Category: Olatunji Dare

Just about the only thing that Nigerians agreed on in the run-up to the General Election was that it was going to be the “most consequential” in the nation’s history.”   Just how consequential it would be, they had not the slightest inkling.

Two weeks after the final results were announced, the consequences have merely begun to unfold.   Many a rampart fell, verities that had endured for ages collapsed, and the political map of Nigeria has taken on a new shape. For political gain, desperate actors invested religion and ethnicity with far greater salience than they had ever possessed, corroding both factors in the process and setting up the country for an implosion.

Never has the country been so divided, in the home and in the workplace.  Civility has become a stranger, and yesterday’s neighbour has become an object of suspicion, if not loathing.  A return to anything resembling amity is unlikely to occur anytime soon, I fear.

Resentments are hardening and deepening, and everyday language is coarsening in private and public intercourse.

It is a far cry from the carnival atmosphere that characterised election season, especially from the party conventions to the post-election jubilations of those who had cause to celebrate.  Call it the time of politics as carnival.

And what a jolly time it was, and how rich its sartorial heritage, not forgetting its symbols.

Even in the present distemper, I can still see much of it with my mind’s eye. I can still see the blizzard of brooms fashioned from palm fronds, held aloft by the APC party faithful, their ends dipping and cresting and swaying as their handlers desired -handlers who, at the end of another long, tumultuous rally, showed nary a sign of fatigue nor a loss of enthusiasm.

It was not inconceivable that an object designed to symbolise the party’s commitment to sweeping the dirt-strewn landscape clean could in a moment be turned into a weapon of brutal offence, given the intended or accidental provocations that can occur at such events.

But it never happened.   The crowds were too disciplined for that.

The greater surprise was that none of the other 17 registered parties said a kind word about the palm trees whose branches were hacked down for the brooms, nor about ecology, the sustenance and health of which the trees are a crucial factor.

None of them sought a court injunction restraining the APC from hacking down palm tree fronds to knit into brooms just to gratify the party’s iconolatry.    None among them invoked national or international environmental law to move the APC to cease and desist

An environmentalist with whom I raised the matter said it centred on a renewable resource; that its exploitation would do no lasting damage, and that criticism would have seemed out of place given more pressing issues, such as the crippling currency crisis.

But what about sustainability, given the furious pace of exploitation?  Where, at any rate, are the brooms today? 

Are they being warehoused in readiness for the inauguration of the President-elect and governors-elect on May 29, assuming the courts would not have voided the elections as some people are demanding?

It would be a pity indeed that they had to hack down hectares upon hectares of palm tree plantations across the country again just to make new brooms, unless they are for sweeping away the APC itself, according to the environmentalist aforementioned, a die-hard Obedient.

The contractors who supplied the brooms couldn’t care less about the environment   They were trooping merrily to the banks every day until the governor of the Central Bank, Godwin  “Mefi” Emefiele, crippled the nation’s financial institutions by way of retaliation for his own lack of courage to pursue his misbegotten presidential ambition,

Broom merchants and retailers of consumer goods found themselves grappling with an issue that could never have cropped up even in a hallucination:  How many brooms would retailers take for a tablet of toilet soap, a medium-sized packet of detergent, a pint of palm oil or beer, a bottle of aspirins, a can of baby formula, or a family-size piece of yam?

For that matter, how many truckloads of designer brooms would translate into a 50-kg sack of rice?

They would have had to employ the most abstruse algorithms to figure out the equivalencies. 

How the other parties must have envied the APC its good fortune, having no symbols that could be deployed to produce stunning visual effects at will, rally after rally!  Umbrellas cannot be massed to that effect even when it is raining; they may have the compactness of brooms, but they don’t come cheap.

The sartorial legacy of the period is just as memorable.

I am thinking of the distinctive uniforms in which the faithful were decked out at national, state, and local engagements; the fetching styling, the ornate embroidery, and the matching caps and headgear.  I am thinking of the hectares upon hectares of fabric from which they were made, the lucky merchant who supplied them, the tailors who fabricated them, the storekeepers who kept stock, and the contractors who handled distribution.

This was a massive logistic undertaking that the main political parties executed seamlessly, and a pointer to what Nigeria can achieve if mobilized for common purpose.

One image in particular clings in my memory:  the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, decked out as an Eyo masquerade without the mask, after his party had won resoundingly in Lagos, and was on the cusp of capturing Alausa outright.  It was truly captivating.

Some of the caps featured in the rallies told stories of flexibility and adaptability.  At the risk of getting lost in the crowd, Tinubu gave up his signature knitted cap with the mathematical symbol of infinity embossed at the rim for a modest version of the Zanna Bukar Dipcharima cap of the First Republic which lapsed when its depth came to symbolize the excess of the Shagari years. 

Just as startling was the sight of many APC governors in the North wearing Tinubu’s signature cap without any sign of unease.  Benue Governor Samuel “Ortomatic” Ortom’s rainbow cap added colour to the proceedings of the Group of Five, with the maestro himself, the combustible Nyesom Wike, at the helm.

Now that the festivals are over, what is to become of the party uniforms? 

It has been suggested, I gather, that they be preserved for future use.  But where can appropriate storage be found?  It has also been suggested that they be donated to the poor and needy.  They will in all likelihood find them unwieldy.  Even if they cut them up, would they have the resources to make them into less ostentatious clothing?

One proposal under active consideration, I have learned, is to store samples of the most striking outfits in a designated museum of political artefacts, for the benefit of historians, moviemakers, and the general public.  Not a bad idea, if the facility will not suffer the fate of such depositories across the national landscape.

What of the mountains of vile, incendiary and treasonous audio-visual material that poured ceaselessly into the mainstream from discredited politicos and their proxies, not forgetting the venomous outlet they call “social media,” though they are anything but social?

Some of it should be preserved, too, if only as examples of how not to build a nation.

Seeing how some public figures in Nigeria were hounded out of office, humiliated or discredited, I vowed in my late 40s that I would never hold certain positions.  I would never enter an application for consideration, no matter how lavish the compensation.  And if was appointed all the same, by radio, say, I would decline to serve.

Top of the list was vice-chancellor of a university.    Second was chair or even member of a body charged with administering elections, whether local, state or federal. Third was chair of a commission of inquiry, even if its remit is to establish whether the material you are  reading was printed backwards.

I have since included in that list, based on an unpleasant experience, presiding over the election         of  executive officers of a professional body or a local branch thereof.  Some 12 years ago, I was invited, with Patrick Thimangu, a Kenya-born reporter with the St Louis Post Dispatch, to conduct an election for executive officers of the North American Association of African Journalists.

The election was prefaced with a workshop conducted by area journalists and faculty from  Howard University, venue of the Association’s annual conference.  Members sauntered in and out of workshop sessions without the slightest regard for the instructor and the class.  They busied themselves planning election strategies. 

As the hour for the elections arrived, the place looked like a brewing combat zone.  The tension was palpable. Most of the participants were Nigerians, with a sprinkling of journalists from other African  countries.

Thimangu and I sensed that no election could be held safely under the circumstances.  We went through the motions anyway, not sure whether we had a quorum or what actually constituted one.  In the end, we announced that election should be deemed not to have been held, and recommended that arrangements be made to stage another one, keeping in mind the factors that vitiated the latest attempt. 

Just be sure we were not in harm’s way, Thimangu and I rushed out of the campus to take the city bus  back to our hotel.

That experience reinforced my vow against serving as an officer at an  election.  And so, my attitude toward election umpires in Nigeria and indeed in  Africa, has always been one of deep commiseration for a start, and ultimately, prayerful hope that they would emerge from it with their bodies and reputations intact.

 Their equanimity is, of course, guaranteed never to be same again.

Maurice Iwu –remember him? – came into the position without much of a reputation even in the academy, where he was a professor.   He was reported to have made the sensational claim at an international conference that he had found a core for the dreaded immuno-suppression disease HIV-AIDS, a claim he never substantiated.   By the time he was done presiding over the shambolic 2015 General Election, he was finished.

Attahiru Jega was that rare umpire who delivered a credible election and was not enmeshed in the corruption scandals that tainted many of his predecessors.  Even the genial, strait-laced Professor Eme Awa was nearly sunk when he was named chair of the National Electoral Commission during the first phase of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s misbegotten transition; they sacked him when he proved unbending. 

His successor Humphrey Nwosu was roped into a contrived debacle, despite conducting the best presidential election Nigerians had seen or would experience.  For six crucial weeks during the debacle, Nwosu went missing.  He emerged with his wife, about whom nothing had been heard previously, beside him.  The good lady disclosed that they had been having “a second honeymoon.”

I know nothing about INEC chair, Mahmood Yakubu other than what I have read about him.  He took a First in history at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and confirmed his pedigree with a Master’s from Cambridge, and a doctorate from Oxford.

From the distance, he seems to me have about him a calm, imperturbable air.  It would take a great deal, it seems to me, to get him to work up a fuss, or to distract him from the task at hand.  I know nothing of his public service record, but if it is nearly as unedifying as they make it seem by innuendo, why did they appoint him INEC chair in the first instance?

When Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was declared President elect at the end of the first phase of the General Election two weeks ago, former president Olusegun Obasanjo who has long given up  the pretence of neutrality or statesmanship on crucial national issues, tore into Yakubu.

He said Yakubu could still save Nigeria from looming danger by postponing the concluding phase of the General Election and rectifying the irregularities Obasanjo and others were trumpeting “if his hands are clean.”

The former president said the election, which has been marred by violence, disenfranchisement, voter intimidation and result manipulation among others, is being conducted by corrupt officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), “who allegedly took bribe to rig the election for politicians.”

“Chairman INEC,” Obasanjo said, addressing Yakubu directly. “I have thought that you would use this opportunity to mend your reputation and character for posterity.”

And so on and so forth.  Every sentence made you wince.

Spokespersons for the PDP turned the screws, so much so that Yakubu’s spokespersons warned that if they did not stop besmirching him, he would seek protection under the law.

Whatever the final outcome of the General Election, Yakubu’s tenure at INEC will soon come to an end.  A new chair will be appointed.  I am almost prepared to swear that someone who knows, perhaps only too well, how all but a few of former appointees have fared, will accept an offer enthusiastically.

It’s a terrible job. But I guess someone has to do it.

Back in the 1960s, in the time of the playboy-president, Dr Ahmed Sukarno, the Indonesia’s economy, or what was left of it, was so battered that it defied every solution in the pharmacopoeia of every economist who ever lived and of every institution ever devised to cater to its health.

In desperation, Sukarno offered the relevant cabinet post to anyone who thought he could fix the economy, with just one caveat:  If the person could not deliver within a year, he or she would be executed by a firing squad.

There were no takers.

I have often wondered how things would play out if the country were Nigeria and the job was INEC chair.

To offer a reprieve from these tempestuous times, I would like to shift gears and head to bucolic Bungoma County, in Western Kenya, close to the border with Uganda, and to the church of Mwalimu Yesu wa Tongaren.  Born in 1981, he was christened Eliud Simiyu.  His formal education ended with his first year in secondary school.  He became a preacher in 2009, after being discharged from a hospital where he had received treatment for an undisclosed ailment. 

Somewhere along the line, he morphed into Mwalimu Yesu wa Tongaren, a Kenyan version          of Jesus Christ, and thereafter into Himself the Real Deal, with a retinue of 12 disciples who worship him the way the original 12 worshipped the Master.  He heals the sick, feeds the hungry and comforts the distressed.  He is married and has eight children.

Lately, members of the community seem to have decided that there was no better season for him to fulfill his historic destiny than the coming Eastertide.  They have accordingly served him notice of their intention to nail him to a cross at the end of Lent.

If he was indeed the Christ, they assured him, he would rise from the grave after three days and either ascend to heaven, or continue the life that had been.  Either way, the Holy Writ would be fulfilled.

Mwalimu Yesu wa Thangole has reported the matter to the police.

Comment: 08111813080

The last installment of this column appeared on this page the day before the Independent National Electoral Commission announced the definitive outcome of the presidential election.   In the week leading to the poll, the internet bristled with rumours, the content of which ranged from the apocalyptic to the farcical.

You could dismiss more than 95 percent of them with a cursory interrogation. They emanated from the usual purveyors of the darkest conspiracy theorists and their idle followers, all operating at full throttle and occluding strong intimations from knowledgeable sources that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the candidate of the APC and his running mate, Kashim Shettima, had won the pivotal race.

Those intimations were doused by INEC’s earlier announcement that Peter Obi’s insurgent Labour Party (LP) had worsted the ruling APC in Lagos State, its redoubtable bastion.  Some surveys which many dismissed as “Onitsha Market polls – shades of Onitsha Market Literature, per Emmanuel Obiechina – had predicted that much, but they had about them that familiar penumbra whereby hope triumphs over experience.

In Lagos, hope triumphed over experience.  

The triumph galvanized the Obidients into a frenzy and sent them pouring into the streets and neighbourhoods of the metropolis in song and dance in a triumphalist outing that seemed ill-suited to the occasion, if not downright provocative.  Wherever you turned, Obimania pervaded the air.

If the street was effusive, the higher reaches of society were hardly less restrained.  Based on the Lagos election results, one of the nation’s best-known diplomats composed and dispatched for publication a congratulatory letter to Obi, whom he described, riffing on the candidate’s first name, as “The Rock” on which Nigeria’s unity stood.  The letter was to be published the moment it was announced, as the writer confidently expected, sooner rather than later, that Obi had won the presidential race.

For now, his letter is resting in the publisher’s vault.  It may yet be published, suitably backdated, if and when the courts affirm Obi’s claim that he won the election.

To return to Obi’s sensational Lagos outing: Would the development be replicated nationwide? 

The APC’s stalwarts said there was no cause for alarm.  They said their Situation Room was in possession of actual figures showing the party coasting to victory on the first ballot.  There would be no second ballot with the sterile horse trading and the desperate backroom deals that characterize politics at its ugliest, they assured their followers.

Subsequent returns from INEC would show that the LP’s achievement in Lagos was no flash in the pan, for it had swept the South East comprehensively as was expected, and made gains in the Christian enclaves in the North and the Middle Belt.  The returns would also show that the APC had built up a prohibitive lead over its closest rivals.  The jury was not yet out.

Then INEC named a time for announcing the final results and proclaiming a winner, thus putting a pause on the speculation and second-guessing, not forgetting the online traffick in disinformation and vile propaganda that was threatening to convulse the polity.

Ever so mindful of the June 12, 1993, presidential election debacle, I called professional colleagues and democracy activists in Lagos to ask whether the PDP or the LP or any disaffected party for that matter had obtained a court injunction restraining INEC from announcing the final results.

They said no such thing had happened, to the best of their knowledge.

One of the disaffected parties, I learned, was frantically shopping around for a high court that would issue such an injunction.  They had found one in Bauchi, but its enthusiasm for the task was less than reassuring.

With no injunctive restraint or an imminent prospect of one, INEC announced the results as scheduled.  Tinubu had won garnering  8.79 million or  36.9 percent of valid votes cast.  In addition, he had won at least 25 percent in 29 of the 36 states and Abuja Federal Capital Territory, much more than is required to meet the geopolitical spread mandated by the Constitution.  There would be no second ballot.           

Tinubu had graduated from Asiwaju of Lagos and Jagaban Borgu and all that to President-elect of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, just like that.

Atiku Abubakar of the PDP came second with 6.92 million votes (29.1 percent) and Obi came third with 6.1 million votes (25.4 percent).  They rejected the figures and demanded with former president Olusegun Obasanjo who has made a habit of playing referee even after abandoning that rarefied perch for the murky pitch of partisanship, that the entire poll be cancelled.  Separately, Obi claimed, much to Atiku’s bemusement,  that he was the runaway winner.

If recent history is any guide, the disaffected parties would seek a court injunction restraining INEC from carrying out the next stage of the election, namely, presenting a Certificate of Return to the president-elect and the vice president-elect.  Had any court issued such an order?

I kept up this line of inquiry until the INEC chair, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, presented the certificate to them, at a ceremony witnessed by some members of the team of foreign observers in town to monitor the elections and report on how they measured up on the scale of best practices in democratic elections. 

In their submissions, the observers had remarked the glitches and malfunctions that can occur even in the best-ordered polls, as well as incidents of violence.  They concluded, however, that lapses had not occurred on a scale that could have vitiated the entire poll.

At this writing early on Monday, March 6, no such injunctions had been sought or granted.  But there are still some hurdles to clear. 

Every general election cycle America is haunted by a clear and present fear that, a week or two before the presidential race statutorily scheduled for the first Tuesday in November,  a candidate would release a nugget of damaging information that would not merely take his opponent out of contention but virtually terminate his political career as well.  They call it the October Surprise.

The Nigerian equivalent for the election just concluded would have had to be a February Surprise.  It was not for lack of effort on the part of the stragglers of the anti-June 12 Confederacy that they could not pull it off.  They tried everything conceivable and even unimaginable.  To no avail.

Would they seek an injunction restraining the Federal Government and its agents from swearing in the President-elect, in effect preventing him from taking office?

Personally, I will not rule it out.  Even after he is sworn in, I will not put it beyond them to seek an injunction restraining him from executing the office of President of the Republic and Commander-in-Chief. In Nigeria, In Nigeria, no election is over until it is well and truly over,

Meanwhile, as Atiku and Obi litigate their claims, political attention has shifted to the gubernatorial and House of Assembly phase of the General Election.  Lagos, the crown jewel of Nigerian politics, is again the epicentre, in what is threatening to be a war for control of the megalopolis.

The Labour Party is accused of deploying even more brazenly the ethnic and religious cards that had worked so well for it in the last round, by harping on the Igbo antecedents of its candidate, trumpeting his Igbo name and rallying the large  Igbo population to vote for him.  The Yoruba, who have always held sway in gubernatorial elections in Lagos, see this as an existential threat and are mobilizing their Yoruba population to ward it off.

The battle lines are drawn. 

Few residents can recall a time when relations between the twain have been so brittle and so fraught.

Accomplished facts – or what the French call faits accomplis,  have a way of defanging the most confounding situations.  They are piling up in the APC camp and making Atiku and the Obi seem tiresome.  But we cannot continually rely on them to solve fundamental problems of Nigeria’s existence.

Elections prove nothing and settle nothing if a dysfunctional structure remains rigidly in place.

Meanwhile, Mefi’s malignant authority continues to roil the micro-economic landscape.

After the campaign for the General Election closed, I woke up every morning with one question on my mind:  Have they procured a rogue judge to issue a midnight injunction restraining the Independent National Electoral Commission and its agents from proceeding with the polls scheduled to start on February 25?

But the question did not just sit on my mind.  I put it to colleagues and associates and persons in the attentive audience who share my concern about the parallels between the runup to the June 12, 1993, presidential election, and the one about to be staged.

No, or not yet, were their responses, right up to Election Day.

The morning after, my question was a slight variation on the theme:  Have they procured a judge to issue an injunction restraining INEC and its agents from announcing the results or anything purporting to be the results of the election?

Again, the responses were, no, or not yet.

I will ask that question every day until the election results are declared.  For, between this writing and then, anything can still happen.

In the closing stages of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s transition, even the most unyielding skeptics, among whom I counted myself, thought that, at his most desperate, he could only put off the election.  We rested easy thereafter.

None of us ever thought that the election, the finest Nigerians had ever witnessed, would be annulled.  Babangida had reserved unto himself the authority to disqualify any aspirant before, during, and after the election, but we never thought that he would avail himself of the last option.  But annul it he did.  And a great many who had voted in the poll cheered on. 

This being a  country where nothing is impossible, one must remain resolute in the belief that nothing is over it is really over.

People:  The election is not over until the winner takes office.

That much is now clear from all the skirmishing over the delayed declaration of the outcome. The official position is that nothing about the outcome is over until INEC says it is over.

So, why all the pitter-patter about “collating” returns  Why the delay in releasing them?

They say the resident election commissioners are in transit from the state capitals to Abuja for the conclave at which they will be asked in full public view to proclaim the outcome in their domain. If that is indeed the case, why did INEC frontload the results from Ekiti State?

-In this mechatronic age, why should the physical presence of resident commissioners be  required in Abuja just to announce election results?  What if they are kidnapped en route?   

Stragglers of the anti-June 12 brigade and their retinue of shysters, are latching to what seems to be a lacuna in the poorly-drafted 1999 Constitution to insist that, in addition to winning a majority of the votes cast and securing at least 25 percent of the votes in two-thirds of the 36  states and Abuja Federal Capital Territory,  a presidential candidate cannot succeed without winning a plurality in the FCT.

This cannot be the intendment of the appropriate clause in the Constitution.  For it would mean that the votes of Abuja residents carry greater weight than the votes of other Nigerians, in effect giving them a veto.  It would set at nought the Constitution’s equal-protection clause.

But this shibboleth might be only the opening gambit of the stragglers.  They are a pertinacious breed.

It is a constant cause of lamentation among many Nigerians living abroad that they cannot vote in elections back home.  But that circumstance is not as disabling or handicapping as it might seem at first blush.  For they participate in the elections in every way just short of

Like the folks back home, they follow the twists and turns of the transition keenly.  They comb the internet for scraps of information relating to the elections, but not always with the nice sense of discrimination that one must bring to material from that provenance.

I have before me one such material that was doing the rounds on the eve of the presidential election.   The source identified himself only as a pastor,  and here is his message to fellow Christians:

Nigeria had been a member of the Organization of Islamic Community – he couldn’t even get the name of the body right – for eight unbroken years, with a Muslim president in the saddle. To qualify for all the rights and privileges, Nigeria had to have had ten years of continuous rule by a Muslim head of state.

It needed two more years of rule by a Muslim to enjoy full membership.

The design, the pastor claimed, was to ensure that the leading presidential candidates were all Muslims, so that, whoever won the race would serve out the two years needed for Nigeria to qualify as a full member of the OIC. 

For that privilege, however, Nigeria would have to pay an annual subscription.  A certain percentage of the national cabinet (and presumably high-ranking offices) would have to be assigned to Muslims.

So that, when Buhari displayed time and again a craven partiality for Muslims in making federal appointments, he was merely executing the OIC’s plan for Nigeria.

They never reckoned with the coming of Peter Gregory Obi and the massive following he generated across the country.

God has given Christians the privilege to see through the scheme.  It is therefore “mandatory” and “a service to God” to ensure that President Buhari is not succeeded by a Muslim.

If that were to happen, your children would be barred from certain schools.  And you would be barred from holding certain positions.  Christians must not allow that to happen

God told the children that had given the land of Canaan to them, but that they had to fight for it.  All (Christians) must come out to vote for Obi.  They should mount a door-to-door campaign to convince every single friend to vote for Obi.

This was no Sermon on the Mount, but a summons to hatred and bigotry – in the name of God.  It would be hard to find a more revolting example of the weaponization of religion.

Obi qualified on all counts to run for President.  He never presented himself as a Christian candidate, only as a reconditioned trader who would “move the country consumption to production.”   Why did the pastor insinuate God into his pet desires and press his audience to embrace them as a sacred duty?

He was preying on the innocence of his audience with his fact-free harangue.  The clauses cited with such contrived earnestness are nowhere to be found in the OIC’s charter.  He could not even state the organization’s name correctly.  Nigeria acceded to OIC membership  more than 30 years ago, in the Babangida era

But how many in the attentive audience would take the trouble to check out his claims or challenge him if they found out or knew that he was faking it?

As I end this piece to meet my deadline, INEC has not yet announced the final outcome.  But certain trends are clear.  Religion was in big play.  So was ethnic identity, which cuts across all groups with its contents and discontents but is much stronger in some than in others.  Instead of savouring their gains, some are demanding that the elections be cancelled.

Judging by the provocative reactions to the results declared so far in an election advertised as the most consequential in the nation’s history, and the revanchist tenor pervading them, the question is already being asked:  Is this the new dawn the election was supposed to preface?

In two days, precisely February 26, 2023, Nigerians will elect the country’s next president alongside other public officers – in a free and fair election perhaps. Of the top contenders, however, Bola Ahmed Tinubu (BAT), is the candidate to beat.

En route to the polls, the two-time governor of Lagos unfurls to manifest incarnations. Ornamented in self-creation, he suffers the muse of manic re-creators. He is the punching bag of every virulent critic and hatchet writer on the payroll of his frantic rivals.

Yet his mettle attains the radiance of rebirth, like the proverbial patriot sculpted of spunk and spittle. In the flora of imagination, he is a hero, a villain, a mentor, and a political godfather. He is a father, a husband, a brother, an uncle, and a grandfather. He is also a patriot. A human.

In the estimation of friends and foes, the heart of his story is redacted and recast. Everybody defends or maligns Tinubu as politics and circumstances dictate – if this isn’t expedient belly magic, what is?

We have seen recipients of his benefactive politics hurl caution to the wind and pay it forward with malice. Some mutate as foes. “This must be witchcraft if not juju,” the acerbic millennial and Generation Z prowling Twitter would say.

Amid the clashing contrarieties triggered by his presidential ambition, only Tinubu’s deeds could validate him or otherwise.

Unlike the other candidates, he endures a complicated backstory pitted with intrigues, mindless vilification, and infidelity of his associates.

He is the general who suffered a mutiny of sorts by his most trusted lieutenants, not for his lack of leadership skills, but for his ennobling generosity, overwhelming presence, and humaneness.

Some protege challenged him to the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s presidential ticket, goaded by a devious, self-seeking cabal, the inconsequential support of a rabid religious mob and the dubious prophesies of fortune seekers on the pulpit, itching to become the power(s) behind the presidential throne.

Alas! They watched their sanctified puppet bite the dust. The latter suffered a dismal outing at the APC primaries. But Tinubu again showed up, extending an olive branch to the fiendish, perfidious character alongside his other rivals thus asserting his depth as a tolerant, astute statesman; a benevolent leader, and a guardian of men.

In politics, Tinubu flaunts a quintessential stone architecture, but the random troll wanted him to give it up for the use of a wily, lesser protege, who played ‘hide and seek’ with his presidential fantasy thus projecting himself as earthen ovule, manhood as quivering scorched egg.

Facts don’t care about anyone’s feelings. The truth sprouts free of “stomach infrastructure.” Of the 2023 presidential aspirants, Asiwaju leads in stature and by his exploits. Nonetheless, he’s frantically dismissed as infirm by parties threatened by his virtuosity and apparent bone strut.

He is the general who suffered attrition of his trusted commanders, only to enjoy the unflinching support of his once fierce adversaries. Perhaps because the latter saw the statesman and titan in him.

There is no gainsaying Tinubu vies for the presidency in dire times. He must appreciate this moment for what it’s worth when the neurotic tick-tock of midnight silences our whispers of dawn.

He vies amid our self-inflicted tragedies: terrorism, comatose oil refineries, substandard health and education, corporate banditry, and Yahoo Plus pandemic, to mention a few.

He vies while secret and open fiends contrive a fuel shortage and an ill-conceived currency design and naira scarcity thus impoverishing large segments of the electorate – hoping they would crucify Tinubu and the APC.

It’s that delicate. Tinubu encounters enemies within and outside his own party. Many plots and tales about him suffer enormous exclusions. In the foundry of political imagery, so much is excluded from Tinubu’s bust that we can feel his silhouette straining against the charged atmosphere, in combat with arbitrary sculpting.

Having bestrode the political scene, like a colossus for three decades, grooming leaders, his politics culminate in pursuit of his presidential ambition. Tinubu banks on his experience in public and private business sectors to improve Nigeria’s fortune.

His politics assumes tactical elegance even as his sportsmanship is made more concrete through upheavals. Ultimately, he is elevated or “reduced” to his essence. He is a blessing to those who truly know him and a role model to his closet and open detractors.

His traducers employ the same tired gimmicks, the same choreographed moves; this pantomime of coordinated hatred subsists in the political arena against his candidacy – within and outside an APC-led government.

Still, they haven’t the higher calibre of men capable of besting him to the nation’s most coveted seat, in a free and fair election.

To serial contender, People’s Democratic Party’s Atiku Abubakar, and the so-called cabal, who are fearful of a Tinubu-led government, this election is a do-or-die affair. But to Labour Party’s Peter Obi, it’s simply a means to feed his lean repute and cash out.

To the electorate, the 2023 polls become a stylized ritual. Thus every vote cast may assume a public expression of pain and a fervent longing for revenge.

The lurid and detailed sagas behind each voter’s choice rather than the call of citizenship duty, are what drives each voter to a frenzy, for or against a preferred candidate.

Yet the most powerful saga today, the most searing narrative across Nigeria is one of financial ruin, desperation, and enslavement. It depicts the impoverishment of the unemployed, of a frightened abused working class by a heartless political class.

For many, Saturday’s election offers a fleeting reprieve, a comforting illusion of control, that they are able to rise above their small stations in life and engage in a heroic battle to fight back.

And despite the clamour for a younger candidate by segments of Nigeria’s youths, none of their whispered alternatives is in his youth. None has shown the intellectual rigour, emotional maturity, stamina, discipline, native intelligence, and character displayed by Asiwaju.

Tinubu is ritualized personality, a streamlined pond, and a totem for sloganeering. He is detestable to his foes yet excitingly speckless to loyalists. The former is committed to thwarting him, knowing their preferred candidate’s perfection is chiefly for display, not exploitable. He can only tickle their fancy from his social media balcony – his window of appearance.

If all politics thrive by a window of appearance, Tinubu’s face is the sun of consciousness rising over his professed horizon. To his rivals and detractors, Tinubu is both exposed and enclosed, a torment and an idol. He is naked yet armoured, vilified yet ritually adored.

Thus he must understand if, for instance, his democratic credentials are radically questioned by news media notorious for their tyrant disposition to staff, institutionalized bigotry, and double standards.

He must appreciate too why he must soak it all in like a garbage dump, knowing it’s a prerequisite for a patriot seeking to serve Nigerians of vast bigotries, intellect, and stripes. He must respond in truth, patience, competence, understanding, and love.

He must understand that his most bitter critics are essential to his pirouette to greater significance. If the presidency is divinely penned in his Qadar, no force in the world could thwart him.

Of all his names, it is easy to fall in love with his oriki, Akanbi. An Akanbi is an Akanda Eda (inured to the odds, or forged to triumph through tumult).

Nigeria is in a state of war, a frigid blank zone under siege. It would take an Akanbi to liberate her.

When the story of these perilous times comes to be written, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin “Mefi” Emefiele, is sure to emerge as one of the most execrable figures of the era.

I date this evaluation from the moment he allowed himself to be recruited by the resident Svengali in the Aso Rock Villa into the race for the presidential ticket of the ruling APC, the party of President Muhammadu Buhari.

It was not his idea.  If he had any political ambition, he had kept it a secret hitherto. He did not strike you as the type who would want to launch a political career starting as the country’s president.  Nothing about him was indicative of overweening conceit or ambition, at last not from a distance.

But it says a great deal about Emefiele’s credulity and gullibility that he embraced it in double quick time.  His first order of business after obtaining an APC membership card, was to flood the landscape with 500 branded cars to register his arrival on the political scene.  Then he bought copious amounts of media space to advertise his mission and recruited elements of the Mobutist  media to project him as the solution to the trouble with Nigeria

It seems not to have occurred to him that he could not enter party politics nor run for president while remaining custodian of the national monetary policy and czar of the banking system.  He saw no conflict in playing those roles simultaneously. 

Perhaps he did, but was assured by the Svengalis in the Villa that such considerations did not apply to him.  Aren’t there always exceptions to every rule?  And we are here dealing not even with any iron-clad rule but a mere convention.

In whatever case, Emefiele’s presidential bid ended in a puff, well before it had gained traction.  It will now go down as the briefest and least consequential foray into electoral politics ever made by a presidential aspirant.

In the perpetual jostling for advantage that occurs in every regime, Emefiele’s sponsors seemed, at least for a while, to have been out-muscled by a rival power bloc in the Villa, determined to clear any doubt as to who was in control.

They set in motion a machinery to have Emefiele prosecuted on charges of financing terrorism.  Even by Nigeria’s standards, the move seemed exorbitant.

Emefilie fled precipitately, to parts unknown.  And for several weeks, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, regulator of the economy that is the powerhouse of the Economic Community of  West African States and home to one of the three largest economies in Africa, abandoned ship.

He was received back at Lagos airport by a phalanx of soldiers.  Since then, they have kept him under armed protection.

Because the economy is judged far too important to be left to the winds of political partisanship and the whims of political meddlers, the autonomy of the Governor of the Central Bank is formally guaranteed in most countries.   That autonomy is relative, to be sure, but the larger it            is or perceived to be, the greater the respect the incumbent is accorded by his or her peers and the greater the confidence that flows from their decisions.

But, much more than his predecessors, Emefiele seems to be content to take his orders from Aso Rock.  Every so often he is to be found there, more supplicant than sure-footed expert giving the authorities the benefit of his superior knowledge and wisdom.

Before Emefiele pulled out or was pulled out of the race for the presidential ticket, he had determined that the time had come to rein in the excess liquidity that was fueling inflation and making the electoral system a hostage to political actors for whom the surest path to power lies in massive vote-buying.

The stockpile they were counting on to buy the election had to be degraded by redesigning the banknotes in circulation, injecting them into the system, and allowing them to circulate side by side with the old notes, until January 31, when the old notes would cease to be legal tender.

This monumental shakeup was to occur within 100 days.   Under no circumstance would the deadline be extended.  At every opportunity, Emefiele reassured all those who expressed doubt about the feasibility of this compressed schedule that he and the CBN were up to the task. 

That nation now knows at a frightful human and material cost that grows with each passing day that Emefiele was not being forthright.  And even at his most indulgent, Buhari must now be wondering whether Emefiele was in earnest when he assured him that the National Mint had the capacity to produce the volume of new notes the overhaul would require.

According to the best authorities, it was based on that assurance that Buhari instructed Emefiele to have the National Mint print the new notes.  No outsourcing.  And that was how we arrived at this present disquiet where millions of our compatriots are reduced to wallowing in misery of near-Biblical dimensions.

In every clime, it is accepted, even if the tenet is not always woven into policy, that the welfare of the people is the supreme law.  In Nigeria, the governing philosophy seems to be that wanton immiseration of the people is the supreme law.

Surely, a more humane way is possible?

Emefiele has stoutly denied telling the Council of State, trotted out to give Buhari covering fire, that the National Mint was well equipped to print the new bank notes. Emefiele has so many faces that it is hard to tell the one he is presenting at any given moment. Even, so,  I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on that point.

But the capacity to produce the quantum of required bank notes is not the same thing as the capacity to deliver them within the timeframe Emefiele had stipulated for the changeover, plus the additional ten days he was forced by public indignation to concede.

He has neither produced nor delivered.

As we go back and forth, the question cries out insistently: To what purpose is the perfect calendar of woes which Emefiele has inflicted on Nigerians in the runup to the General Election?  For whose benefit?

Cui bono?

The claim that it is designed to insulate the public from those scheming to rob them of their voices and their power by the wholesale purchase of their votes is implausible to the point of absurdity.

How, at any rate, can that objective be attained by making it well-nigh impossible for clients in good standing to draw on their bank deposits to meet their daily needs?

How, Mefi?

We must put the same question to the latter-day Arthur Nzeribe who sought an injunction restraining the authorities from extending the life of the old banknotes even if they so wished. 

What is the busybody’s locus standi?

And to the latter-day Judge Bassey Ikpeme  — she of the “Midnight Judgement – who more than enthusiastically embraced a petition rooted more in politics than law and upheld it when she should have declined jurisdiction.

Finally, the question must also to go the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation,  Abubakar Malami (SAN), who has been carrying on the tradition of the holder of the same office and resident cardsharper in Babangida’s military presidency, the late Clement Akpamgbo, SAN.

Give Kano State Governor Dr Abdullahi Ganduje full marks for “connecting the dots,” pardon the cliché.  Anti-June 12 elements have regrouped big time. 

The public ignores them at its peril.

Twenty analog years ago, on February 1, 2003, or thereabout, I wrote for one of the newspapers a piece welcoming Dr Hamidat Doyinsola Abiola, to my demographic neighborhood on her 60th birthday, little knowing that she had actually preceded me to the precinct.

The Lady (hereafter HDA)  turned 80 a week ago.

Her status as the Grand Doyenne of the Nigerian Press (I use that old-fashioned term advisedly) was affirmed by President Muhammadu Buhari in a stirring birthday tribute.  Asiwaju Bola and Senator Remi Tinubu called her a valued friend and associate in advancing progressive causes. Dele Alake and Tunji Bello, who had served as editors for the Concord Newspapers, called her  reverentially “our Editor-in-Chief.”

It is in the latter category that HAD’s renown will reverberate across time.

Her last address was the sprawling Concord Newspaper Group where she presided as Editor-in-Chief and chief operating officer.  At its height, the Group boasted six titles in its stable, and had on its staff some of the best-known Nigerian journalists. 

Its distribution network was unsurpassed in its reach and efficiency. If just one newspaper was on the newsstand in the most far-flung corners of Nigeria on any given day, it had to be of the Group’s titles.

In a male-dominated industry, leading such a conglomerate was no mean task.  But HDA played that role for years and carried along a team comprising members of perhaps the most querulous occupational group.

It helped that she was the wife of Concord publisher. Chief Moshood Abiola, but it took much more than that to stay at the top of the game.  HDA did not just walk into the role. Long years of academic and professional immersion had prepared her for it.

Graduating from the University of Ibadan in the 1960s, HDA entered journalism by serving as a writer and columnist for the Daily Sketch, in Ibadan.  From there she went on to the Daily Times as part of the pioneering graduate team that its visionary leader, Babatunde Jose, had recruited to raise its intellectual appeal to match the appetite of an audience that had grown much more sophisticated than the leading newspaper of the day.

It was in keeping with that programme that the Daily Times sponsored HDA for doctoral studies at the University of Buffalo, in upstate New York.  Before that, she had earned a Master’s degree from the highly regarded journalism programme at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin.

With the doctorate, the first by a Nigerian woman, she returned to Nigeria and served on the Editorial Board of the Daily Times, which Dr Stanley Macebuh had transformed from a routine expedient to the newspaper’s cranium.

Then, Moshood Abiola and the Concord Newspapers happened, in the aftermath of the 1979 General Election.  HDA relocated uptown from Kakawa, to Ikeja, the operating base of the Concord Group, shortly thereafter becoming editor of its flagship title, The National Concord.

The Concord Group unapologetically pulled for President Shehu Shagari and the ruling NPN, despite their unpopularity in places where Nigeria’s core newspaper readership resided.  Abiola’s endorsement of sharia grated against the sensibilities of Christians, leading some church officials to order a boycott of the Concord titles. 

Moshood Abiola was also widely regarded as an apologist for the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida.  That did little to enhance the standing of the Concord titles.

Through it all, HDA kept the newspapers in a stable, holding, pattern. She came into her own when Moshood Abiola severed his links with the ruling party and became a less strident proselytizer.  The Concord newspapers grew in appeal and respect.

A far greater challenge lay ahead.

It came when Moshood Abiola entered the 1993 presidential race and won the presidential ticket of one that is “a little to the left” of the two official political parties, the  Social Democratic Party, the other being the “little to the right” National Republican Convention.

The Concord Newspapers, like the rest of the private press, saw through the duplicity of Babangida’s political transition programme and took a leading role in exposing it.  The price was heavy.  A banning order put its weekly newsmagazine African Concord permanently out of circulation.

The Concord titles were handed a wider banning order during the debacle confected to prevent Moshood Abiola from being declared winner of the 1993 presidential election.  When the ban was lifted after a year, the operating climate had become unsustainable.   The titles limped on for a while, shadows of what they once were.  Then, they expired.

Abiola’s struggle to claim his electoral mandate thrust HDA into a role for which nothing had prepared her:  spouse of an embattled president-elect, fighting for his life, under a brutal military regime, and editor-in-chief and chief operating officer of a mass-circulation newspaper.

In the Abiola household, there was an unspoken but clear division of labour among the wives. Kudirat Abiola was the popular face of NADECO, the umbrella organization of progressive elements campaigning to retrieve Abiola’s mandate.  Outgoing, outspoken,  and defiant right up to the moment she was gunned down in broad daylight by government-sponsored assassins on her way to yet another strategy meeting.

The thoroughly a-political and sedate but engaging Adebisi Abiola kept the home front humming.

HDA was the intellectual face of the struggle, the discreet mobilizer who maintained and used effectively a network of influential persons in Nigeria and abroad.  She brought to this task mastery of the emergent communication technology.  

At the height of the annulment crisis,  she prepared – full disclosure: I assisted in the effort – a fortnightly newsletter on the political situation in Nigeria she sent to key officials of the United Nations, the United States, the Organization of African Unity, and the Commonwealth.  From the feedback, we were satisfied that the effort was not wasted.

The June 12 struggle took a heavy toll on HDA.  In all its obscenity, Kudirat’s assassination was a clear signal that nothing and nobody was off-limit in General Sani Abacha’s plan to foist his brutish rule on the nation.  They kept her under surveillance.  They drew her into enervating mind games.

Not long after Kudirat’s assassination,  a bullet issuing from an undetermined origin would have struck HDA on the head right in her living room at the Abiola Residence in Opebi had she not shifted her position some two minutes earlier.

The stakes were prohibitive.  Yet HDA kept faith and helped keep the struggle alive, until the President-elect was done to death, very conveniently across the coffee table from a United States delegation visiting ostensibly to facilitate his release from the military regime’s custody.

She did not confine her exertions to the Boardroom or political networking.  She imparted her knowledge, skills, and insights to journalism students at the University of Lagos, among other institutions.  She used her resources and influence to promote worthy causes nationwide. A generation of Nigerian women count her as a role model.

HDA’s sacrifice in the epic struggle has not been acknowledged, much less honoured.  Recognition has instead flowed to fringe actors, and even to some who did everything in their power to thwart the struggle, to subvert the electoral mandate of Nigeria’s sovereign electors.

Her entry into the eighth decade of her life provides an opportunity to redress this neglect. In the next National Honours List, or based on a Special Citation, the Grand Doyenne of the Nigerian Press deserves to take her earned place among Nigeria’s truly exceptional figures.