Birthday boy”, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, was right, at the 8th Bola Tinubu Colloquium in Abuja: the stunning All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential win of 2015 was a fitting birthday gift.
But that connect, between personal bliss and group glory, underscores the thin divide between triumph and failure in politics.
One year ago, the land was upbeat with renewed optimism. Right now, it is downcast with yet unrealised hope.
It’s the ancient children of Israel out there again in the jungle, out of Egypt but yet to reach the Promised Land; bawling, yelling and screaming at Jehovah to clear off his celestial high horse and return them to Egypt fast, since his Canaan promise was nothing but holy smoke!
The triumph of March 2015 has turned the crunch of March 2016!
To be sure, most of the shrieking and screeching and squealing has come from the defeated class, praying and fasting that the Buhari administration fails.
Even then, Nigeria has more than its fair share of the fickle, the simplistic, the gullible, and the outright vacuous, ready victims of the nay orchestra. Besides, when the pocket hurts, cold reason melts in hot passion.
Still, Tinubu’s personal triumph, in the context of the opposition’s victory, is a salute to an individual’s total devotion to a cause, no matter how lonely or chilly.
Indeed, were history to record Nigerian political evolution from 1993 till now, it could well tag this epoch Tinubu Era (TE); the era before, Before Tinubu (BT) and the epoch after, After Tinubu (AT). Such has been his grand impact on Nigerian politics (and governance) between the still-birth Third Republic (1992-1993) and now.
Here is why.
1993: After joining the conservative progressives in Shehu Musa Yar’Adua’s People’s Front (PF) faction of the victorious Social Democratic Party (SDP) to sack the classical Awoists of the Lateef Jakande school in Lagos, Tinubu balked at PF trading off Moshood Abiola’s June 12 presidential mandate, after Gen. Ibrahim Babangida had annulled that election. Dapo Sarumi, the Lagos PF leader then, kept faith with PF.
Between Tinubu and Sarumi, that made the difference between political life and death. Though Sarumi would briefly buoy up as one of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s first set of ministers, his political career would fizzle out.
But Tinubu’s would bloom — thanks to standing on the sanctity of the vote, with NADECO fighting the annulment, and helping to birth the current democratic order; rather than pally with intra-party reactionaries for short term selfish pleasure.
2003: After Obasanjo’s grand electoral invasion of the South West, following the controversial 2003 general elections, Tinubu’s Lagos remained the sole state to escape the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) capture. Talks then were rife: the then Lagos governor should dump the progressive shipwreck and join federal power.
Not Tinubu. He instead rallied the dejected progressive troops, even with savage plots and hideous intrigues from the Obasanjo presidency; and its crass executive bullying.
Two election seasons after in 2011, most of the South West was back under the progressive fold, if not as one party then as ideological soul mates, notwithstanding the Olusegun Mimiko political prostitution and ideological subversion that careened him from Alliance for Democracy (AD, 1999), to PDP (2003), Labour Party (2007) and back to PDP (2015).
Again like Sarumi, comparing Mimiko to Tinubu is a harsh study in unprincipled wheeling-and-dealing, which leads to eventual ruin (Mimiko); and staying steady on a tough and difficult turf, which leads to ultimate triumph (Tinubu).
2015: That was the blessed year the Afenifere grandees finally got their deserved comeuppance; but again, Tinubu was their battling ram.
Even when clear Goodluck Jonathan was running everyone into a ditch, the Afenifere divine, Kabiyesi (the Unquestionable) of the Awo progressive franchise, that reserve the right to bestow or withdraw it from mere mortals, located their own good fortune in Goodluck.
Since their personal good equalled the Yoruba comfort (so went their tragic conceit which really was hubris), they all zoomed off to their personal ruins, expecting the fond Yoruba collective to follow.
But again, as in 2003 when the five other AD governors fell for the Obasanjo deceit, backed by this same Afenifere grandees, apart from the late Chief Abraham Adesanya, Tinubu charted a radically different path.
For one, the opposition alliance APC was gathering traction. For another, the PDP was unravelling fast, with a president doing all the wrong things in electoral desperation; and Patience, his spouse, mouthing all the wrong things on the stumps, to further bury hubby without trace.
But to the Afenifere, old or young, nothing drove them but concentrated Tinubu spite. To this well-funded conspiracy of demonization and blackmail, the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) duo of Fredrick Fasehun and Gani Adams — one, an old man bordering on political senility; the other, a callow youth punching above his weight — were merry recruits.
Add the AIT hate documentary, and feel anew the full venom of Operation Total Demonization! Still, AIT has since gobbled its vomit; and some news media, merry echoes of those hate messages, now fall upon themselves to make Tinubu their man of that same year!
At the end, the impossible, on which the spiteful Afenifere and confederates hedged their bet, despite the clear balance of demography and political power, happened. For the first time in Nigerian history, a federal ruling party got electorally toppled and cobbled by the opposition!
Again, Tinubu is flush with victory; and his traducers are whining in defeat! For the Afenifere, the age of innocence, the halcyon paradise of integrity, is over. They not only lost an election, they lost their brand integrity.
Chief Olu Falae, who spearheaded the anti-Tinubu army, spurring the Trojan horse called SDP, is now freely cited for alleged obtainment with established political crooks in the land! How many of the other grandees savoured Jonathan’s sweet electoral dollars, now turned poison to all?
It doesn’t get more tragic!
But as it often happens in politics, tragedy and victory comingle, with a rapidity faster than even the flux of Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher that posits change is the sole permanent thing in life.
So, for Tinubu himself, this is as much victory time as it is crunch time. The victory whoops of 2015 only echo at a distance, with its hangover. One year later, it is crunch time; and the groans, the pains and the angst in the land aren’t pretty.
From that terrible din, come taunts of the electorally vanquished; the shriek of the fickle; and the occasional jeer of the alienated, even from the victorious camp.
From the media come the obtuse, the acute, the reasonable, the outright malevolent and hostile and the grand conceit of the brilliant but unwise, all staking their republican claim to tutor their government the ABC of winning policy.
But the Buhari administration need not be frazzled. It is only a grand reminder its work is well cut out; and that failure is no option. So, it must work its butts out.
Indeed, if Tinubu’s personal triumph is to last, and not buried in the present crunch, APC must fulfil its historic mission of changing Nigeria for good.
