so-called prosperity and healing-obsessed clerics will never mine. A columnist who took him to Golgotha as chief executive is now his choirmaster. Another one who wrote a book to gospelise a sectional president has fraudulently tweaked the book and title for him. What a shame!

The protest against Tinubu is not about his health, or his ideas. It is about fear, not fact. But that other candidate’s followers and intellectuals so-called would not subject the man to facts, because it is not about what we want as a nation but who we should hate. It is not about him. It is against the man in Bourdillon. Many of them, in south-south and southeast, love Lagos but will not credit him. It is what psychologists call the fear of gratitude. They will not ask of their own states what they demand of Lagos.

In his crowds, we see less love than opprobrium. It is what Elias Canetti, the writer of Crowds and Power, attributes to religions that cry over a slain god. The Nobel laureate sees the crowds as originating from a “religion of lament.” He attributes it to faiths like Christianity. But critics have elaborated them to even secular crowds. Just as we are seeing today. Lament as a pathway to salvation.

As the campaigns warm up, let us follow what the Bible says, to prove all things and hold fast to that which is good. Not the twist of facts for tendentious mischief, like Bertrand Russell warned when he defined philosophy. He wrote that a square table can be looked at from a different angle and make us conclude that “there is no table after all.”

Henry Kissinger wrote a book titled: The Age of AI, and lamented how human nature, facts and civilisation are in crisis. Those who can read should pick up a copy. The 99-year-old set the world thinking. Maybe the czars of human eyesight can learn from this.  It’s one thing to see, and another to know and then another to understand. In the words of poet Shelley, we need the power to imagine what we know.

Someone said the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide sanwo-Olu, is on holiday, and I wonder what he meant. Some people need lessons in English language.

Of course, he is on holiday, and had time to look at the payroll, and rejig it and decide that he is raising workers’ pay.

When states cannot even pay what they have. It is only when you are robust and cruising, and crossing your I’s and T’s that you can raise salaries. As I noted at the TVC Breakfast show, whoever says it is for campaign purpose should raise his own salaries, too.

He worked hard to give himself the right to raise it. A farmer feeds his family on the fatness of the harvest. If it is cynical, wont every governor love to be this cynical? This is not to say he was cynical. But for those who claim it, let them come with their answer.

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He is Fruitful enough to earn the plaudits to be cynical. What a blessing. He is on holiday and he received 21st century trains that will transform not only the landscape of the city but redefine how we move. This is train acquired without borrowing. I don’t want to acknowledge who said it.

This column chooses those who deserve to be named. This fellow does not.

Governor Sanwo-Olu, keep being on holiday and changing things, while they wallow in hollow baits.

It is no easy thing to be named Iyiorcha Ayu. The man is still trying to free himself from the charge that he obtained a tip of a billion naira. The man is too dumbstruck to utter a word. He must be fretting over Nyesom Wike’s threat to escalate the revelation. And then, the escalation blew up from within. Ayu may have collected, but the alleged N1 billion in Lagos has turned out to be a tip of the iceberg.

A purse of about N10 billion suddenly evaporated. Haba! The spokesperson said it was to house its bigwigs. But how do you give money to a person who does not know why he got it? Then those persons kept the money and were already fantasising how to spend it, when they realised they had to refund. Only after this newspaper had revealed the truth as a wind blows open the hind feathers of a mother hen. Is this PDP’s DNA?

Can we forget what happened during Jonathan? When the national security adviser understood that the security of the pockets was a prime assignment of his fellows, and billions starting moving around, even the media was not spared the hurricane of free cash. Ayu is ONSA part two. Is that why Wike wants Ayu fired? If he can collect a princely sum, why can’t others collect measly cash? As measly as N28 million. What is good for Ayu is cooing for others in the party. Now, not many will be so heroic to refund. The party bigwigs need housing, eh?

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Indeed, they need to buy some of the houses the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu is building for first-time home owners in the city and the ones the trojan of works, Babatunde Fashola (SAN) has completed in parts of the country. They need to abandon their rented huts first.

We cannot have our big men remain homeless, not when there are billions wasting away in the party vault. Forget the masses, if we don’t house those who own houses in Ikoyi and Maitama, what example of prosperity shall we bequeath to the common folks? Maybe they want to live among the masses, and apply for three bed-room bungalows instead of the fifty-room complexes that no one occupies, since the kids are away in the west anyway.

Don’t tell me that some have converted some of the money to dollars and pounds and some of their kids are already shopping in Manhattan and Champs Elysees in Paris. Perish the thought.

As the campaigns begin, we should look outside. The world elite is failing this generation. Hence our candidates ought to learn, and voters ought to guard their PVCs. It is an age without vision or example. Its heroes are pigmy, its ideas a soap bubble, and its malice large. Conscience has retreated to tribe and tent, and crowds worship to disguise their worry. Faith has swapped temples when it has not swamped it. The leaders, though puny at heart, have lifted themselves above the earth like some Roman emperors, including Commodus and Julius Caesar. They are becoming gods in human flesh.

This is not a time to wish our leaders to travel. When they are not lounging at home, they are in an airport lounge. As the campaigns hoot off, I would have asked them to hop across the world and observe one great tragedy: this is an age of poor leaders.

The big nations are stumbling like humpty dumpty. This is happening both in the west and east. Just last week, Great Britain’s new prime minister Liz Truss came back to earth after bidding the queen farewell to heaven. And what a crash. It may defer her own crash, but not so the pound, her ratings, the mortgage crisis, and the fear the former great colonial metropolis faces an economic apocalypse. A woman voted in by less than two percent of the country developed a blueprint that is giving the country the blues. It’s Truss without trust. Her predecessor made a bravado of cunning. He got caught, and it ruffled him like his crown of hair.

The US is in the after-glow worm of Trump’s imperial sway, a man that turned barbarism into a virtue of state policy, and he is being cheered with animal glee. He lies to lie again, cheats with a smirk, bullies like a right and hates like an article of faith. Even a man who may be called a little Trump, known as Ron DeSantis, is turning imitation into a savage art. Recently, this governor of Florida lied to immigrants and dumped them in a no-man’s-land. It’s a small reminder of the Middle Passage of the slavery era.

In Brazil, we have an ex-soldier, Jair Bolsonaro, a fuddy-duddy as hoodlum on the throne and he is seeking a second term. He, too, is aping Trump, trying to raise bullying into the status of statecraft. The polls, I hope, are what they promise: a shellacking for him. He defied Covid leading to many deaths, damaged the economy and its green earth, turned a blind eye to corruption, and swaggered as though he owned the country.

In China, Premier Xi Jinping mismanaged COVID-19 pandemic and wanted to profit by it when it prostrated the rest of the world. He is shutting town after town and its soaring economy is unable to flap a nimble wing. He is turning his hubris on Taiwan and ratcheting up global tension of superpower fear with the United States.

Of course, we have Vladimir Putin, who has what I call Caligula complex, combining paranoia with megalomania. His troops have fallen flat in Ukraine, and David is now gloating over a big, lumbering Goliath.

The tragedy is not that these leaders rule without a clue. It is that they have a tribe of followers. They cheer. They rant. They abuse others who are not of their type, race or party. They line behind their leader without questioning.  Their leaders lie, they believe them. When they are used to believing lies, they too becoming like their leaders. They start lying, too, with the face of a hyena. We are witnessing that already here in Nigeria.  Stats are wrong. Economic analyses are wrong. Data is concocted. We cannot blame them for their ignorance. The level of education has fallen. It has also affected their ability to see with their eyes. The followers name fictions as people. People’s faces are not their faces. Someone’s son is not someone’s son. We should not blame the Maker for their lack of good sight. Maybe they have stayed in the sun for too long, or some form of malnourishment has affected their capacity for visual accuracy. We must do something about making fish available in our diet to enrich them with the right vitamins, so some do not see a short man and call him a giant, or see Hamzats in the wrong places, or think one bald man they know must be any bald man in a picture, especially in a hospital with a white woman. Their bad sights make them fulfil Shakespeare’s mockery in a question, “But are not some whole that we want to make sick?”

We need bold vision, not bald vision.

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They have no ideology or game plan. hen they do, it is about tossing the other guy, impoverishing the weak, and enthroning a set of people to the agony of others. Putin is in a desperate condition. He called a sham poll in a region to annex cities he knows he cannot defend. He wants to scare the Ukrainians on pain of nuclear blast. That is a coward’s line. They are turning upside down the point of playwright Jean Paul Sartre that “hell is other people.”

We must look for people who have done things. Those who cannot be fly-by-night. Those who do not lie about their past and their followers have no clue what is true or not but are hiding behind him to pursue a furtive agenda.

If we had a Putin, we have also a Zelensky, a man who has a clear vision on how to win a war for the people. Not a rabble rouser who knows that he has followers like the ladies in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. During a parade, some women hail Caesar with such zest that a mutineer called Casca says, “If Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.” Trump said similar things about his supporters. It’s like Jesus’ caution about blind leaders leading the blind into a ditch.

This election should be about reason, not wild sentiment.

Travel may not help our leaders if they go abroad and see the puny leaders on the world stage. We may consider one of the wisest men who ever lived and regarded as the father of modern philosophy. Immanuel Kant, that is. His eye never spied past sixty miles of his village his whole life.

Another writer, the tempestuous Emile Zola of the Dreyfus case, said, “Nothing develops intelligence like travel.” He knew about that. He fattened on exile even as he churned out a 21-novel series on one family. We had an Ajala, who scanned the earth but had no other story to tell us than that he scanned the earth.

So, travel is neither good nor bad. It is not the body that travels but the mind. Some travel, as they read books, to confirm their lies or absorb new landscapes of ideas. It may not be true after all, as Nobel Laureate Olga Takarczuk wrote in her novel Flights, that “barbarians don’t travel.”

Let our leaders’ minds travel with vision.