Category: Sunday

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.

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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.