The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

The movement of transition

Last week, on Sunday to be precise, Nigeria lost two of her most famous sons. Even for a nation inured to endless mysteries and political perplexities, the astrological signals and significance of these departures could hardly be missed. It was like a double meteor falling off the skies in quick succession. Nigerians had hardly taken in the import of the passing of a former ruler of the country in faraway London where he had sought medical refuge only to be informed that a frontline traditional ruler had also joined his ancestors, this time in the privacy of the royal bedroom.

General Mohammadu Buhari was a notable soldier and civil war hero who became a military head of state and was removed by his colleagues for his strong-willed inflexibility and inability to transcend primordial and provincial proclivities. A man of adamantine resolve, he later became a civilian ruler of the country after three unsuccessful attempts. In the case of Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona, he was a stellar and outstanding product of Nigeria’s durable and resilient traditional institution, becoming the Awujale at the youthful age of twenty six in 1960 and going on to rule over his people with courage and forthrightness for the next sixty five years. After some youthful indiscretions, he settled down to rule his people with much royal flair and firmness.

It was, as they say in this clime, the end of an era. But it is much more profound than that. It was a historic watershed for Nigeria. It was the culmination of the movement of transition in a particular direction which makes reversal in the former direction totally impossible having exhausted its historical and material possibilities. As enunciated by our former teacher Professor Oyin Ogunba, a liberal humanist and scholar of distinction, the movement of transition stresses the absolute contiguity between the world of the living and the world of the dead in the Yoruba cosmology. But it is a one-way traffic or as Amos Tutuola will put it in his colourful English: it is a journey to the land of the “unreturnable”. The dead have expended their visa and cannot return to the world of the living. This is why certain deaths are symbolic of a collective closure and the culmination of a particular phase of existence in a particular nation. It is the unforced and unhurried exit of certain historical forces and exceptional personalities that have dominated and determined the fortunes of their country for good or bad. They are what Charles de Gaulle, thinking of himself, called “sacred monsters”.

The case of the late Awujale is more straightforward and less complicated. The nasty posthumous spat with traditionalists who wanted to take control of the royal remains notwithstanding, he was a beneficiary of more benevolent historical forces and a benign conjuncture. His was a cohesive society with core values shaped by the history and culture of his industrious and enterprising people. Among the various sub-nations of the cultured and cosmopolitan Yoruba people, the Ijebu people stand out for the solidity of their worldview, the rigour of their traditional institutions and the breezy confidence with which they deal with existential and historical exigencies. They have been living in the same domain continuously for over a thousand years and they have never been militarily subdued except once when overconfidence and lack of discretion allowed vastly superior British artillery to overrun their ramparts ending in a humiliating rout at Imagbon in 1892. They quickly recovered the initiative after taking to heart the lesson that ancient amulets are no match for modern bullets.

There can be no doubt that Oba Sikiru Adetona left Ijebu-Ode a much better, more prosperous and culturally thriving place than he met it, with his people more united, more vibrant, more accomplished and forward-looking. Thanks to his cousin, Mike Adeniyi Adenuga the Globacom mogul, the annual Ojude Oba gathering has been transformed into a global cultural extravaganza which has brought world-wide fame and recognition to his domain. He had met Ijebu-Ode a rural municipality and had transformed it through sheer determination and the force of his towering personality to a thriving modern city with well-paved roads, majestic edifices, amenities, first class institutions and a slew of industries. Nothing that could add lustre and prestige to his beloved town escaped his attention and searching scrutiny. A personal example will suffice. After the burial of Toun Onabanjo in 2011, yours sincerely in the company of some notable Yoruba leaders, repaired to his palace.

It was our first and last meeting. After introduction, the Awujale concentrated his gaze and attention on the columnist bemoaning the fact that one was one of those Ijebu children lost to the diaspora. Even after Chief Segun Osoba had told him that one was from a village in Osun State, the revered monarch insisted on our departure that the columnist must return home to put something on ground. Such was his charismatic charm and the goodwill he radiated. By the time he joined his ancestors last Sunday, the late king had been transformed into a supranatural personage of transcendental courage and immanent integrity, a mighty oak and auroch among men. Little wonder that the entire Ijebuland had been thrown into deep mourning and depression.

Read Also: FAAC shares highest allocation of N1.818tr in June

Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said about the general from Daura who left his country far more bitterly divided, polarized and impoverished than when he met it as a self-professed born again democrat and civilian leader. In death as in life, General Mohammadu Buhari split his country and people centrally. While the Nigerian ruling class and its global cohorts showered effusive encomiums and fake testimonials on him, the teeming masses of Nigerians across ethnic and religious lines were not impressed. They jettisoned the cultural admonishment not to speak ill of the dead as nothing but feudal veto and autocratic overreach.

Angry callers jammed switchboards condemning him as an ineffectual political leader and his reign a massive rip-off and hypocritical scam. Never in living memory, except the passing of General Sani which was met with widespread celebrations and wild jubilation in some sections of the country, has a Nigerian leader met with such hostility and scarification in death. They accused him of not walking his talk on corruption, of leaving Nigeria with a worse security nightmare and of compounding the problems of ethnic, religious and cultural diversities in the country. Yet others hailed him for his infrastructural feats which are unequalled and unprecedented in the annals of the country and his massive empowerment schemes which turned out a classic instance of Stone Age economics compounded by a fiscal fiddling of the Exchequer.

These divergent and countervailing opinions point at something more fundamental: a deeper structural misalignment of the nation which Buhari was fundamentally incapable of perceiving. He was a systems man and not a system changer or disruptor. His was a narrow and circumscribed feudal worldview in which all the issues were already settled and in which everybody was supposed to know his place. Having such a man as a leader in a roiling postcolonial menagerie of combustible contradictions is a cruel set-up. But power hungry while being politically maladroit Buhari was a willing martyr and accomplice. He allowed himself to be set up while also setting up the country and its teeming expectant populace. Under the spreading colonial chestnut tree of political perfidy, you sold me and I sold you.

A man of more cultivated social habits, wider reading regimen and sharper political instincts would have seen through the fog from a mile off. Throughout his life, there was a lingering whiff of spite, resentment and scornful contempt as if he could not live down the haughty condescension of the blue-blood feudal Brahmins who looked down on him as belonging to an inferior caste of forest dwellers and the humiliation of having been toppled by his own junior colleagues. After he was elected the president of the country, a senior military colleague and former benefactor was known to have remonstrated with him that it was time to forget and forgive those who had wronged him in the past. He was said to have looked up in consternation at his former boss before exploding: “Including Ibrahim?” Yet it was the same Ibrahim whose magnanimity and generosity of spirit made sure no harm came his way on the night he was arrested and dethroned.

Nigeria is not a unified or homogeneous country. Its contradictions have not been simplified and unbundled to a simple confrontation between the haves and the have-nots. Those, including this writer, who invested unrealistic hopes in the general from Daura have not been fair to him or the country. We had unfairly surmised that with his populist mystique, his aura of authority and messianic infallibility he would be the avenging avatar that would drag the north by the scruff of the neck screaming and kicking into the portals of modernity. But General Buhari is not a Colonel Mustapha Kemal Ataturk; neither is he a Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser or even Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi for that matter. This is because Nigeria is neither Turkey nor Egypt or Libya. We must always modify our expectations based on the internal configuration and the state of nationhood of each country.

General Mohammadu Buhari has given it his very best shot. He was not a rebel or a radical but a former herd-boy made good. In an engrossing play of irony, his military superiors who in 1976 upon the assassination of Murtala Mohammed foreclosed his appointment as Chief of General Staff, Defense Headquarters on the patriotic grounds that based on his political clumsiness such an appointment might imperil a sterling military career merely opened a surer path to political preeminence for him. General Obasanjo and General Danjuma could not see far into the turbulent future. Both Buhari and Shehu Yar’Adua, the man who acceded to the post, were classmates in Katsina Provincial College but there is no evidence of deep friendship between the two. The two military brass hats ended up in partisan politics with Yar’Adua perishing in Abacha’s Gulag while Buhari went on to become a twice elected civilian president.

With the transition of General Buhari last Sunday, we have reached the end of an era; a critical threshold in the history of the nation and the culmination of events which began fifty years earlier with the overthrow of General Yakubu Gowon and the ascendance, military dominance and political hegemony of the civil war officers, those heady warriors who believed that because they fought for the unity and preservation of the country, they also had a right to control the political and economic destiny of the nation. They have left their deep marks on the tumultuous history of the nation. It has taken half a century for the nation to discharge its debt of obligation to them. But now, Nigeria has entered a new phase.

July 20, 2025
Atiku’s presumptuous politics

Former vice president Atiku Abubakar’s resignation from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will be the third from the party since he began participating in Fourth Republic politics. He had defected from the PDP to the Action Congress (AC) in 2006, fled back to the PDP in 2009, then sauntered to the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2014, and then crawled back to the PDP in 2017 for the purpose of contesting the 2019 presidential poll. After a long hiatus, in which he virtually abandoned the party to the likes of former Rivers governor Nyesom Wike, he rekindled his interest in the party essentially to contest the presidency in 2023. Finally, to cap an inglorious culture of political peregrinations, the nomad again resigned last week from the PDP to seek solace and fulfillment in another adopted party, the African Democratic Congress (ADC). After his 2023 presidential election debacle, analysts concluded that he had blown his last chance at winning the presidency. But he thinks he still has another ‘last chance’, hence his orchestrated mass migration to the ADC.

He resigned from the PDP a day after former president Muhammadu Buhari died in London on July 13. While one of his aides, Paul Ibe, claimed the resignation letter was leaked and was not meant to overshadow the burial of the former president, another aide posted the letter on X (Twitter). There was of course no leak. Having tendered the letter to the appropriate authority in line with the PDP constitution, and with no caveat attached to its circulation, it was only natural that so significant a resignation should be publicised. More, for a man so taken by the inscrutable art of political metaphysics, he saw the death of the former president as a good omen for his political ambition, an augury that beckons immediate action. In any case, by July 16, Alhaji Atiku was reveling in the announcement of his resignation. He had attended the burial of the late president on July 15 flanked by former Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai and former Sokoto governor Aminu Tambuwal as they walked to the late president’s residence on account of the crowd that thronged the funeral. Hailed extravagantly like heroes just back from battle, he and his cohort interpreted what seemed like a festival of welcome directed at them on the approaches to the Buhari residence as proof of resounding victory in the 2027 presidential election.

The former vice president’s resignation letter illustrates a man who consistently labours under grand illusions. Apart from opportunistically projecting himself as the inheritor of the Buhari mystique – and it is extremely hard to see how or why – the letter also tells brazen lies about his intentions, his worldview, and his ambitions. He predicated his resignation, or ‘parting of ways’ as he put it, on “the current trajectory the party has taken”, which he argued diverged from the PDP’s ‘foundational principles’. This was of course an egregious lie. The party’s trajectory has not changed a jot, notwithstanding the convulsive politics of some of its panjandrums. What is more, its ‘foundational principles’ have remained neither fully conservative nor passably progressive. The party has in fact engaged in ideological straddle for decades, indeed from its birth. If anything has changed, it may perhaps be its repeated failure to muster the kind of subliminal confidence that attended its birth and weaning. Nothing else has changed except the defeats that have corroded its essence and denuded it of courage, a malaise contributed in no small measure by the political whoredom Alhaji Atiku practiced in and around the party and programmed into its mindset.

Read Also: Presidency slams ADC over Buhari’s burial remarks

Not done with exaggerations and fondness for outright mendacity, the former vice president boasted that he was a founding father of the party and was therefore heartbroken to resign. If indeed he was a founding father, no child should ever aspire to be groomed by such a truant and absentee father, one who kept running off with every voluptuous temptress in the neighbourhood. The truth is that Alhaji Atiku is totally bereft of conviction; he has no idea what the term ‘founding father’ means. Worse, to speak of heartbreak, a word he used twice in his impassive resignation letter, is to indicate a lack of lexical integrity to capture his false emotions or crystallise his thoughts. There was of course nothing heartbroken about his exit from the PDP. Had he been truly heartbroken even once, having exited the party three times in this republic, his heart would have been broken into a thousand pieces. The unvarnished truth is that he left the PDP because he had overstayed his welcome. He had played ducks and drakes with their affections, and had taken them for granted. He used and dumped them so many times that they grew weary of his excesses and shenanigans. He was indifferent to leaving the party, so, too, was the party in gladly getting rid of him, his kept aides, and his unfeeling cohort. Had the party pandered to his political whims, he would have stayed put and massaged their ego. He would have thrown a few bones to the party dogs and deployed them for his so-called last electoral stand.

After many years of being tossed hither and thither by users and political adventurers, the PDP has finally come into its own. If they can leverage their newfound determination, if they can manage to refine their ideology and spruce up their platform, and if they can face their seemingly dire future with courage and pertinacity, they might yet confound sceptics and revivify their electoral chances. Their hope is not as grim as it seems on the surface, especially with the exit of the political wayfarers led by the former vice president. Despite the emergence of a third force in the shape of ADC, the PDP still has better footing than any other party save the ruling APC. One PDP leader said of Alhaji Atiku that his exit was good riddance to bad rubbish. That might seem harsh; but judging from the cavalier manner the former vice president plays his politics, every negative metaphor hurled at him must be deemed an absolute understatement.

July 20, 2025
Natasha and her contentiousness

The suspended senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan is as inscrutable as they come. Until she broke into the national scene a few years ago, she was hidden in thorough anonymity. But once she turned her electoral contest against former Kogi State governor Yahaya Bello into a soap opera, there was no stopping her. Controversial, recalcitrant, and self-centred, she has also demonstrated a huge capacity to be exploitative and manipulative. Her current battle, however, is with senate president Godswill Akpabio. Yet, three times in her recent jousting with the man she had sensationally accused of sexual harassment, she was offered a way out of the bind in which she threw herself. Thrice she spurned the offers.

She had hoped the case would be resolved in her favour through local and international public agitation. Despite her best efforts, including shedding crocodile tears and manipulating top Nigerian women whom she described as ‘useful idiots’, she came a cropper. Now, she has cases in three courts. In one, after Justice Binta Nyako of the Federal High Court fined her N5m and asked her to apologise to the court for contempt, she has dragged her feet. In fact she has appealed, with the senate also embarking on a cross-appeal, thus tying up the case a few knots further. She seems to enjoy the reputation of being contentious, in addition to being naïve, pedantic and embroiled in completely needless battles and controversies. However, with each grueling case and controversy, she becomes less and less believable and credible.

The movement of transition

By Tatalo Alamu (PIX)

Last week, on Sunday to be precise, Nigeria lost two of her most famous sons. Even for a nation inured to endless mysteries and political perplexities, the astrological signals and significance of these departures could hardly be missed. It was like a double meteor falling off the skies in quick succession. Nigerians had hardly taken in the import of the passing of a former ruler of the country in faraway London where he had sought medical refuge only to be informed that a frontline traditional ruler had also joined his ancestors, this time in the privacy of the royal bedroom.

General Mohammadu Buhari was a notable soldier and civil war hero who became a military head of state and was removed by his colleagues for his strong-willed inflexibility and inability to transcend primordial and provincial proclivities. A man of adamantine resolve, he later became a civilian ruler of the country after three unsuccessful attempts. In the case of Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona, he was a stellar and outstanding product of Nigeria’s durable and resilient traditional institution, becoming the Awujale at the youthful age of twenty six in 1960 and going on to rule over his people with courage and forthrightness for the next sixty five years. After some youthful indiscretions, he settled down to rule his people with much royal flair and firmness.

It was, as they say in this clime, the end of an era. But it is much more profound than that. It was a historic watershed for Nigeria. It was the culmination of the movement of transition in a particular direction which makes reversal in the former direction totally impossible having exhausted its historical and material possibilities. As enunciated by our former teacher Professor Oyin Ogunba, a liberal humanist and scholar of distinction, the movement of transition stresses the absolute contiguity between the world of the living and the world of the dead in the Yoruba cosmology. But it is a one-way traffic or as Amos Tutuola will put it in his colourful English: it is a journey to the land of the “unreturnable”. The dead have expended their visa and cannot return to the world of the living. This is why certain deaths are symbolic of a collective closure and the culmination of a particular phase of existence in a particular nation. It is the unforced and unhurried exit of certain historical forces and exceptional personalities that have dominated and determined the fortunes of their country for good or bad. They are what Charles de Gaulle, thinking of himself, called “sacred monsters”.

Read Also: FAAC shares highest allocation of N1.818tr in June

The case of the late Awujale is more straightforward and less complicated. The nasty posthumous spat with traditionalists who wanted to take control of the royal remains notwithstanding, he was a beneficiary of more benevolent historical forces and a benign conjuncture. His was a cohesive society with core values shaped by the history and culture of his industrious and enterprising people. Among the various sub-nations of the cultured and cosmopolitan Yoruba people, the Ijebu people stand out for the solidity of their worldview, the rigour of their traditional institutions and the breezy confidence with which they deal with existential and historical exigencies. They have been living in the same domain continuously for over a thousand years and they have never been militarily subdued except once when overconfidence and lack of discretion allowed vastly superior British artillery to overrun their ramparts ending in a humiliating rout at Imagbon in 1892. They quickly recovered the initiative after taking to heart the lesson that ancient amulets are no match for modern bullets.

There can be no doubt that Oba Sikiru Adetona left Ijebu-Ode a much better, more prosperous and culturally thriving place than he met it, with his people more united, more vibrant, more accomplished and forward-looking. Thanks to his cousin, Mike Adeniyi Adenuga the Globacom mogul, the annual Ojude Oba gathering has been transformed into a global cultural extravaganza which has brought world-wide fame and recognition to his domain. He had met Ijebu-Ode a rural municipality and had transformed it through sheer determination and the force of his towering personality to a thriving modern city with well-paved roads, majestic edifices, amenities, first class institutions and a slew of industries. Nothing that could add lustre and prestige to his beloved town escaped his attention and searching scrutiny. A personal example will suffice. After the burial of Toun Onabanjo in 2011, yours sincerely in the company of some notable Yoruba leaders, repaired to his palace.

It was our first and last meeting. After introduction, the Awujale concentrated his gaze and attention on the columnist bemoaning the fact that one was one of those Ijebu children lost to the diaspora. Even after Chief Segun Osoba had told him that one was from a village in Osun State, the revered monarch insisted on our departure that the columnist must return home to put something on ground. Such was his charismatic charm and the goodwill he radiated. By the time he joined his ancestors last Sunday, the late king had been transformed into a supranatural personage of transcendental courage and immanent integrity, a mighty oak and auroch among men. Little wonder that the entire Ijebuland had been thrown into deep mourning and depression.

Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said about the general from Daura who left his country far more bitterly divided, polarized and impoverished than when he met it as a self-professed born again democrat and civilian leader. In death as in life, General Mohammadu Buhari split his country and people centrally. While the Nigerian ruling class and its global cohorts showered effusive encomiums and fake testimonials on him, the teeming masses of Nigerians across ethnic and religious lines were not impressed. They jettisoned the cultural admonishment not to speak ill of the dead as nothing but feudal veto and autocratic overreach.

Angry callers jammed switchboards condemning him as an ineffectual political leader and his reign a massive rip-off and hypocritical scam. Never in living memory, except the passing of General Sani which was met with widespread celebrations and wild jubilation in some sections of the country, has a Nigerian leader met with such hostility and scarification in death. They accused him of not walking his talk on corruption, of leaving Nigeria with a worse security nightmare and of compounding the problems of ethnic, religious and cultural diversities in the country. Yet others hailed him for his infrastructural feats which are unequalled and unprecedented in the annals of the country and his massive empowerment schemes which turned out a classic instance of Stone Age economics compounded by a fiscal fiddling of the Exchequer.

These divergent and countervailing opinions point at something more fundamental: a deeper structural misalignment of the nation which Buhari was fundamentally incapable of perceiving. He was a systems man and not a system changer or disruptor. His was a narrow and circumscribed feudal worldview in which all the issues were already settled and in which everybody was supposed to know his place. Having such a man as a leader in a roiling postcolonial menagerie of combustible contradictions is a cruel set-up. But power hungry while being politically maladroit Buhari was a willing martyr and accomplice. He allowed himself to be set up while also setting up the country and its teeming expectant populace. Under the spreading colonial chestnut tree of political perfidy, you sold me and I sold you.

A man of more cultivated social habits, wider reading regimen and sharper political instincts would have seen through the fog from a mile off. Throughout his life, there was a lingering whiff of spite, resentment and scornful contempt as if he could not live down the haughty condescension of the blue-blood feudal Brahmins who looked down on him as belonging to an inferior caste of forest dwellers and the humiliation of having been toppled by his own junior colleagues. After he was elected the president of the country, a senior military colleague and former benefactor was known to have remonstrated with him that it was time to forget and forgive those who had wronged him in the past. He was said to have looked up in consternation at his former boss before exploding: “Including Ibrahim?” Yet it was the same Ibrahim whose magnanimity and generosity of spirit made sure no harm came his way on the night he was arrested and dethroned.

Nigeria is not a unified or homogeneous country. Its contradictions have not been simplified and unbundled to a simple confrontation between the haves and the have-nots. Those, including this writer, who invested unrealistic hopes in the general from Daura have not been fair to him or the country. We had unfairly surmised that with his populist mystique, his aura of authority and messianic infallibility he would be the avenging avatar that would drag the north by the scruff of the neck screaming and kicking into the portals of modernity. But General Buhari is not a Colonel Mustapha Kemal Ataturk; neither is he a Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser or even Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi for that matter. This is because Nigeria is neither Turkey nor Egypt or Libya. We must always modify our expectations based on the internal configuration and the state of nationhood of each country.

General Mohammadu Buhari has given it his very best shot. He was not a rebel or a radical but a former herd-boy made good. In an engrossing play of irony, his military superiors who in 1976 upon the assassination of Murtala Mohammed foreclosed his appointment as Chief of General Staff, Defense Headquarters on the patriotic grounds that based on his political clumsiness such an appointment might imperil a sterling military career merely opened a surer path to political preeminence for him. General Obasanjo and General Danjuma could not see far into the turbulent future. Both Buhari and Shehu Yar’Adua, the man who acceded to the post, were classmates in Katsina Provincial College but there is no evidence of deep friendship between the two. The two military brass hats ended up in partisan politics with Yar’Adua perishing in Abacha’s Gulag while Buhari went on to become a twice elected civilian president.

With the transition of General Buhari last Sunday, we have reached the end of an era; a critical threshold in the history of the nation and the culmination of events which began fifty years earlier with the overthrow of General Yakubu Gowon and the ascendance, military dominance and political hegemony of the civil war officers, those heady warriors who believed that because they fought for the unity and preservation of the country, they also had a right to control the political and economic destiny of the nation. They have left their deep marks on the tumultuous history of the nation. It has taken half a century for the nation to discharge its debt of obligation to them. But now, Nigeria has entered a new phase.

July 20, 2025
Buhari eulogies and aftermath

In the next one or two weeks, the obituaries written on the late former president Muhammadu Buhari will dry up. It is in the nature of his life and administration that such compositions will have ephemeral value as his controversial image probably deserves. He died on July 13, was buried on July 15, and since then, for nearly one straight week, copious obituaries have been composed on his life and times, whether in or out of office. The obituaries have naturally been mixed, distributed almost evenly between those who eulogise him, some of them outrightly elegiac, such as the expanded Federal Executive Council confected on July 17, and those who dismiss his character and capacity in scathing and unsparing post-mortems. Given how polarising and unappeasable he was as a person and political and military leader, no one seems sure how heartfelt the eulogies are, whether they mirror reality or whether they are merely being politically correct. But as for the bilious post-mortems, no one needs to measure the amperage of the words to determine that they are unfeigned.

The surprise in all this is the genuineness of President Bola Tinubu’s grief over a man who in his eight years in office was conflicted about requiting the devotion and reverence shown him by the future president. Ex-president Buhari of course deserved a state burial, and President Tinubu dutifully and wholeheartedly gave him one, including composing a stirring lamentation for the departed. But how much of it was duty or heartfelt may never be known. Perhaps it depends on which part of the former president the sitting president decided to focus on. There was the President Buhari who never really idolised President Tinubu, and had taken extraordinary steps to preclude him from succession, including exorcising the ruling party of all his influences, and promoting a cocktail of policies designed to make the former Lagos governor’s ascension impossible. Those hurdles were orchestrated over eight years, and in particular, and with added severity, over the last two years before succession. The late president was not averse to being sponsored in every material particular by the Lagos politician, but he was loth to compensate his devoted associate.

But there was also the President Buhari who at the last moment, after the deluge of hostile and orchestrated policies had not barred the former Lagos governor from fighting for and winning the nominations battle, had sensibly got out of the way and declined to swing the presidential election one way or the other. President Tinubu had always said that all he needed was for the former president to observe strict neutrality, insisting that he was quite capable of dealing with his contenders, singly or collectively, be they the cantankerous and entitled former vice president Atiku Abubakar and the unprepossessing former Anambra governor Peter Obi. In the end, but indefensibly for a man who benefited so much from the former Lagos governor’s help in winning the 2015 election and the 2019 reelection, he decided to stay neutral. Neutrality may not indicate affection, but President Tinubu appears grateful that he did not have to battle an openly biased sitting president in addition to warding off attacks by fierce competitors, religious bodies, and even tactless and venomous Yoruba elite. However, it speaks to the essential Muhammadu Buhari that he never matched what he felt were the duties of others to him with the obligations he correspondingly owed them. How the eulogists of the expanded FEC, not to say his many faithful aides, glossed over this mainstay of his character is beyond comprehension. Did he perhaps reflect on this contradiction before he passed away peacefully in London? The story may never be told.

On balance, and as many obituarists catch their breath in order to carefully pen their thoughts on the departed, it does seem like former president Buhari has been successfully characterised as shallow, pedantic, simplistic, boyishly honest, bigoted, and a blight on Nigeria. How much of this characterisation is fair and accurate may be difficult to gauge in the short term. There are always two sides to a man: one good, the other bad, and no one personified both sides than the former president. At certain moments and to those close to him, he seemed incredibly thoughtful, benign, empathetic, and unrepentantly nationalistic. At other moments, given his befuddling public speeches on sore national and existential issues, he seemed the total embodiment of ethnic and religious exceptionalism, in fact a promoter of Fulani hegemony. The debate will continue for some time. But whether the jury will be hung is hard to tell, especially if the eulogists do not, as expected, observe a ceasefire.

Read Also: Nigeria teledensity hits 79.65%, 48.81% broadband penetration

What appears indisputable about the late president’s life and leadership is that his limited education and exposure, particularly going by his disinclination to improve himself, conspired to render his projection of great principles and assimilation of a great sense of justice impossible. Presiding over a country of over 230 million people armed with a disparate sense of justice, an improper appreciation of the rule of law, a simplistic view of developmental economics, an impressionable understanding of the debilitating intrusion of religion in national politics, and inability to develop a penetrating vision of the future is bound to wreak havoc on any presidency. When he left office some two years ago, the lives of Nigerians were not altered in a positive and substantial way. He was in fact already mummifying in his retirement. Had his death not come a little quickly after he left office, though he always seemed quite older than his official age, he would have been confined to anonymity in a year or two more.

In the months ahead, Nigerian politics will have to contend with the vacuum the former president’s death has left. Because he did not create a systematic body of thought, and since the northern elite as a group was wearied by his intransigence and wary of his mass appeal, his captive and generally unquestioning followers will now be rudderless and up for grabs. This vacuum may explain the avalanche of eulogies by politically correct aides and analysts, not to talk of the reticence of the northern elite. It may also partly explain why President Tinubu has been careful to give the devil his due, idiomatically speaking so to say. It is not known whether the president foresaw that this day would come earlier than expected; but he must now fashion a way to get a huge slice of the charged Buhari crowd, regardless of how viciously the CPC component of the APC constitutes itself into a wrecking ball. But judging from how deliberately little the late president impacted the 2023 presidential poll in favour of the ruling party, the president must now take his destiny in his own hands to woo a region he had for over two years bent over backwards to mollify. He may surprisingly have more success in that endeavour than he believes possible, for there will now emerge a fierce competition for the soul of the region by northern political leaders determined to avert an even more catatonic Atiku hegemony.

July 20, 2025
Sights and sounds of the Buhari burial

It is hard to miss the scores of anecdotes that came out of the Muhammadu Buhari burial rites, which the mainstream media either glossed over or buried in the bowels of their paragraphs. Three of the anecdotes deserve special mention. The first one came innocuously from Katsina State governor Dikko Radda. He recollected an interaction he had with the late former president over the fuel subsidy controversy. According to the governor, the former president had remarked with uncommon candour: “I pity Bola (President Tinubu) for what he is doing. He is a brave man for removing the fuel subsidy. When I was president, whenever I made an attempt to remove the subsidy, a lot of people would give me too many reasons not to do so. But Bola did it immediately. If he had consulted people, he could not have removed the fuel subsidy…” Nor could former vice president Atiku Abubakar and former Anambra governor Peter Obi, both of whom ran for the presidency and pontificated insincerely on what they would have done differently about the subsidy.

The second anecdote was a Freudian slip from former head of state Abdulsalami Abubakar while paying a condolence visit to the Buharis in their London residence. Said he while recounting his relationship with the late president: “My relationship with Buhari dates back to as far back as 1962; we joined the military, and he was my senior. During the unfortunate civil war, we fought in the same sector. Buhari is a gentle man who is very quiet but exceptionally honest.” Gen. Abubakar of course meant to praise ex-president Buhari, but he managed to cast doubt on the true age of the departed leader, a constant dubiety among Nigerian leaders, judges, and footballers. Gen. Abubakar himself is officially 83 years old, so how at death could his senior be younger than he is? Of course, according to some sources, the late president was about 89 years old. After all, former president Olusegun Obasanjo is over 91 years old, though he claims to be 88, much younger than those who called him egbon (senior).

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The third interesting titbit, but a little more disturbing, came from one of the late president’s former longtime associates, Buba Galadima, an engineer and fiery politician. He stated categorically that he and others recruited the late president into politics for nefarious and sectional reasons. Hear him: “General Buhari came into politics; it wasn’t his province. He never liked politicians because he believed we are fake and that we don’t mean what we say, but there was an incident that made some of us to recruit him, convince him, and use other people to convince him to join politics, even though we had our own agenda…To cut a long story short, we achieved our first purpose of putting a brake to what OPC was doing because immediately Buhari joined partisan politics, we had a very big outing in Daura to initiate him into politics. The Obasanjo government became restive and was shaking to its bone marrow and because those were some of our thinking, Obasanjo had to really checkmate the OPC. So we achieved our first purpose of bringing General Buhari into partisan politics.” In other words, the late Buhari, perhaps unknown to him, was dragged into politics to help checkmate the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) militancy.

July 20, 2025
Adeleke, Aregbesola: opportunism trumps alliance

On the eve of Osun State’s July 2022 governorship election, former governor Rauf Aregbesola’s faction of the All Progressives Congress (APC) declared that its members would remain progressives. The Osun Progressives (TOP), as they became known, neither confirmed nor denied whom they would support, Ademola Adeleke, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), or Gboyega Oyetola, the incumbent. Mr Aregbesola’s supporters, who had endured a bitter falling out with the APC’s Mr Oyetola, were noncommittal. They eventually worked for the ‘enemy’ in order to prove that alienating their leader could be catastrophic. Two days after clinching a decisive victory, Governor Adeleke confirmed on television that Mr Aregbesola’s men worked for his victory. By insinuations and public demonstrations, the former Internal Affairs minister proved to Osun and Nigerians that he was indeed pivotal to the outcome of that July 16, 2022 poll.

That tentative alliance built on shaky foundations and subterfuge has finally collapsed. It was not an ideological alliance, for Mr Aregbesola is a pretentious socialist, and Mr Adeleke a hybrid conservative. It was also not founded on any firm convictions, for neither of the two leaders had ever demonstrated adherence to principles. Governor Adeleke is carefree and indifferent to ideas of any kind, and Mr Aregbesola is a bitter and vexatious politician who would seize upon any weapon or idea, no matter how contradictory, to execute his plans and overthrow his enemies. It was also not an alliance founded on anything enduring. Except to the excitable Mr Aregbesola, every other person in and outside Osun State knew that Mr Adeleke, as superficial as he seemed, was unsettled by his alliance partner’s politics. However, like every tactical politician, Mr Adeleke sensibly took advantage of a partner’s treachery, but recognised he would have to be on his guards against a newfound friend for whom betrayal was effortless.

The governor’s fears have finally been proved right. His former partner has sworn to oust him from the State House in next year’s governorship election. Arriving back home in Osun last week to advertise his new political affiliations, the former governor, who is also the Interim National Secretary of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), had scorned Mr Adeleke’s political moves and promised that the ADC, which is the fulcrum of the Atiku Abubakar-led mega-coalition to unseat President Bola Tinubu, would take over Osun in 2026. He had declared: “Those who know my value and worth gave me this new position, and now they (APC and PDP) are making noise. Their noise doesn’t concern me — they haven’t seen anything yet…Before we started this journey, they said there would be three political parties in Osun State. It is obvious he (Adeleke) is decamping now. We will meet in Abere — ADC will win the Osun governorship race in 2026.”

Cut to the quick, Mr Adeleke unleashed a verbal fusillade at the former governor. Speaking through his spokesman, Olawale Rasheed, the governor said: (Mr Aregbesola) is “a man who left a legacy of huge state debt, half salary, scam tablets, and several fanciful, inflated, and uncompleted projects…(His tenure was) the worst in Osun history…The empty boast of Mr Aregbesola about 2026 is a symptom of a troubled mind who sees wrong vision, who is battling his benefactor, and who is haunted by the pains and suffering he inflicted on millions of Osun people through his evil policies and programmes. A man who should be remorseful and tender public apologies for his years of maladministration has the audacity to threaten Governor Adeleke who is clearing the mess left behind by Mr Aregbesola after his eight years of anti-people, thoughtless leadership…Mr Aregbesola’s wickedness against workers, public servants, and Osun people knows no bounds while he wielded state power. A man who introduced half salary, misapplied contributory state pension fund, and misused state cooperative deductions fund should be ashamed of his temerity to attack a Governor who is now paying up the half salary affliction, clearing the unjustified debt and rehabilitating brutalised Osun workers…The Adeleke administration has paid 28 months out of the half salary left behind by Mr Aregbesola…”

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Few Osunites saw this sustained piece of invectives coming from the dancing governor whom many believed couldn’t hold a grudge. But the suspicion is that Mr Adeleke, once he settled down into governance and weighed the enormity of Mr Aregbesola’s maladministration, waited for years to ventilate his feelings on the sordid mess he met on ground. The former Internal Affairs minister, not one to let bad enough alone, and too cocky and self-entitled to moderate his emotions or anticipate a trap, gave the governor the opportunity to disembowel him. After exhaling in that fusillade, Mr Adeleke probably felt his burden suddenly lightened. He has not demonstrated inspiring capacity in governance, but he is certain that Mr Aregbesola, of all people, can’t hold a candle to him. The governor might conceivably allow himself to play second fiddle to any other governor or former governor, but never to the preening Mr Aregbesola.

Now that the opportunistic alliance in Osun has broken down irretrievably, Mr Adeleke can move on. He has insinuated he might be defecting to the APC, from whence he came in the first instance. But he is being resisted by APC housekeepers. If they can transcend their differences and kiss and make up, they will form a formidable pair. Mr Aregbesola has boasted about his invincibility; he is merely posturing. Neither he nor his supporters, nor yet the malformed and ambitious ADC, can stand before an APC into which the PDP in Osun has collapsed its structure. Fighting an incumbent electorally is not easy; fighting an incumbent who has migrated to the national ruling party would indeed be herculean. Not even the boastful and irascible Mr Aregbesola can pull a rabbit out of that Osun hat.

July 20, 2025
SNAPSONG 262

The Camera’s Green Eyes

Rise this new dawn, Earthchild,
And sing your way to the top of the day
Measure your stride
With the supple simplicity

Of gifted moments. Commence your dialogue
With the trees whose leaves
Swing to the urgent warrant of the wind
Under a sky still quick with the mellow magic

Of compassionate clouds.
The birds, ever so grateful
For your quiet company, welcome
Your voice to their choral company

Green, graciously green, the trees cherish
The way your toes touch their roots
The way your hands embrace their bark
And your defence of their right to life

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They pledge their leaves as your fan
On days the heat is tense
Their shade as sacred spot for
For your striving fancy to stand and stare

Bless the roving lenses and their capture
And the hand which steers and steadies their gaze
There is no aspect of the tree’s green glory
Un-proclaimed by your camera’s prodigious practice

The trees sway to the music of your Muse
Oh Earthchild
May your Orchard of Grace
Stay forever grand and green

July 20, 2025
Farewell to Awujale Adetona

For several reasons, the late Awujale of Ijebu land, Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona (Ogbagba Agbotemole II), will go down in history as one of the luckiest.

Besides ascending the throne of his forefathers at a youthful age of 26, Oba Adetona had one of the longest reigns, spanning 65 years, one of the longest not only in Yoruba land but also across the country. His long reign was marked by peace and development. Despite this, he stayed out of trouble – traditional, social, and financial – in most parts of the period. He was never enmeshed in self-inflicted intrigues. He was also among the first set of traditional rulers who were well-educated and well-liked by their people.

Even in death, there were testimonies from his people that he did not mingle with those who would tarnish his image. To the people, he was a living legend, someone they fondly called “Orisa Ijebu,” or the Ijebu deity, about the reverence his people accorded him. It was not because he was a tough traditionalist; it was because the people cherished his contributions to their progress and held him in high esteem. He was a tested and trusted leader who defended the people’s interests.

He was the personification of unity in his vast domain, in the axis of Yoruba land, which shares boundaries with Remo in its southwest, Ibadan in its north, Osun in its northeast, and Ondo towns and villages, such as Mahin in Ilaje, in its southeast. He was the quintessential man of the people.

The revered Awujale was responsible for the advantageous position of Ijebu-Ode, his seat of traditional power and headquarters of Ijebu land.

To his credit, all the Ijebu believed in him as a moral voice and source of inspiration throughout the period of his time in power.

He cherished and protected his royal background. If he had dreamt of becoming a king, little did he guess that the honour would come at the prime of his life.

The selection of the 26-year-old prince in 1960 as the successor to the deceased Oba Adesanya Gbelegbuwa II, who joined his ancestors the preceding year, was a turning point.

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Charming, sociable, charismatic, educated, cultured, enterprising, and forward-looking, Oba Adetona was a product of township consent in the people’s search for a more enlightened ruler for the emerging modern era. It was consistent with the advice of colonial Governor David Cameron that educated monarchs were more knowledgeable and exposed than their illiterate counterparts..

Sixty-five years later, Ijebu-Ode is better for it. The people made the finest choice, and they have continued to reap the fruits of development, progress, and prosperity.

While the tenure of his predecessor was full of tension, with two assassination attempts on him, Oba Adetona largely presided over a peaceful era with neither adversary nor misfortune. God made him to triumph over challenges. He continually deployed the weapons of incisive wit, courage and principle. A very accommodating paramount ruler, he promoted inclusion and rallied sons and daughters from all towns and villages to see themselves as one. This was evident in the display of oneness and cohesion by the “regbe-regbe” (age groups) during the yearly Ojude-Oba (literally: the King’s Front Yard) Festival, which always attracts tourists to his domain.

Ace Apala musician, the late Haruna Ishola, captured the unique installation and presentation of the staff of office to Oba Adetona in Ijebu-Ode by the Premier of Western Region, the late Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, in the epic record he waxed after the ceremony.

Tall and dignified, Kabiyesi exuded happiness over the fulfilment of destiny. The town was aglow with festivities. Eminent Yoruba leaders, including the Leader of Federal Opposition, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, witnessed the historic moment. The attention of the whole country was on Ijebu, the land of enterprise.

It was a story of sacrifices. Oba Adetona’s father, Prince Rufai Adeleke, who nursed a legitimate ambition for the throne, sacrificed his aspiration to boost the chance of his beloved son.

The obedient son, after the encouragement of the elders who craved a better tomorrow for Ijebu land, answered the call with patriotism and sacrificed his pursuit of education and golden fleece in the United Kingdom to serve his people.

Three Ijebu-Ode community leaders – Ogbeni-Oja Timothy Odutola, Chief Emmanuel Okunnowo, and Chief Samuel Sonibare – stood behind the young monarch like the Rock of Gibraltar. They were prominent Action Group (AG) stalwarts. Odutola, a reputable industrialist, served as a member of the Regional House of Assembly. Okunnowo, also a businessman, was a federal parliamentarian, and Sonibare was an investor and media owner who kept the purse of the party. Lamentably, Sonibare latter passed on in 1964, barely four years after that patriotic community service.

Nobody could fault the judgment of the three Ijebu musketeers at that moment of cardinal decision-making. They acted in the community’s interest. They never led Ijebu astray. They also brokered genuine reconciliation between the new Awujale and other contestants. The young monarch also submitted himself to their gerontocratic guidance. Arrangements were made for offsetting the expenses incurred by other contestants.

Following his ascension to the prestigious stool, Oba Adetona automatically joined the tiny elite club of Yoruba obas whose members included the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi; the Eleko of Lagos, Oba Musendiku Adeniji-Adele; the Olowo of Owo, Oba Olateru Olagbegi; the Ewi of Ado-Ekiti, Oba Anirare Aladesanmi; the Olubadan of Ibadan, Oba Isaac Akinyele; the Zaki of Arigidi-Akoko, Alhaji Olanipekun; the Aholu Menu Toyi of Badagry, Oba Cladius Akran; the Deji of Akure, Oba Ademuwagun Adesida; the Odemo of Isara, Oba Samuel Akinsanya; and the Timi of Ede, Oba Adetoyese Laoye.

Remarkably, these monarchs were also active leaders of the AG. It was a time of hot regional politics. Two years after he ascended the throne, the Western Region was in turmoil. Neutrality was impossible for key leaders.

When the party split in 1962 during the Jos Convention, some of the traditional rulers, who were ministers and House of Chiefs members, took sides in the divisive and destabilising politics, queuing either behind Akintola or Awolowo. Politically, Yoruba land became divided.

Oba Adetona was a member of the House of Chiefs. Thus he was not insulated from political pressure. The monarch witnessed the sudden collapse of a united Western Region, the friction between Awolowo and Akintola, the bitter contest for power and lack of tolerance, the ‘Wet E’ episode in the “Wild, Wild West,” the trial and the imprisonment of the Federal Opposition Leader, and the collapse of the legitimate authorities in Nigeria.

Thirteen years later, the scion of the Anikilaya royal family in Ijebu-Ode was embroiled in a misunderstanding with the state government. His palace was threatened. Former Ogun State Governor Olabisi Onabanjo, a subject of the Awujale, announced the deposition of the king. The governor’s action was premised on the suspicion that Kabiyesi was pro-National Party of Nigeria (NPN), the ruling party at the federal level, while the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) was the main opposition and governing party in Ogun State.

The battle shifted to the court. The late Adama Constance Yesufu, lawyer and politician, who once reminisced on the Awujale’s ordeal to reporters in Lagos, insisted that it was all political. His Royal Majesty, nevertheless, survived. The feud was festering when the Second Republic collapsed. The rest, as it is often said, is history.

Today, traditional rulers are agitating for constitutional roles, oblivious of the fact that their involvement in politics in the past created problems for them. The Aseyin was harassed by the Akintola government. Alaafin Adeniran Adeyemi 11, former Oyo Divisional Council chairman, was deposed. Owo, the domain of Oba Olateru-Olagbegi, was divided. Zaki Arigidi fled his town. Akran of Badagry was detained. Emir Sanusi of Kano also had a problem in 1962. The salary of Odemo of Isara, Oba Samuel Akinsanya, was reduced to one kobo per year. Politicians challenged the Eleko, Oba Musendiku Adeniji-Adele, to a duel at the Lagos Council. A Soun of Ogbomoso was beheaded. The lessons of the past are very instructive. The wise need to learn from history rather than to repeat it.

Oba Adetona’s permanent tenure spanned the elongated period of military rule and four republics. Under him, Ijebu land continued to produce citizens who add value to the country. The people’s pastime is trading, which is consistent with the economic pursuits of their forebears.

Indeed, Ijebu paramount kingship was linked with commerce. To profit from the trade along the coast, ancient kings of the land erected tolls for traders en route to Ejinrin (in Lagos State) in the days of yore. It made them and their aristocratic companions very rich.

Oba Adetona continued to build on the legacy of prosperity through clean and legitimate commerce in a modern era. He led by example as an investor of note. He guaranteed ease of doing business by offering accommodation to indigenes and other residents.

Major markets in Ijebu-Ode, including the famous Ita-Osu, Ita-Ale, and Oke-Aje, which was named after him years ago, were expanded and modernised. They became the confluences of commerce for traders from all walks of life during Oba Adetona’s reign.

Ijebu-Ode grew in leaps and bounds under his reign. Its population increased geometrically. Today’s picture of urbanisation in the town contrasts with the sixties, when big amenities and huge government presence were not there. The town is now proud of more industries and other commercial ventures, tertiary institutions, hospitals, five-star hotels, and numerous housing estates.

The monarch also contributed to the development of scholarship by instituting an academic chair in politics and good governance at the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU) at Ago-Iwoye in Ogun State. Last week, Governor Dapo Abiodun said it would gladden the hearts of the people whenever Oba Adetona’s School of Post-Graduate and Research Studies in Governance is affiliated to the Nigerian Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) at Kuru, near Jos, the Plateau State capital.

Oba Adetona was an advocate of justice. He saw all Ijebu sons and daughters as his children. In moments of adversity, he has never turned his eyes away. On a number of occasions, he tried to reconcile politicians in deep conflicts without taking sides.

Also, it is noteworthy that he never abandoned any of his subjects in distress. A case in point was the plight of the business icon and big employer of labour from Ijebu-Igbo. The royal father pressed buttons until the siege was over.

Oba Adetona did the same for the late Lt.-Gen. Oladipo Diya, a former Chief of General Staff (CGS), whose life hung in the balance when his boss, the late military Head of State, General Sani Abacha, said he had uncovered a coup plot involving the Odogbolu-born senior soldier. When Abacha tried to dwell on the extent of Diya’s alleged involvement, the royal father reportedly said: “But remember, Diya is my son.”

Bold and courageous, he advised against the third term agenda.

Like many progressive blue blood in the Southwest, Oba Adetona was thankful to God that a Yoruba son, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, became President in his lifetime. He remained very close to him till his last day.

Oba Adetona’s unfulfilled dream is the non-actualisation of the Ijebu State. But for Ijebu and Remo compatriots, the struggle to actualize the dream continues. Its realization will gladden the heart of the late monarch even while he is with his ancestors.

July 19, 2025
PMB: Simplicity in life, dignity in death

It would have been surprising if his death last Sunday, July 13, in a private hospital in London, had been received with universal approbation and adulation of a virtuous, unblemished life in a polity as complex and fraught as Nigeria. First, there are no human beings without fault. With the possible exception of the immaculately spotless Peter Obi, according to the holy gospel of the ‘Obidients’, mortal leaders are no angels. Again, an inevitable and unavoidable price of greatness is the intense controversy evoked by those who make a significant impact on history across time and space. Those who love them do so fanatically, and those who detest them are implacable in their hatred. And so it was with President Muhammadu Buhari, unassuming military Head of State for about 20 months between December 1983 and August 1985, and two-term elected President of Nigeria from 2015 to 2023. It was no different with Ahmadu Bello, Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ladoke Akintola, Murtala Mohammed, Odumegwu Ojukwu and several others who had played prime roles in Nigeria’s political evolution.

When he died in 1987, the great sage, unrivalled administrative genius and first Premier of the Western Region in Nigeria’s First Republic, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was passionately mourned by his teeming followers and remorselessly reviled by those who could not differentiate him from Satan. The great novelist and thinker, Professor Chinua Achebe, had issued a public statement after Awolowo’s death, accusing him of supporting genocide during the Nigerian civil war, and vigorously canvassing against according the great politician a state burial. He did not believe that the dead deserved some respect, and he was no doubt entitled to his view in a free and open society. It is instructive in this regard that Awolowo’s arch political opponent, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, who defeated him in the 1979 and 1983 presidential elections, awarded him the National Honour of Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR), even though Awo was never President.

A near-unanimous refrain in the outpouring of emotions following President Buhari’s transition to eternity from both his friends and foes alike, however, was the unrivalled ethical pedestal he bestrode and the impeccable moral integrity that characterised his over five decades in public life. His aversion to material accumulation earned him the lifelong adulation, adoration and reflexive loyalty of millions of ordinary Nigerians, particularly in Northern Nigeria, where mass poverty is particularly pronounced, largely as a result of leadership lack of vision and elite venality. Indeed, in his slim but powerful classic, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, Achebe had traced the excessive materialism that is the bane of contemporary Nigeria partly to what he described as the deficiency in the political thought of some of our key founding fathers.

As Achebe put it, “A perceptive student of Nigerian politics, James Booth, has drawn attention to the poverty of thought exhibited in the biographies of Dr Azikiwe and Chief Awolowo in contrast to the expressions of ideology to be found even in the more informal works of Mboya, Nyerere and Nkrumah! In a solemn vow made by Azikiwe in 1937, he pledged: ‘that henceforth I shall utilise my earned income to secure my enjoyment of a high standard of living and also to give a helping hand to the needy’. Obafemi Awolowo was even more forthright about his ambitions: ‘I was going to make myself formidable intellectually, morally invulnerable, to make all the money that is possible for a man with my brains and brawn to make’. Thoughts such as these are more likely to produce aggressive millionaires than selfless leaders of their people. An absence of objective and intellectual rigour at the critical moment of a nation’s formation is more than an academic matter. It inclines the fledgling state to disorderly growth and mental deficiency”.

Though controversial, Achebe ‘s contention here in my view contains some grains of truth. Buhari was no intellectual and did not pretend to be one. He was a simple soldier who defended his country’s territorial integrity first on the battlefield, next in a war against indiscipline and corruption through ‘redemptive’ military statecraft between 1984 and 1985 and then on the partisan political terrain as a politician and emergent statesman between 2003 and 2023. Yet, he had a strong moral orientation to life undoubtedly influenced by his deep commitment to Islamic spirituality. It is amazing that a man who was military governor of the former North Eastern State comprising about five states today did not seize the opportunity to amass stupendous wealth. He was a former Chairman of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and military Head of State but never allocated any oil bloc to himself. He never acquired any property in Lagos. It almost sounds like fiction. It was after he left office in 2023 that the succeeding Tinubu administration upgraded his house in Kaduna.

When he assumed office as military Head of State in 1984, following the martial overthrow of a thoroughly corrupt and decadent Second Republic, the military still had the image of being a redemptive, messianic institution with the requisite reservoir of patriotism and professional integrity to rescue Nigeria from the havoc of predatory politicians. There is no doubt that Buhari and his deputy, Brigadier General Tunde Idiagbon, pursued their War Against Indiscipline and Corruption in essentially purist and uncompromising, Messianic terms. Thus, they set up anti-corruption tribunals that tried and jailed corrupt politicians of the Second Republic for terms that amounted to life sentences. They publicly executed drug couriers and jailed foreign exchange speculators. They drafted draconian punitive laws against a media they perceived as veering beyond the bounds of liberty into licentiousness.

Even before his emergence as military Head of State, Buhari ‘s patriotic commitment to Nigeria was indisputable. In his thrilling and authoritative book, ‘Soldiers of Fortune’, the lawyer, writer and historian reputed for his extensive knowledge of Nigerian military history, Max Siollun, wrote, “Buhari was in charge of troops sent to Nigeria’s north-eastern border region in 1983 to prevent infiltration by armed rebels from the neighbouring Republic of Chad. After his troops successfully cleared the rebels from the border area, the troops advanced several kilometres into Chadian territory. The political hierarchy ordered Buhari to withdraw his troops, but he refused, arguing that the Chadian rebels would return to the area as soon as his troops departed… Buhari was finally persuaded to withdraw after President Shagari enlisted Buhari ‘s superior officers, Lt-Generals Jalo and Wushishi, to order him to pull back.”

As expected and as Max Siollun writes, the incident created a tense relationship between top members of the Shagari administration and Buhari and that “It also caused enough concern in the government for the Transport Minister, Umaru Dikko, to place Buhari under surveillance. Dikko also pressured the Chief of Army Staff, Lt-General Wushishi, to block Buhari ‘s posting to Lagos…The strong-willed Buhari complained to President Shagari that Dikko had asked his movement to be monitored. When Shagari raised the issue with Dikko, Dikko did not deny the accusation, but simply warned Shagari that Buhari could not be trusted and should be retired. Dikko had woken a sleeping tiger.”

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Widely reviled by Nigerians, Umaru Dikko had a reputation for corruption, arrogance and contempt for suffering Nigerians. When asked on national television about the economic hardships being experienced by Nigerians under the Shagari administration, he responded by asking if any Nigerians had been seen eating from dust bins! The audacious attempt by the Buhari regime to abduct Dikko from Britain, where he had escaped to after the 1983 coup, an effort coordinated with the support of the dreaded Israeli intelligence outfit, Mossad, made global news at the time. Dikko had been successfully kidnapped outside his residence when he was taking a walk, anaesthetised into unconsciousness, bundled into a waiting van and driven away by Nigerian and Israeli security officers. He was later offloaded into a crate labelled “diplomatic baggage”, addressed to the Nigerian Ministry of External Affairs in Lagos and transported in a lorry to Stansted Airport, where a Nigeria Airways plane was waiting to depart for Lagos with its “diplomatic baggage” at 3 pm.

Unfortunately, there had been a last-minute lapse in the operation and British security and immigration agents in and around the airport had been put on high alert. Attempts by the British authorities to inspect the diplomatic crate were vigorously protested by a Nigerian officer, Major Ahmed Jarfa Yesufu (rtd) and one Okon Edet, a member of the Nigerian High Commission in London. According to Max Siollun, “The vehement protests were dismissed and the police opened the crates with a crowbar. What they found inside was shocking. In the first crate was a bound and unconscious Dikko with his torso bare. Dikko ‘s captors had shoved an endotracheal tube into his throat to prevent him from choking on his own vomit when he was unconscious. His captors wanted him brought back to Nigeria alive. Besides him was Shapiro, brandishing syringes and a supply of additional anaesthetics to administer to Dikko if need be. Shapiro asked the customs officers, “Well, gentlemen, what do we do now?”

Those were momentous episodes in Nigeria’s foreign policy at the time, resulting in a prolonged diplomatic face-off between Nigeria and Britain. Buhari’s transition from a feared military dictator to a democratically elected two-term President who governed with utmost respect for democratic ethos is unprecedented in Nigeria’s history. Obasanjo also governed as a two-term elected President after previously serving as a military Head of State who voluntarily handed over to a democratically elected President in 1979. But on his second coming as elected President, his attempt to secure a tenure extension for a third term in 2007 had to be thwarted by a concerted resistance of critical political stakeholders. Obasanjo sings his anti-corruption credentials from the rooftops and labels everybody else as corrupt. But the monstrous Hilltop mansion in Abeokuta and the expansive Obasanjo Presidential Library complex, as well as numerous multi-billion Naira private investments, give the lie to his rhetoric. Buhari has no such baggage.

This column does not intend to join the debate on the achievements or otherwise of the Buhari administration for his eight years as elected President. His accomplishments are there for all to see, and his failings too, like any leader. One of these is that he was too trusting of some of his key aides who hid behind the cover of his unstinting integrity and credibility to amass humongous wealth without the slightest iota of compassion for the teeming talakawa that Buhari loved and who reciprocated his affection fervently. Yet, some of such unscrupulous persons see his consistently over 12 million votes over several electoral cycles as an asset they can inherit and trade with, even as the honest one leaves us in a blaze of glory. They should not underestimate the intelligence of Buhari’s masses.

Flashback to October 1, 1974. In his address to the nation, Nigeria’s military Head of State at the time, General Yakubu Gowon, told his stunned countrymen and women that his earlier pledge to return the country to democratic governance by 1976 was no longer feasible. Aba Saheed, pen name of Akogun Tola Adeniyi, fiery and unsparing columnist with the then trail-blazing Daily Times, responded with a pungent and incisive piece titled ‘Death, I salute you!’. He warned about the transience of human existence, the ubiquity of death and the ultimate vanity of power. Buhari needed no such admonitions. According to his media adviser, as President, Femi Adesina, towards the end of Buhari’s tenure, he asked the former President, “after here, what next?” And he responded, “I’m looking forward to leaving. And from there, I go to my grave at the appointed time”. No wonder he was so indifferent to the obsessive accumulation of wealth and the arrogant utilisation of power. May the honest one rest in deserved peace.

July 19, 2025
Trophy presentation

The Europeans, and indeed some others, know that soccer is a major source of entertainment. It creates anxiety, characterised by shocking results, especially with the final games, which leave watchers of the sport globally in awe. Indeed, bookmakers, punters, pundits, gamblers, and stakeholders in the industry, most times, lose their bets based on the form exhibited by the teams in games leading to the final.

But football is a cruel game. It neither knows who inflated it nor gives preference to its owner in deciding its results. It is a game in which the hungrier side on match day wins. Such other permutations as ball possessions amount to rhetoric when the chips are down. Sincerely, it is one game whose outcome doesn’t entirely depend on the side with the largest percentage of ball possession winning. The iconic coach Jose Mourinho has taught the world that a pragmatic side, which does its tasks clinically by marking out dangerous players on the pitch, is more likely to win the game, provided the opposition’s manager doesn’t come with a counter-tactic to neutralise the more disciplined side based on tactics.

Final games are most times a thriller of sorts, especially when the odds by bookmakers and lovers of the game, including armchair critics and analysts, are heavily against one of the finalists. The weaker sides, which lie low like Chelsea, prefer to do the talking on the pitch to underscore the unpredictability of the outcome of games.

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I had my doubts over Paris Saint-Germain FC of France for Sunday because of the way they played against English Premier League sides, starting with the Round of 16 game against Liverpool. It was apparent that the Parisians couldn’t cope with the speed of the Reds, with each of them winning on away grounds until the penalty kicks which decided the tie. This writer must state here that over the two legs, PSG were the best team, but they were left bare by Liverpool’s spirited style of play, which any good team would exploit.

One was, therefore, not surprised that Aston Villa dragged PSG to their knees. In fact, if Aston Villa players were experienced enough, they would have beaten PSG. One must add here that Villa’s manager shot himself on the foot when he substituted Marcus Rashford, who, until his substitution, troubled the Parisians.

Arsenal’s European dream was ended by goals from Fabian Ruiz and Achraf Hakimi, who earned Paris Saint-Germain a 2-1 win on the night and set up a Champions League final against Inter Milan. Ousmane Dembele’s early strike gave Paris St-Germain victory at Emirates Stadium. Dembele stunned Arsenal when he swept home a low finish from Khvicha Kvaratskhelia’s delivery only four minutes into the semi-final first leg. PSG won both legs, but Arsenal was the better side on the balance of play on both nights, with the Gunners to date ruing the absence of a poaching striker in their team.

Having seen the way PSG struggled against the English, I didn’t rule out Chelsea with their pragmatic style anchored on quick breaks on the counter-attack to surprise PSG. But I had a big doubt about Chelsea’s goalkeeper Sanchez. Yes, Sanchez proved me wrong in that final game with several acrobatic saves and strong and positive mental strength, when put under immense pressure from the Parisians, especially in the early part of the second half.

Sanchez, for me, was the star player for Chelsea. He grew in confidence and stature as the competition progressed, culminating in keeping three clean sheets from the six matches Chelsea, losing only one game. No prize for guessing right that Sanchez was voted the best goalkeeper of the 2025 Club World Cup competition in the United States of America (USA).

July 19, 2025