Category: Idowu Akinlotan

More than three decades after he first plunged into politics as a senator, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, 71, has finally met his destiny. Perhaps he sensed it early enough that he would be president one day; or perhaps the thought first crossed his mind as a governor. Whatever the real story, and assuming he remembers with certainty when the thought first came to him, he had since then forged ahead undaunted by grief and setbacks, ignoring every provocation and suffering, and enduring all kinds of slander. He takes office tomorrow exuding a heart of steel, tried and tested by time and history, and unencumbered by cabals and all kinds of political hostage takers. But his fortitude and preparation will come under extreme stress tests and scrutiny in the months and years ahead, for he is playing on a different turf now. As a brilliant accountant and administrator, he had meandered through tasks fearsome and cumbersome enough to drain a man’s soul or pulverise an ordinary leader, and had endured punishment and vendetta from opponents and sworn enemies with unusual tenacity and equanimity. And either because of these qualities or because he was born into it, he has also grown to become one of Nigeria’s most controversial but nevertheless sought-after political strategists, a man with an intuitive and unerringly canny capacity for sound choices, a man with a keen sense of smell for unobtrusive agenda unconstrained by age or science.

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President Tinubu’s fortitude is matched only by his confidence and optimism. As the era bearing his name begins tomorrow, he will reflect on his past battles in order to determine which factors made him overcome. Perhaps those factors could still serve him well in the many bruising battles ahead. Notwithstanding, he is not a stranger to political battles; for his nature and chequered background have imbued him with matchless capacity to confront danger and not flinch. Lagos prepared him well, and after his governorship years, as his vision and ambition took on Pterodactyl wings, he acquired more oomph battling his way through the gauntlet of cantankerous and envious giants of the Southwest, through the hostile and unappeasable All Progressives Congress (APC) intraparty intrigues and wars, and now eventually landing smack in the middle of Aso Villa, Abuja, thereby breaking the mould of leadership succession along the way. He is the first social and management scientist to take office, the first politician since the civil war who was neither a soldier nor sponsored by a military cabal, and the first man to be elected against formidable intraparty and media opposition.

But neither his preparation, which was unmatched by his opponents in the presidential poll, nor his hardiness, which is yet to be surpassed by any of his political contemporaries, guarantees the success of his administration. His predecessor has left the economy burdened by debts and misdirection, especially with various factions of the cabal running riot with bewildering last-minute schemes and stratagems. And the country itself has never been more divided in every sphere. Even after winning the poll by an undisputed margin, his opponents have sought to delegitimise the victory with audacious lies, sabotage and rebellion encouraged strangely but not unsurprisingly by a few influential south-western leaders, retired military and civilian. President Tinubu is accustomed to swimming against the tide, but he will find this peculiar tide bequeathed his administration daunting and corrosive, and he will be tested like no other Nigerian leader has been, no, not since the civil war ended in 1970. He will rely on his leadership character to make a difference, but he will soon discover that making a success of his administration will require skills subliminally in excess of his famed ability for economic management and political strategy.

Leaders are unremarkable these days; they come cheap, armed only by their passion to rule, and with no other accoutrement. Most are, however, ignorant of the metaphysics of leadership; they equate or even limit great leadership to physical development. President Tinubu’s governorship of Lagos probably reminds him of both the insubstantiality of power and the intangible essence of leadership that differentiate great leadership from ordinary leadership. He has rarely spoken about this, nor has he so far attempted to explain why he outlasted his Class of 1999 governorship contemporaries. He was perhaps the most outspoken and audacious of them, and was billed for destruction; yet, he survived. And since vacating the governorship mansion, he has hardly put any foot wrong. Indeed, with minor exceptions, and despite betrayal by some of his protégés, not to talk of bitter hatred by his opponents, he has flourished. Nineteenth century German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, pondered this subject and concluded that “The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past.” It is not clear that as governor, President Tinubu took that lesson to heart or understood its subtle and hugely significant meaning. But, judging from his achievements, he seemed to appreciate the essence of the statement. Now, he must unequivocally treasure it.

In addition to tackling smouldering divisions and comprehensively rejigging education and health, not to mention restructuring the police and security agencies, he must demonstrate a full grasp of the intangibles of power and leadership. The first few months will be intense; but when he reaches cruising altitude, he must turn his attention to those sublime policies and programmes capable of changing the society in ways that make revisionism difficult. During his tenure, his goal must be that when the curtain is drawn on his presidency, the lives of Nigerians must have been changed in unmistakable and fundamental ways for the better. Beyond laurels from sporting, culinary and other mundane competitions, he must give Nigerians reason to believe in themselves and be proud of their country and identity. He must, therefore, manage and defang the antipathy to his leadership emanating from or two regions. He must also find humour in the constant heckles he will be subjected to, heckles that seek to irritate him and bait his shibboleths. Fortunately for him, the three geopolitical zones of the North favour him and demonstrated it with their votes, while his few but vociferous opponents from the Southwest, who will remain unamenable to reason or logic for the duration of his presidency, have little or no clout. And finally he must sponsor fundamental changes in leadership recruitment nationally and at all levels to preclude, as Lagos discovered to its dismay in the last governorship poll with LP candidate Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, inexperienced, unprepared and starry-eyed individuals from assuming sensitive leadership positions.

Tomorrow is President Bola Tinubu’s day, the beginning of a new era of a leadership unfettered by menacing powers and the deathly and iniquitous throwback cultures of the ancien regime. He will be his own man. Last Thursday he was bestowed the country’s highest honour, Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR). If he has not already reflected on how far he has come, let him take a few hours before inauguration to ponder his life’s trajectory. It is okay if he lies prostrate on the floor of his bedroom for an hour or two in total submission before God who has helped him stay true to his ideals, who has made him triumph over many enemies, and who has gifted him this day. He played his part by developing himself, making friends, reaching out to his enemies, and showing courage and strength in the face of odds potent enough to break a dozen gifted men at once. But in the end, he must come to the conclusion that God prospered his politics and gave him the throne. He will encounter many highs and lows as he goes along, and some of his friends will desert him, even as he makes new friends. And as he tries to navigate between hostile and hugely competitive global powers, some of those countries implacably far-right, and others populists, he must remember that his country is behind him, regardless of the unmitigated criticisms and animosity from his political or regional opponents.

In all this, President Tinubu will find solace in the God who has helped him get so far. But that solace is indefinable, unfathomable. It comes only from a place of deep silence, where a president must learn, like other great leaders, to walk in the woods to await direction and instruction from the maker of the universe; woods where, in the words of Chancellor Bismarck, a leader must struggle to hear God’s footsteps and take hold of His coattails as He marches past. The new president’s advisers, if he assembles the right and selfless crowd, will do their best to proffer advice to the limit of their knowledge and ability; but it is God who gives infallible directions. President Tinubu has been tried and tested like no other politician in the past eight years, with venom powerful enough to deflate and ruin him, not to say lure him to respond in kind to his detractors and traducers, hate for hate, and pettiness for pettiness. Instead, he has chosen to allow his victory deliver the message of hope, tolerance and accommodation. It is the ultimate and archetypal revenge. The test he has endured for many years and the lessons he has learnt should ultimately stand him in good stead. In a manner of speaking, he has been weighed and not found wanting. He will be canonised tomorrow as the first Nigerian leader not to be sponsored or foisted upon the country. Indeed, seeing how expansively his vision has defied regional constraints, and ethnicity and religion, he always seemed larger than Lagos and the Southwest. His political reflexes demonstrated this. Now, he must prove worthy of, and large enough for, Nigeria. 

In eight days, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be sworn in as Nigeria’s 16^th president. For him personally, it was a long fight. He will be taking office at a time of global declination of leadership, and will thus be challenged to offer something better, robust, deeper, farsighted and impactful. Even those who resent his style and person, including many in President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, widely acknowledge his track record. Yet, as Nigerian president he must intelligently tweak his style and reframe his paradigms in order to respond well to the bone-crushing and nerve-racking crises his administration is certain to face in the coming months. His predecessors, particularly the outgoing administration, left many things undone; so the incoming president will almost certainly have to start afresh. He speaks ingratiatingly of the outgoing administration, promising to build on their records; but his statements represent nothing more than a nuanced way of avoiding needless conflict. He must know that the country needs a new foundation, and a new direction. He must courageously admit these needs as he takes office.

The president-elect must also be keenly aware of the significance of the spatial distribution of the votes that took him to the presidency, and probably feels the mortifying reluctance of his supporters to explode in raptures after he won the presidency. He will, therefore, be heading into the presidency hobbled by the vociferous opposition his enemies have mustered from inside and outside the outgoing administration. And considering the parlous state of the national economy, and how ethnically and religiously divided the nation has become, repairing the damage will require urgent and far-reaching measures that may further complicate the country’s existential crisis. Asiwaju Tinubu is renowned for his boldness and calculating insight; he will, however, need a balancing act never before seen in these parts. His enemies want him to fail; but the subliminal and perhaps celestial forces that gave him victory will want him to succeed. He is the most prepared and gifted of the three leading contenders for the throne last February, and the most likely to make a success of his administration; but the crowd that embraced the leading opposition parties has little capacity to judge competence or character, preferring instead to embrace chimera.

The president-elect will be taking office at a time when the global economy is facing deep stress and fractures, with predictions of a looming recession occasioned by wars in diverse places, especially the highly causative Russo-Ukrainian War. He will not be able to affect the outcome of that war, and must be less adventurous and meddlesome than the unreflective South African president Cyril Ramaphosa. But he must look out for troubles in unexpected places and opportunities. The United States and its Nato allies remain combative, China is restless, Taiwan is anxious, but Indian has walked the tightrope gingerly, tentatively and discreetly. In all his years in leadership and limelight, Asiwaju Tinubu has not quite indicated how his foreign policy would look like, nor in whose hands – politician or technocrat – he would commit its design and formulation. He can make occasional errors in recalibrating the domestic economy; but despite the grandioseness of his foreign policy manifesto, he can’t afford a lack of surefootedness in external relations. He is somewhat a radical and a reformer, but given the imperialistic shackles hobbling many African countries, the president-elect will find wisdom in proceeding cautiously but firmly and confidently.

By now, he must have found out by books and perhaps too by interactions that exceptional leadership is rare in the contemporary world, at least nothing close to the fateful mid-20^th century. The US, despite its economic and military might, is just patching along, torn between the atavistic forces of reaction and the permissive and often reprobate forces of liberalism; Great Britain is doodling and twaddling, and since Churchill and to some extent Thatcher, has regressed towards the mean in leadership. And France and Germany have done and stood for nothing spectacular since De Gaulle and Bismarck. Ukraine’s Zelensky foolishly jumped in front of a moving Russian train, and nostalgic Putin equates leadership with imperial vanity. After a slew of competent Oriental administrators, China’s Xi Jinping has embraced revisionism, while Asia continues to fumble along. Asiwaju will thus not have many inspiring contemporary role models; he will have to chart a new path for himself, his leadership and the country. Mistakes must be few and far between, but he cannot afford to be paralysed into inaction domestically and internationally.

His style of governance exemplified by his tenure in Lagos has been remarked in many circles nationally and globally. He mentored young leaders with a ferocity that was unrivalled, and despite being ridiculed by his opponents and his contributions downplayed, there is no doubt that he laid the foundation for remodeling and rebuilding Lagos into a megacity. Moreover, he has an uncanny ability in pinpointing, mentoring and projecting successors, sometimes against heavy internal opposition, and also sometimes against his own better judgement. The Lagos formula will, however, not work nationally. Mentoring is undoubtedly a great tool for leadership recruitment and succession, but the president-elect must now identify and mentor young leaders around a philosophical/ideological school. He must find ways of measuring their performance and loyalty, not in terms of his person, but in terms of their ideological and intellectual acuity as well as fidelity to a philosophical school. That presupposes that he himself must be clear about the philosophical/ideological school he belongs. He must not forget that he won the poll, among other reasons, because of the three leading contenders he most approximated ideological clarity. He has a distinct and engaging and charismatic persona, stands for something and is willing to die for it, and also stands a better chance of imbuing the nation with a grand and lofty ambition despite the controversies swirling around him. After all, the campaigns showed unmistakably that there was nothing in Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi but yawning emptiness.

Asiwaju Tinubu is really the first literate economist to preside over Nigeria. No one can pull economic wool over his face. He understands economic and financial issues, whether domestic or global. And he is the first real, as against accidental, politician to take office. He understands the politicisation and weaponisation of the dollar currency and the countervailing challenge of the Chinese Yuan, and to some extent the Russian Ruble. He probably has an instinctive understanding of the political direction of the BRICS countries and why he needs to tread carefully, and may have read up on the moribund non-aligned movement. He also has more than an average grasp of global power structures, balance of power, and how unipolarity replaced bipolarity, not to say the explosion of the myth of Russia’s conventional military invincibility. The president-elect will, therefore, be guided by these complex interplay of forces as he begins the process of rebuilding Nigeria, particularly its power configuration within global, continental and regional contexts. Nigeria must not just have a national identity; it must also be imbued with a national character and ambition capable of projecting power and substance globally, far beyond the gloating purchase of a few fighter jets and gunboats. In short, he has a duty to design a national framework as well as lay a new foundation for the country. Undergirding all this must be a solid and powerful economy that is second to none in Africa; for no country can project power on the back of a weak and doddering economy.

But the Nigerian economy will not respond to corrective measures until the country has found a workable, durable and sustainable political structure, not in the alarming and disruptive sense feared by some parts of the country, but in the sense of a structure capable of allowing ethnic nationalities to develop within their own civilisational and cultural paradigms, a structure able to modulate and regulate relationships between groups. The outgoing administration has not only exacerbated herdsmen/farmers conflict, it has stood arms akimbo as herdsmen pillage communities in genocidal, ethnic cleansing rage. It’s a poisoned chalice the incoming president must grapple with, in addition of course to the many bewildering changes, appointments and commitments entered into by the outgoing administration in the closing hours of their reign.

Read Also: Tinubu returns ahead inauguration

In short, Nigerians are fairly conversant with the president-elect’s economic and developmental ideas and programmes, at least judging from his time in Lagos, if not from the profundity and courage with which he won the presidency against indomitable opposition within and outside the ruling party, including the presidency. So, to some extent, Asiwaju Tinubu is well known. What is not well known is the practicality – beyond his manifesto – of his vision for Nigeria as a society. He has probably studied how empires rise and how and why they fall. It is unlikely he has not isolated the core factors responsible for both positive and negative outcomes. Now, he has the opportunity to write history on a clean slate because his predecessors merely ruled without envisioning anything substantial. Expectations are high, inordinately high. The incoming president will not find help in the outgoing administration which inexplicably keeps muddying the water, and he will not find help in the media which, excepting two or three media organisations, opposed his ambition to the hilt, and still remain embittered by his victory. He won the election against all odds, against all conspiracies, and even now against all propaganda and campaigns of calumny. In addition to doing his best, he must now hope that the supernatural factor that midwifed his victory will prosper his presidency, regardless of inclement global and domestic environments.

Obasanjo wise after the fact on leadership crisis

Two Fridays ago, former president Olusegun Obasanjo once again pontificated on Africa’s leadership challenge, and then zeroed in on the Nigerian angle of the crisis. He had been relentless on the subject before he regained the throne in 1999, and has been unremitting since he vacated office in 2007. In the past few years in particular he has been bilious and unsparing of Nigeria’s leadership failings, not minding that he had eight years to ponder the subject and emplace innovative structures to address the terrible shortcomings he had eloquently spoken about before and after his presidency. Predictably, throughout his presidency between 1999 and 2007, he only addressed the subject when it dealt with other leaders, nearly all of whom he regarded as his inferiors.

Speaking as keynote speaker at a National Daily Newspaper function in Lagos on May 12, the former president as usual bristled at Africa’s leadership failings. Said he: “What the past leaders of Africa did right, that we are doing wrong now, and what were the values and qualities then that is lacking now?…Have we lived up to giant in the sun? If we have not lived up to that, are there qualities that leaders have then that are absent in leadership now? What were there in those days that are not there today? Obasanjo queried. Talk of values, have the values changed? Peace, security and stability are prerequisites for advancement. In those days, these factors were present in our lives.” Never one for specifics, Chief Obasanjo was indifferent about putting a definite timeline on his vituperations against current African leaders. He compared past and present, but failed to say just how far into the past his analysis went – before his own leadership, whether as military or elected president, or just when the All Progressives Congress (APC) took over the reins of government in 2015.

Whatever the case, nothing suggests that Chief Obasanjo really knows much about leadership despite his many years as military head of state and elected president. The jury is still out on how he compares with Gen. Yakubu Gowon and Murtala Mohammed; but against Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari, he seems exuberant. Since he was careful not to put a timeline on his leadership analysis, it would be presumptuous to pin him down to specifics. His argument must, therefore, be examined and understood in general terms. He speaks of Africa’s leadership failings, and Nigeria’s. It is better to assess and limit his conclusions to Nigeria’s leadership crisis, a subject quite identifiably above his competence, rather than expand his analysis to the rest of Africa for which he is absolutely ill-equipped to handle with any kind of expertise.

Chief Obasanjo’s perspective on African leadership is controversially dismissive; it must be understood from his ad hocism and eclecticism. He has never been a philosopher, and his leadership style never went generally beyond the elementally practical. Only he is capable of assessing the subject of leadership without the application of philosophical or scientific tools, and without the intellectual and experiential gravity great statesmen are known for. By achieving debt forgiveness, keeping loans within budgetary thresholds, and building bridges and equipping hospitals, Chief Obasanjo probably judges his administration a success. But denominating success mostly in terms of a few developmental indices masks, if not detracts from, the far more urgent need to cobble together policies and programmes capable of forging national identity and ambition for the country, all anchored on tested and operable paradigms, structures and farsighted ideas. It is these paradigms, structures and ideas that would guarantee national survival in the medium to long run, imbue successive leadership with the wherewithal to run the state, and make leadership recruitment and succession achievable on an enduring basis.

The former president denies the country the benefit of the yardsticks he used in measuring leadership failure in Nigeria and Africa, thereby making it a little difficult to weigh his conclusions. The analyst must, therefore, second-guess Chief Obasanjo and presume the Nigerian leaders he had in mind. He probably thought of ex-president Shehu Shagari, Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, and Dr Jonathan and President Buhari. At one time or the other, all of them were his successors. But what structure of leadership succession did he enthrone as a former military leader or as an elected president? Between 2006 and 2007 when his third term gambit blew up in his face, he focused more on the personality and idiosyncrasy of his successor rather than the integrity of the structure designed to produce him. It lured him into foisting the late Umaru Yar’Adua on his party and eventually on the country, and he went as far as also imposing Dr Jonathan as running mate. Democracy in Nigeria began to wobble dangerously after this heedless misadventure, and has yet to recover nearly 16 years after. Even with the best of structures, producing competent and far-sighted leaders is not always guaranteed; it is worse when there are no enduring structures other than high-sounding constitutional constructs that give little assurance of the ideals hoped for, or when rulers like Chief Obasanjo make up their minds to malevolently subvert or manipulate even those minimum constitutional provisions.

So far, including the May 12 lecture he delivered in Lagos, Nigerians have heard from Chief Obasanjo only criticisms and condemnations. They have not heard, and are unlikely to hear, anything fundamentally and philosophically relevant. The borrowed and obviously ineffectual 1999 Constitution is clearly unsuitable for Nigerian needs. It does not address the problems and peculiarities of Nigeria in the same fairly competent way as the Independence and Republican Constitutions fairly and reasonably attempted. The 1999 Constitution unrealistically presumes and juxtaposes the American cultural and political experiences upon the competing, somewhat sectarian, and immensely variegated cultural and political peculiarities of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities. Chief Obasanjo has never attempted to analyse the relevance of the American Constitution to Nigeria, nor understood its limitations, nor yet appreciated the lack of discipline and philosophical depth debilitating Nigerian politicians from implementing it. This is why there is such a huge dissonance between the constitution and the people. The constitution is an artificial imposition. It is, therefore, exasperating that rather than address these fundamental issues and questions, the narcissism in Chief Obasanjo constrains him into futile postulations and vainglorious comparisons ultimately geared towards self-promotion.

While the traditional media have been under tremendous pressure to shape up or ship out, social media and civil society organisations have continued to enjoy unparalleled freedom in fouling the national well of trust and sowing discord among the people. Yet, the wasteland some civil society organisations have created should justify some firm and consistent regulation. The social media is anarchical; and it will take some exemplary regulations to rein them in. Civil society organisations, on the other hand, can still be safely regulated to some extent because they are registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). Two CSOs illustrate the informational crisis and public perception dilemma Nigeria is contending with.

The 2023 polls have exposed the quandary Nigeria has found itself in its effort to curb the maladies perpetrated by partisan CSOs. The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) founded in 2007, and the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) also founded a year later in 2008, have since last year been unable disguise their partisanship, whether political, religious or ethnic. Fecund at producing press statements, but often unreflective and undiscriminating in their opinions, they have immersed themselves in every controversy imaginable with magisterial finality, and have left no one in doubt where their preferences lie, and have spoken on television and disseminated their views through newspapers with vexing openness. Since they continue to receive significant hearing from the media, they have not felt compelled to summon the restraint and caution needed to imbue their operations with credibility.

In the last polls, the Abuja-based HURIWA and the Onitsha-based Intersociety have been unabashedly pro-Labour Party (LP). They clearly refused to limit themselves to isolating issues and principles violated by all political parties and the electoral body, INEC, for mention, discussion and castigation. Instead, their press statements had deployed fiery and damaging phrases and words to demarket the All Progressives Congress (APC) and rhapsodise the LP. If both CSOs continue to give free rein to their partisan preferences, and subscribe to wild and sweeping but illogical generalisations, it won’t be long before they constitute themselves into the main opposition to the ruling party.

In its response to the February and March polls, HURIWA for instance betrayed its partisanship by coveting the senate presidency for the Southeast and denouncing any northern bid for it. Even if the logic of their position is acceptable, it is not clear that they argued their cause temperately and maturely. “Our suggestion is that the Senate president should be given to the Southeast,” the HURIWA press statement began undisguisedly quoting Emmanuel Onwubiko. “The reason is that the Southeast constitutes one of the legs of Nigeria’s major ethnic groups.” But just in case anyone liked to suggest that the CSO was partisan, as indeed its statement presupposed, it quickly threw in this caveat: “First and foremost we want to state that we are an organisation that is not partisan…Good governance means we are supposed to have institutions that function optimally and benefit the citizens of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Hence, we need a solidly grounded Senate President and a Speaker in order for those individuals to offer what they call checks and balances to the head of the executive arm of government. We want to warn that the next National Assembly shouldn’t be the kind of National Assembly that we now have.” The statement may lack precision and may even be contradictory, but it left no one in doubt what factors coloured their affections.

Even before the polls, in those giddy days when they remorselessly pitched for LP, HURIWA had announced why they deprecated the APC’s Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket. The organisation’s spokesman said with explosive rage: “Before the elections, we warned that allowing a party that has the same faith ticket to produce a President and a vice was going to be devastating for the country.” They did not say and have still not proved the devastation they predicted. It was, therefore, easy for the organisation to weigh in after the polls on what it described as the Yoruba-Igbo ethnic clash in Lagos. It concluded without any substantiation that the Igbo were ‘massively’ attacked in Lagos for ‘overwhelmingly’ supporting the LP presidential and governorship candidates. Perhaps this was the devastation the organisation implausibly referenced. But other states, including in the Southeast, had a far higher casualty rate than Lagos. Why were those states not in focus? This dilemma did not, however, stop HURIWA from threateningly concluding to write “a very powerful letter to the International Criminal Court in The Hague demanding visa ban on enemies of free press and democracy.” How did the issue of free or repressed press conflate with the ‘devastating attacks’?

Intersociety was even more hysterical. Despite the relatively peaceful polls in Lagos and the very low casualty figure – just one confirmed dead – the CSO evoked images of the Rwandan genocide and warned that Lagos was descending into a ‘genocidal enclave’ on account of the statements of APC spokesmen. The organisation even delved into the tangential issue of the LP presidential candidate’s ordeal at the hands of United Kingdom immigration officials at Heathrow Airport, deploring the British authorities for ‘criminalising and assaulting’ him. The statement was revelatory of Intersociety being anything but a civil society organisation. Agitated and frantically active during and after the polls, Intersociety denounced the government for raising ‘false treason alarm’ against Peter Obi and his running mate in the last presidential poll, and predisposing them to what it hyperbolically described as ‘harassment, jihadist assassination plots, and cyber attacks’. Then it recklessly and slanderously listed 50 vice chancellors/professors and 34 others whom it believed rigged the election in favour of the APC. Intersociety of course exculpated a few professors from the Southeast, but raised huge defamatory campaign against the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Olukayode Ariwoola, for allegedly fraternising with the APC, and insisting that ‘state jihadism and radical Islamism’ were responsible for ‘INEC brutally rigging the election’.

Neither HURIWA nor Intersociety, despite their avalanche of press statements given prominence in the media, is really a civil society organisation. They have become partisan and covert arms of the LP and Obi/Datti campaign organisation. As their statements and activities in the last few months illustrate, they are undoubtedly ethnic and religious tools deployed for nefarious purposes. Now that the elections are over, and supposing that they can be tamed to fulfill the purposes for which they were registered, it is expected that they will reorient themselves, temper their hysteria, and caution their generalisations and apocalyptic delusions. If they will not, it will not be out of place if the authorities can nudge them in the right direction using constructive legal corollaries.

JUST when Nigerians thought they had figured out President Muhammadu Buhari, they immediately discovered to their dismay that he is far more mysterious and unpredictable than they can possibly decipher with any tool available to them. Banking on what seemed his long-running and consistent opposition to the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo had urged the president to abort the electoral process midway into the presidential election. And also believing that all the president needed to annul the APC presidential victory were well-aimed threats of apocalypse, the Labour Party (LP) presidential running mate Datti Baba-Ahmed attempted to terrify and blackmail both the president and Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Olukayode Ariwoola not to dare crown the winner. But President Buhari mystified them all by shrugging off all the threats; and he will keep mystifying everyone to the very end, perhaps far beyond the commodious surroundings of Daura, Niger Republic, and Kaduna, his avowed retirement homes.

It is not hard to see why nearly everyone, but a few cognoscenti, misread the president. He has a curious sense of humour that is at once sardonic and bucolic, a subtle and sometimes mischievous laughter aimed from his belly against those who deem themselves his betters, and mordant wit delivered at cocktails, like his last Sallah outing in Abuja, with savage delight and simplicity. In his Sallah remarks, he delivered his now famous apology about those he had hurt in his nearly eight years of leadership. Why, he hurt everybody nearly every month and year of his presidency as a result of his controversial and ill-digested policies and measures, his critics snorted. Few attempted to situate that apology within his essential identity as a jocose provincial, and against the background of his wry and coruscating humour. How, his cynical detractors mused, could a stoic and evidently laconic leader accustomed to Spartan living and indifferent to hardship and punishment apologise for anything?

Look at the famous apology textually. “There is no doubt I hurt some people, and I wish you will pardon me; and those that think that I have hurt them so much, please pardon me,” he was quoted to have said moments after returning home from the Abuja Eid grounds where he had joined other residents for the Sallah prayers. In the Southwest, an outgoing leader is unlikely to offer any apologies, regardless of the unfavourable impressions his leadership might have created. In fact, he is likely to cap his valedictory with the 1969 Frank Sinatra classic, My Way, a song composed by Jacques Revaux with lyrics by Gilles Thibaut and Claude François. Though first performed in 1967 by Claude François and was re-written by Paul Anka for Sinatra, it remains an evergreen to which outgoing leaders, both great and small, are besotted.

Regale yourself with the first stanza of the song:

And now, the end is near,

And so I face the final curtain.

My friends, I’ll say it clear;

I’ll state my case of which I’m certain.

I’ve lived a life that’s full –

I’ve travelled each and every highway.

And more, much more than this,

I did it my way.

In some places, perhaps including where President Buhari hails from, an apology is sometimes the final curtain routine rarely offered with any meaningful conviction. He may on the surface feel squeamish about leaving office, but he is at bottom glad and relieved to go. He feels nostalgic about Daura and his farm, and he has an innate longing for Niger Republic, a longing he ventilated through many creative and sometimes flagrant excesses during his presidency. And in the same way Ibadan (now Lagos) captivated the Yoruba, Port Harcourt the Ijaw, Enugu the Igbo, Maiduguri the Kanuri and allied tribes, and Jos the Middle Belters, Kaduna is the affectionate, more personal and cosmopolitan city of northern intelligentsia and retired military generals. President Buhari will cavort between Daura, Kaduna and, only to a little and perhaps hypothetical extent, an indeterminate town in Niger Republic. His sentiments may cause him to apologise over some of his ‘hurtful’ policies, but given his antecedents, he is unlikely to mean the apology literally. He is not only stoical, and as a military general views apologies as a sign of weakness and an admission of fallibility and poor judgement, he is also by training defiant and unflinching in the face of abuse, criticisms and danger. There is of course the little inconvenience of not being too conversant with how a modern economy runs, and he may have fatally trusted ignorant and half-baked advisers on a number of financial and business policies, but considering the fact that he was weaned on the religious principle that only God is perfect, he would by his reticence and defiance dare anyone to demand a real apology.

Were many people, and perhaps a whole nation as his critics surmised, hurt by his policies? Why, of course, yes; millions and millions. Consider the manner he barked up the wrong tree with his naira swap policy and doubled down on the expensive and destabilising cattle grazing measure, both of which spawned social monsters and significant suffering and death across the nation. And also look at his vacillations within and outside the APC, and his quintessential approach to the rule of law as a subsumption of national interest. Then peruse his economic policies, such as relates to agriculture and extensive border closures, and note why many Nigerians suffered agonising pains as a result of too many misplaced policies. But contradistinctively, it must also be said for him that he did many things right too: rails, roads, bridges, and free and fair polls, regardless of social media perceptions. So, on the surface, there were costly mistakes to attract apologies. Yet, the apology he gave during the last Sallah celebrations was more perfunctory than real.

Beyond the sanctity and propriety of the president’s apology was his diagnosis of how the last presidential poll was won and lost. Here, he was unerring. The opposition has tried to frame their loss in terms of electoral malfeasance perpetrated by both the electoral umpire, INEC, and the ruling party. But they are making heavy weather of their explanations in the same atrocious way they have tragically and mendaciously tried to label the October 2020 Lekki Tollgate protest suppression as a massacre. They have not read the judicial panel report, and have also refused to apply logic in deciphering the last presidential poll outcome. But the president was succinct in his appraisal of the poll. Said he: “Now, their over-confidence is creating more problems for the opposition than anyone else. They are finding it hard to convince those who supported them from outside why they are unable to beat us (APC). A combination of overconfidence, complacency and bad tactical moves made them lose, plain and clear. This has created more problems in their camp. Why did they fail to remove us?… An important reason I congratulate Asiwaju on winning is because the opposition got support and false hope from outside and went on to create the impression that they would win, that they would defeat us.  How more wrong could anyone be?”

It would indeed be incredible for any analyst with modest competence to argue that either the LP or the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won the poll. How could they, after dividing themselves into four debilitated groups, hope to unseat a ruling party that went into the election more or less united? The president suggested that the opposition was plagued with disunity and overconfidence. Yes, the opposition was fragmented into four parts, but their disunity, this column had suggested, was due to supernatural factors beyond them, not overconfidence. It was as clear as daylight to any casual observer that if they went into the presidential poll disunited, they would be beaten. Yet, they spurned unity and scorned one another. Nigerians are curious to know why since the poll outcome, the president has been enthusiastic and discursive on the APC victory. Was it the enormous obstacles he erected in the path of the eventual winner of the poll, which were meant to portray the presidency as neutral and to burnish the president’s image as a fair-minded leader? Or was it because Asiwaju Tinubu, the man who twice rallied to his cause and in his view possesses the capacity to govern, won? Whatever it is, President Buhari’s general diagnosis of why the opposition lost is incontrovertible, and his relief and enthusiasm at his party’s victory are palpable, justifiable, and unmistakable. He will leave office next month, as he says; and despite any apology he might offer and to whatever intent, he will be relieved, satisfied, and deeply and enormously fulfilled that democracy, if not brilliant leadership, had afforded him two terms and an apotheosis his reign as military head of state could never hope to give.

Despite the fears expressed by naysayers about the May 29 inauguration of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu presidency and the loathing for democracy exhibited by a few plotters working in league with the Labour Party (LP) to thwart the democratic process, President Muhammadu Buhari has reiterated his determination to ensure a peaceful and irrevocable handover. Opposition to the inauguration may survive in a few quarters, but it is weakening, and by May 29 will hardly matter anymore to anyone. National lawmakers, irrespective of party leanings, are preoccupied with who will become their principal officers; newly elected and returning governors are giddy with delight, readying themselves for assumption of office; and excited state legislators can’t wait to be sworn in. Despite the fiery rhetoric of Datti Baba-Ahmed, Peter Obi’s running mate, the mill of the democratic process may grind slowly in Nigeria, but it grinds small and exact, to adapt Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

However, for more than a month, President-elect Tinubu has been out of the country, perhaps also readying himself for office. Officially he has said he is resting from the rigours of the campaigns he undertook in the final months of 2022 and early 2023 to best competition and win the presidency. He needs the rest. But a few critics have also suggested that the campaigns took a toll on his health, and he has needed to rest more than is usual or much more than he is accustomed to. Yet others are mystified by his ‘inexplicable’ absence, wondering what on earth could be happening to him, especially given the shifts in the dates originally set for his return. But perhaps it all boils down to his security, particularly given the virulence with which his election victory was assailed, and the few fanatics who have taken oath to forestall his inauguration.

Whatever the reasons for his long trip, and for a man so consummate in staying put in the country to bask in the euphoria he has conjured, not to talk of inspiring and micromanaging the dynamics of his administration and the mechanics of succession, it is fortuitous that he has stayed a little longer outside the country than expected. Rather than speculating about the reasons for his unusually long absence, this column prefers to insinuate good purposes into the trip. Winning the presidency had been his lifelong ambition, lifelong in terms of when the idea first crossed his mind, and he knows that presiding over the variegated affairs of about 200 million heaving, contending and often fractious people will not be a cakewalk. He, therefore, needs to psych himself for the job. He could choose to stay back in Nigeria like President Buhari in 2015, but for a man so contemplative and finicky, he knows the stream of visitors he would receive would disallow him from the reflection needed to set the tone and foundations for his presidency.

In psyching himself for the task ahead, the president-elect will not only need to reflect on the job and the men he will assemble to help him do it, it is far more crucial and necessary for him to read up on great leaders and the complex issues and dynamics that influenced their leadership. It is, of course, not inevitable that reading, explicating and assimilating those sublime and often cumbersome texts will perforce turn him into a virtuoso, as indeed ex-United States president Richard Nixon showed by his brilliance and character failings, but if his presidency is to stand any chance of succeeding at all, he must visit the Valhalla of great leaders, and read up on them and read voraciously. There is unfortunately no other way, or shortcut, if he is to avoid the pitfalls that dissipated Chief Obasanjo’s presidency, diminished Goodluck Jonathan’s leadership, and emasculated President Buhari’s reign. All three leaders had unique opportunities to run great presidencies and remould the country, but character, intellect and judgement failed them and disabled them from soaring to great heights.

The contemplative genius that has become the lodestar of great leadership does not come from either daydreaming or submitting to fatalism as the superstitious answer to the inscrutable questions of nationhood; nor does it come by merely secluding oneself shorn of books about statesmen: how they rose up to challenges sometimes brought on by internal dynamics (economic and social unrest and political and existential ferment) or external provocations (war, global depression or climate aggravations), or how they tackled regional, international and economic alliances, etc. These contemplations come by books, and they help the leader to structure and firm up the philosophical theme that would guide, organise and energise his presidency, far beyond sloganeering, and far beyond the kitchen midden of ideas and statements mouthed half-heartedly and absentmindedly by deficient leaders. More than anyone who has presented himself for the presidency in recent decades in Nigeria, the president-elect has demonstrated a willingness to think outside the box and to spend quality time in reflecting on alternatives to popular discourses and paradigms. Hopefully, his trip has afforded him the opportunity to realise that far beyond building bridges and roads, hospitals and schools, great leadership rests on things much more sublime, issues much more philosophical, and solutions sometime much more esoteric.

Then of course, the president-elect must determine what (ideas/philosophy) and on whom he wants to model his presidency. He cannot do this by merely and casually imagining his fondness for one great leader or the other, and then seeking casuistically to speak, argue and imitate that leader. No, he has to discover his role model by books, nothing less. He has not had the opportunity to meet and interact with Julius and Augustus Caesar, but he can discover them by books and see whether in some ways the factors that lit the fires in their bellies cannot be reignited in him, thousands of years after. He has not met Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Napoleon Bonaparte or Genghis Khan, but he can meet them amply by books to discover the quality of their ambitions, their mistakes, and how substantially they changed their countries after their reigns. The president-elect has not met Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Lee Kuan Yew, or George Washington, but he can find through books how they remodeled their societies, rebuilt trust, composed their country’s national ethos and spirit, and also see whether the character, intuition and philosophy that underpinned their leadership could not be successfully replicated with some modifications.

President-elect Tinubu has barely a month before the inauguration of his presidency, and he has sensibly risen above the scoffing, defiance and brickbats that accompanied his election. The courts are unlikely to overturn his election, for reasons clearly jurisprudential; and so he can rest assured that he will have the opportunity to write his name in history in more legible ways than his detractors dared to hope or imagine. Between now and May 29 may be too short for him to pore through those books with such avidity and depth enough to enable him grasp their import and discover what ideas and models he might wish to embrace; but he has the resources to call on gifted historians and political scientists to give him a summary of biographical works dealing with the ideas and skills of great statesmen, their triumphs, their defeats, their anxieties, and how they managed crises and inspired their nations to reach for the stars. Let him set the parameters for their presentations, and in his perusals and studies, let him spend a few weeks to determine what course he wishes to set for himself and his presidency. He will encounter rough weather, and his enemies will not stop snapping at his heels or being his enemies simply because the courts put paid to their insensible loathing. In fact, the more he succeeds, the more they will detest him. He should not care.

What he should care about now, before inauguration, is how to discover his profound self through the agency of books, filtered through the actions and prisms of great leaders. Fortunately for him, no one since 1999 has affected Nigeria so substantially as to be described as having worn big shoes which a successor would find difficult to fill. In short, the president-elect has a clean slate upon which to write his name and deeds in ways unfettered by Nigeria’s recent and convoluted past.

NLC’s Ajaero poorly advised on Labour Party

The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) president, Joe Ajaero, may have taken a huge gamble getting himself and his union embroiled in the Labour Party’s internal struggles. Last Monday he and a number of other union officials stormed the party’s secretariat in Abuja, in defiance of the courts, to reinstate party chairman Julius Abure and the sacking of the acting chairman, Lamidi Apapa, and six other National Working Committee (NWC) members who took office after an Abuja High Court on April 5 restrained Mr Abure and some other party executives from parading themselves as party officials. Since April 5 and the emergence of Mr Apapa and others as acting party leaders, LP has not known peace, leading to the storming of the secretariat on April 17 by NLC leaders.

No one disputes the connection between the NLC and LP, with the latter recognised as the political child of the former. The conflict of interest between the two on the one hand and the other national political parties, particularly the ruling party, on the other hand was not an issue because the LP had not made any significant political breakthrough in winning elective offices. But with the startling showing of the LP in the last elections, especially under the resonant campaigns led by Peter Obi, the party’s presidential candidate, and the winning of one governorship office and a significant number of national and state legislative seats, the party had suddenly mutated into a significant ‘third force’. The status of the party, not to say the enormous resources that will be available to it going forward, has changed in ways that cannot be scorned or diminished.

But the NLC is obviously uninterested in standing idly by as the LP faces the risk of being balkanised by internecine conflict. Without internal dissension, and with their elected governors and legislators displaying tenuous ideological and administrative linkage with the party, the LP was already in danger of fracturing, especially considering its history of political prostitution and the casual manner opportunistic politicians had turned the party into a special purpose vehicle. That danger is still not obviated. But added to the factionalisation triggered by the self-inflicted injury Mr Abure brought upon himself through alleged forgery and fraudulent activities, not to say Mr Apapa’s intransigence based on the ongoing court case against the LP leadership, it is hard to see this weak and fragile party achieving a peaceful resolution of a case that is to all intents and purposes uncomplicated.

Mr Abure had been suspended by his ward executive for alleged forgery consequent upon his illegal substitution of candidates in the last elections, particularly in Edo and Ebonyi State. Interested members, including the aggrieved substituted candidates raised complaints to the police, and the LP leadership was investigated. The police indicted Mr Abure. Seizing upon the indictment, the complainants approached the Abuja court and obtained a restraining order. It is this restraining order that Messrs Ajaero, Abure and other NLC leaders are resisting. They have forced their way into the LP secretariat, broke doors, and threatened Mr Apapa and other interim leaders with physical violence. Said Mr Ajaero: “We say enough is enough! Never again will any human being enter here, under any guise, under any order. Even if we lose our leadership, we have to meet as trustees of this Labour Party to decide the next line of action. For anyone to illegally declare himself either as chairman, secretary or whatever, we urge all workers anywhere in the country, where you see such people, arrest them and bring them to us. The hour has come…” This newspaper also reported Mr Ajaero as describing Mr Apapa and his faction as “rodents that will be fumigated with insecticides”, and then added that “nobody can scuttle the ideal and ideologies of the party, including ongoing cases at tribunal”.

It is not clear whether Mr Ajaero and other NLC leaders recognise that they are contemptuous of court orders, or that the statements they have made amount to dangerous incitement and reckless disregard for law and order. Union leaders, especially NLC leaders, are often believed to be circumspect in managing court cases, regardless of their incendiary speeches in the struggle for workers’ welfare. But to urge open disrespect to court orders, not to talk of ordering union members to embark on self-help, is both unusual and fraught with terrible consequences for even the NLC itself. No one can predict how the case will end, but it is unlikely to end well for Mr Abure, regardless of the show of support by NLC leaders and the LP presidential candidate, Mr Obi, who has waffled considerably on the issue as is his custom whenever he is confronted by controversial and moral issues. If contempt proceeding is instituted against the LP leadership, it remains to be seen whether the court will act firmly. It should. In addition, the police investigated Mr Abure and the LP leadership on the unlawful and criminal forgery and substitutions allegations; why they have not charged the matter in court is hard to explain.

But what is more damaging overall to the NLC is that rather than take a hard and mature look at the internal struggle in the LP, they have opted for a simplistic and emotional approach. Crime has been alleged against the LP leadership; the NLC ought to keep a discrete distance. More importantly, by throwing in their lot with the LP, up to the point of speaking and urging violent reclamation of party secretariat, the NLC has shown that it has become indistinguishable from the LP, and that it in fact lends support and weight to all the appalling extremist statements the party has made in its response to the electoral defeat of February 25. Worse, the NLC leaders may be unwisely laying the foundation for terrible dissension within the union itself by being unabashedly and inextricably linked with the policies, actions and even crimes of the LP. To what extent then can the NLC claim to be impartial and non-partisan in its responses to government policies without opening itself to charges of prosecuting political objectives against the ruling party?

Mr Ajaero is poorly advised, and is engaged in incremental weakening of the standards and objectives of the NLC. The union inspired the formation of the LP, but it ought to keep a healthy distance from the party and its partisan activities. That it managed to be detached all along, and for so many years, was probably coincidence rather than wisdom. Mr Ajaero’s rashness and the inability of his co-leaders to restrain or advise him will haunt the NLC for some time to come, except of course the LP implodes sooner rather than later.

On February 12, while endorsing the Tinubu/Shettima All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential ticket, this column surveyed the political landscape and concluded that the ruling party would win at first ballot, without any need for run-off, and would win by a reasonable margin. Weeks after the poll, when the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi and his running mate and other bitter and startled adventurers began campaigning to delegitimise the poll, the column again predicted that the inauguration would come and go without any incident, despite the worst efforts of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, controversial Afenifere acting leader Ayo Adebanjo, and a few vocal Southwest activists and essayists. Not only will the inauguration be successful, Nigeria will experience a new lease of life in the years ahead.

Many things account for the column’s boldness in making his asseverations, and they were clearly marshaled on this page in past weeks. But chief among the reasons is the God factor, whether some Nigerians think He exists or not. President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu obviously did his part in building a winning coalition that cuts across the country, and by his intellect and charisma led a campaign unequalled by his opponents and unrivalled in expertise. He worked the arithmetic of the campaigns so succinctly that save for a few mishaps proved unerringly accurate. He knew the states and regions where the votes would come from, and he curated them carefully and conscientiously, of course without the customary elocution expected of such complex and mystifying ventures. Yet, even he knew that his victory became a foregone conclusion only when the opposition split into four parts, as it were. That the opposition leaders failed to unite in the face of defeat had nothing to do with the president-elect; it had everything to do with forces and calculations that were simply and inscrutably transcendental.

Nigeria is, therefore, today on the cusp of a new era. President-elect Tinubu’s politics and leadership are just budding; the politics and lack of leadership acumen of Mr Obi and his running mate Datti Baba-Ahmed are tragically wilting. The star of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, flickered out years ago in 2019. The 2023 presidential election has entombed his career. However, many analysts think there is a future for the LP duo. The analysts probably assume that because the LP made a significant and impressive showing in the presidential poll, a bright and lasting future awaits Mr Obi and Mr Baba-Ahmed. That future, assuming it exists, will depend on whether the two gentlemen possess the administrative acumen to run a national party imbued with an ideology and a structure more durable than their superficial longings, or even whether they possess a willingness to purge and recast the party in their own philosophical mould. They have none of these virtues. Worse they lack a perspective of the future and the temperament and capacity needed to build a major national party devoid of ethnic and religious opportunism.

President-elect Tinubu is cut from a different cloth. As this column noted while endorsing him, he is not infallible, nor does he personify the most unimpeachable politics. But he has character, leadership acumen, intuition, intelligence and judgement. Had he been a saint, he would be in a convent. And had he possessed the strength many adjudge him lacking on account of his age, he would have embraced far more herculean avocations needing the explosive and unfettered energy of youth. Assess, for instance, the people around him during the campaigns, both young and old, nearly all of them people of stellar talents and accomplishments, cutting across ethnic groups and religions. They point the way to his presidential reign. The president-elect’s antecedents are also enviable. He is, therefore, expected not only to assemble a general cabinet that would set the mark for Africa, he would also assemble a kitchen cabinet that is bold, national, committed and gifted. Before the primary that gave him the APC ticket, all sorts of obstacles lined his path; but he demonstrated rare courage in dismantling them. In presiding over Nigeria, he will need those attributes in excess of what he is used to as governor and political mobiliser and strategist.

There is little he can do to avoid the fallout of the Muhammadu Buhari era and presidency. He will have to contend with the vestiges of that era and overcome them if he is to stand any chance of success. Before the APC presidential primary, the president had at first gone along with all kinds of subterranean campaigns to preclude the candidacy of the former Lagos governor, but finally reconciled himself to what seemed to him a galling prospect. He was not the chief inspirer of the convulsions that shook the ruling party to its foundations, leading to the dethronement of Asiwaju Tinubu’s loyalists; but once the plots got underway, he signed off on them and even briefly owned them. More than a year later, when the general election loomed into view, he appeared bewildered by the decision of the former Lagos governor to throw his hat in the ring, unsure what inspired him to defy all the plots and predictions against his ambition. And when finally the president and the party played their last card against him by attempting to supplant him with a consensus candidate, and failed, the president simply went to sleep, leaving the party to its devices. He had done his best to show his neutral hands, and had played his last joker. He thereafter seemed determined to leave the rest to God and perhaps the voters.

The voters finally had their emphatic say in February, signposting the beginning of a new era. Powerful forces are trying their best to undermine the new era even before it begins, but it is beyond them, just as the outcome of the poll was beyond the candidates and the voters. This is why the venomous social media warriors whooping for Mr Obi, outside his borrowed party, will also come to grief. In order to remain a credible opposition to the APC, the PDP will have to recalibrate their structure, personnel and ideology, without needing to take cognisance of the influence or presence of Alhaji Atiku. And President-elect Tinubu will in his first year in office have to grapple with the poisoned chalice of inoperable and unprofitable railway projects, controversial policies, last-minute changes and awards, smouldering education crisis, alienation in the Southeast, restive youths angry at years of neglect and confusion, fuel subsidy removal, insecurity mixed with ethnic cleansing and land confiscations, and humongous external debt pushing the country into debt peonage. The president-elect’s mindset, fierce ambition, leadership and mentoring ability, and exposure to global finance and development standards should help him steer the troubled national ship away from the precipice.

Soyinka, Obidients and futility of appeasement

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, like many other critics of the juvenility of the so-called Obidients, may have started to understand that in the dynamics of the sewer, those little and budding ‘fascists’ could not be outdone. To outdo them implies descending to the muck from which they emanate and derive sustenance. Prof Soyinka had publicly tongue-lashed the Labour Party (LP) presidential running mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed for threatening the collapse of democracy should the winner of the presidential election, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, be sworn in. It reeked of fascism to threaten the president and the judiciary simply because the LP lost an election, warned the professor. The professor added that he had warned the LP candidate himself that he stood the risk of losing the election on account of the irreverence and obstreperousness of the so-called Obidients, Mr Obi’s unrestrained and ‘excitable’ supporters.

Prof Soyinka gives as much as he takes, and does not suffer fools gladly; but it is not certain that the din that followed the interviews in which he made those ‘provocative’ remarks did not surprise him, especially given how unequivocally it united many eminent south-easterners and authors against him. Even former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) deputy governor, Kingsley Moghalu, who had initially and enthusiastically rallied behind the professor, had to beat a hasty and apologetic retreat when the Obidients sallied forth against him with their bayonets. The professor also baited the mouthy Mr Baba-Ahmed with a debate offer that was brusquely declined. There will be no debates, and startled and dismayed by the abuse he had received from unusual but hitherto respectable and highly-placed quarters, it is uncertain that Prof Soyinka will be venturing out against the unruly social media denizens. The world and Nigerians, perhaps aggravated by a decadent social media culture, are far different from what the professor’s politics and lifestyle have idealised.

By his confession, the eminent professor said that he reached out to Mr Obi to offer him political counsel. But there is no appeasing the LP candidate. Unlike the cerebral and refined Prof Moghalu whom he endorsed in 2019 for the presidency, Mr Obi is more dissembling and opinionated. The LP candidate and his strategists had determined that for them to stand any chance of electoral success they had to deploy ethnic and religious sentiments and tactics, two vices completely antithetical to Prof Soyinka’s worldview. So, whatever advice the professor gave to the publicly and showily deferential Mr Obi was bound to hit a brick wall. Clearly, in considering Mr Obi an approximation, perhaps personification, of the youth angst convulsing the nation, the professor was betting on and appeasing the wrong horse. Both Mr Obi and his supporters are irredeemable, unideological, and violently insular. Last week, Prof Soyinka received a full dose of their acerbity.

Mr Obi may be engagingly young and agile, and stands at the head of a mob of young but bitter iconoclasts, but it was too optimistic for anyone to gamble on him. Ex-military head of state Ibrahim Babangida had also spoken glowingly of the next Nigerian president as someone in his 60s, perhaps a reference to Mr Obi; but it was a wholly wrong thesis to qualify the presidency of a nation as complex and dynamic as Nigeria on age rather than on character, intellect, experience, intuition, and judgement. This column has always argued that leadership is nearly an arcanum that far transcends the superficiality and endearments men like Mr Obi are enamoured of. It is true that Prof Soyinka has projected an inclusive worldview that detests alienation, inequity and injustice, a style that has made him an instinctive advocate of power shift to the Southeast. The problem, however, is that some people are unworthy of such investments. The LP candidate, as events have shown, including his rabid exploitation of the incendiary politics of religion and his abysmal fondness for untruths, is a bad and unwholesome investment.

Apart from the unalloyed and undiscriminating support given Mr Obi by many of his kinsmen such as Chukwuemeka Ezeife,  Obiageli Ezekwesili, Charles Oputa, Chimamanda Addichie, Olisa Agbakoba, and Chidi Odinkalu, who have all flattered his bad politics, the sulking LP candidate persists in his fallacies as a result of the support and instigation received from ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, Afenifere factional/Acting leader Ayo Adebanjo, and a host of other overhyped south-western celebrities and skit makers. By voicing some sort of indirect support for youth politics, which Mr Obi seemed to exemplify so cursorily, Prof Soyinka appeared to endorse the LP candidate’s ambition. The professor, it must be pointed out, does not have a history of supporting only those who stood a chance of winning, a reflection of his dispassion in political advocacy. However, going by Mr Obi’s desperation in the closing weeks of the campaign, the former Anambra governor actually seemed to think he stood a chance of clinching the crown. It is a reflection of his deep-seated opacity and general lack of substance and depth that he thought excluding the core North’s two vote-laden geopolitical zones was not injurious to his ambition.

Many endorsers will be more careful next time in assessing the capacity, ideas, character and competence of political aspirants. It is not enough that an aspirant promises to stand for the right things; he must also possess the right qualities. Prof Soyinka is, of course, not alone in desiring the best for Nigeria, especially if that best could also coincidentally come from the Southeast believed to have been excluded from the country’s central power loop. But as Anambra governor Charles Soludo, Imo governor Hope Uzodinma, Ebonyi’s Dave Umahi, and former Enugu governor Chimaroke Nnamani all warned, putting an Igbo man in the presidency requires more than the tactless and aggressive approach embodied by Mr Obi and his scurrilous social media warriors. The LP candidate may have now so muddied the waters that it will take a little longer than anticipated for the Southeast to win the presidency. Having chafed quietly on the sidelines over how Mr Obi takes his defeat badly, or how former Abia governor Orji Uzor Kalu runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds, or how the LP candidate’s supporters have lost their senses and are threatening to destroy Nigeria’s democratic edifice, the North will likely make up their minds to be vigilant on whom to support for the presidency in the next election cycle. They supported president-elect Tinubu because he played his politics adroitly, built powerful coalitions, and gained their trust and proved his reliability. They and the rest of the country now know for sure that no one could win the Nigerian presidency without going through that route, regardless of the madness on social media, and irrespective of the plaintive cry for political inclusion from the Southeast.

Obi to Obidients     

Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, Peter Obi, was on Twitter last Monday admonishing his entranced Obidients to stay the course he had set for them. He not only finally owned the movement, he also identified with their controversial style and goals. For those who sought to coax him into restraining his supporters, the tweets were final proof that he is indistinguishable from his supporters whom he described as a movement. Here is what he said grandiosely: “My Obidients…as we celebrate the Easter and look forward to a joyous Eid al-Fitr, we pray for God Almighty’s guidance, protection and blessings as we face and pass through litany of challenges in our dear country, Nigeria – flawed electoral processes, insecurity, weak institutions, multidimensional poverty, unemployment, inflation, lack of justice, fairness, equity, opportunities….As we reflect on these challenges and look forward to a New Nigeria that is POssible, Datti and I are painfully mindful that for the mere reason of being OBIdient, most of you have suffered vituperations, physical attacks, loss of rights and privileges, hateful trolls, indignities and vexatious fighting words, even from some of those we long regarded as civic leaders and conscience of our nation. Please bear such attacks as the sacrifices that we are all required to make in order to create a New Nigeria, where justice, equity, fairness, love and prosperity shall reign…”

Apart from the innuendoes against notable personalities whom he derisively and disapprovingly labeled as conscience of the nation, his tweets also clearly show how easily he traverses alternative universes, realities and truths. His rule of law sloganeering and manipulation of facts and fictions, not to say the egregious lies about being pressured to leave Nigeria and women being planted around him to seduce him, are unexampled. He counsels his movement on forbearance but ignores the fact that his supporters inspired the horrors and vices he complained of, including terrorising everyone, foreigner or local alike, who objects to their apocalyptic approach to politics and dissent. Had he won the presidential poll, his movement, which reminds many of Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts and Blackshirts, would have executed unimaginable horrors against opponents while creating fertile ground for dictatorship. Worse, their presidential election triumphalism would have sooner rather than later led to anarchy. On February 25, without a shadow of doubt, Nigeria was fortunate to have escaped a fate worse than military dictatorship.