The diaries section of Sam Omatseye’s ‘Beating All Odds: Diaries and Essays on How Bola Tinubu Became President‘ takes in and records for posterity small and big points and issues of the campaign not excluding desperate attempts by Tinubu’s adversaries including newspapers and television stations as well as their columnists and anchors who took their antagonism to his candidacy to heights of unprofessionalism hitherto unknown in Nigerian journalism.
At moments, it became difficult to distinguish between the jungle of social media and what was expected to be a saner, more restrained, and professional terrain of traditional, mainstream journalism.
In many ways, Nyesom Wike continued to influence the tenor and texture of the campaigns as depicted in the diaries.
In the week of November 18, for instance, Wike invited Peter Obi to commission a flyover in his state. At the event, Obi mouthed one of his untruths in a futile attempt to aim a blow at Tinubu’s jugular. As Omatseye puts it, “The Labour candidate also made news with another lie. He said he knew Peter Odili as a schoolmate at Christ the King College, and that he was a great footballer. He spoke as though a witness. But Odili was in CKC when Obi was still a toddler or at most a six-year-old. He wanted to translate that moment to launch a jibe at the APC candidate by showing that he had recognizable classmates but he turned out to make a fool of himself.”
In another diary entry in the week of November 25, 2022, Omatseye records Tinubu’s wife, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, campaigning in flawless Itshekiri linguistic flourish in Warri, Delta State and Wike unsettling governors of the South-South by revealing that his plethora of projects were executed with funds released by Buhari to all the Niger Delta governors; monies which had been denied them since 1999.
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Some of the diary entries depict in bold relief the dilemmas confronted by Tinubu in his maneuverings toward the presidency. For instance, what would be the attitude of the APC candidate to the incumbent APC administration of President Muhammadu Buhari? In Omatseye’s words, “Another development was the speculation from some pundits that it may not be easy for the APC presidential candidate to navigate the Buhari terrain in propagating his own candidacy. This is because of some bad news about ASUU, flagging currency, and a sense of disaffection with the direction of the country. Buhari is perceived as a huge albatross on the Tinubu candidate, and this has come up with the statements from the spokesman, Festus Keyamo, who is trying to play a delicate balance between selling Tinubu’s virtues without alienating the Buhari circle.” The diarist’s advice here is that Tinubu needed Buhari’s goodwill in key Northwest sweepstakes like Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, and Jigawa and that the candidate should continue along the shrewd path of not alienating the President.
In the week of September 9, 2022, Omatseye notes in his diary the marked improvement in power supply and the lull in banditry. But he is disappointed that the media play these down. Even more strangely, the Buhari administration does not blow its own trumpet. “The bad part”, Omatseye writes, “is that the Buhari administration and the APC echelon are also quiet about it. No one can tell your story like yourself. The APC ought to seize the momentum. If power and insecurity go, the opposition and cynics have no word of contention with the ruling party…It is high time the Asiwaju campaigns seized this and explained why these pieces of good news and brag.”
Although this book is a collection of diaries and essays on the 2023 presidential election, the first essay in the second part titled ‘The APC challenge’, was published in Omatseye’s column on February 18, 2013. The first paragraph offers a good specimen of Omatseye’s ‘Prosetry’. Hear him: “It mocks us as well as it embraces us. It is the ultimate judge and its verdict can either bruise or boost us. But it is inevitable. It is history, a perennial guest at the contemporary dinner table. Whether or not we agree to fete it, its appetite gravitates to our feast.” This essay has as its focus the founding of the APC, an epochal development without which the outcome of the country’s electoral cycles as from 2015 would have been radically different from what it turned out to be. Analyzing the communique read on behalf of eleven governors by Kashim Shettima who declared their support for the new APC coalition, the author writes, “That is why I say that the governors and the party wheel horses behind the mergers must pray for history not to prey on the nobility of the idea”. Note the word play on pray and prey – ‘prosetry’ at work. It is a stirring piece in which the writer deploys the tools of the historian to take a rear mirror view of our political evolution to recall how the progressive coalitions against erring parties at the centre in the first and second republics failed to achieve their objective of winning power through the ballot box as a result of contending vaulting ambitions, incompatible personalities, draconian utilization or outright electoral chicanery.
One of the fascinating pieces in this book is titled ‘A Lagos Original’ published on January 17, 2022, after Tinubu had first publicly and formally unveiled his intention to contest for the presidency come 2023. Soaring to inspired heights of lyricism, the author paints vivid pictures of Tinubu’s strengths and attainments which placed him in great stead not only as the immediate front runner in the race but one aspirant with a bright possibility of achieving his ambition and occupying the coveted office. In Omatseye’s weekly essays on the no-easy route to the 2023 presidential election, the swirl of events and developments on an uncertain, often unpredictable terrain come alive in glowing colours of a gripping narrative. They are placed within a comparative historical context, enriched with literary anecdotes, seasoned with philosophical musings and elucidated for better comprehension through sheer analytic lucidity.
On February 21, 2022, for instance, he wrote on ‘APC as a sick baby’. He refers to what amounted to a veritable coup d’etat within the APC when its Adams Oshiomhole-led party executive was decapitated mostly by conspiratorial governors who saw this as a first step to denuding Tinubu of whatever influence he had in the party and ultimately truncating whatever future ambitions the former Lagos State governor harboured within the inner recesses of his soul. Of course, we are aware of how the Buni-led caretaker and extraordinary convention planning committee that supplanted Oshiomhole came to an ignoble end and the APC had to return to a constitutional order.
Another interesting essay is ‘The Bazaar’ penned on May 30, 2022, with its lens trained on Atiku’s emergence as the presidential candidate of the PDP. “So, to Apostle Paul again”, Omatseye writes, “Atiku won a corruptible prize, a dollarized victory. It was a bazaar of democracy, and what a bizarre duel. A democracy of the money men. Money and politics have never turned more obscene than the story of the PDP presidential primary”. And here, the essayist comes across as a futurologist when he avers that, with Atiku’s triumph as PDP candidate, for the APC “The only option is to have a Tinubu as the candidate. It promises to be a gladiatorial contest…Other than Tinubu, APC has no one near Atiku’s prowess…The option for APC is whether they want to win with Tinubu or lose without him. Do they want to fight a lion with a domestic cat or a bigger lion? It’s a battle of pound for pound and guile guile for guile. It will be a thriller. A week from now will prove it.”
The essays focus on diverse issues around the campaigns such as the emergence of Tinubu, Atiku, and Obi as the major candidates, high points of the various campaigns, the characteristically foxy and wily interventions of Obasanjo, the heated debates on Muslim-Muslim ticket, the pastoral theatrics of ‘men of God in partisan political garbs, the merits of a Kashim Shettima vice presidency, the elections proper and the desperate attempts to discredit both the result and the electoral umpire by sore losers, the post-election attempts to blackmail, intimidate and harass the judiciary, Atiku’s futile fishing expedition to Chicago in search of what was not missing – all these and more attract the attention of the pen from Omatseye’s observatory.
This is a work of history even if written with the hurry of journalistic deadlines in mind. It is a blend of prose and poetry as grounded in realism as in imagination. There is an intricate, intimate nexus between the first part, the diaries, and the second section, the essays. In the diaries, trends are teased out, questions are raised, posers are posited, the author airs his doubts sometimes debating with himself and conclusions are tentative. Not so, the essays. Here, the author takes definitive positions. He makes confident assertions and at times magisterial pronouncements and audacious predictions. In Omatseye’s political analyses, black and white stand in sharp contradistinction. There are no indecipherable shades of grey. For his admirers, this is strength, the hallmark of the opinion writer at his best. His critics would accuse him of a tendency to bias and lack of objectivity wondering why he hardly finds fault with Tinubu or sees any good in his adversaries. But partisan stands that don the deceptive garb of objectivity is difficult to distinguish from hypocrisy and Omatseye has chosen not to tread that path.
