By Iyke Obi Durumba
In assessing Tinubu’s public life, it is a grievous sin in the eyes of his supporters to hold him accountable. You know, in Nigeria, it is a conversational mistake to hold politicians fully accountable for their deeds in the public space. If you try that, you will be blackmailed into silence, verbally clobbered into submission.
Nigeria is in a bad shape but going by the tone of national conversations, nobody put her there. No-one is responsible for anything bad here. Every leader past and present (even Abacha today!) is a hero or ‘did his best’. So how did Nigeria spoil at the different levels? Where did the rain start to beat us? If Nigeria is not delivering to citizens, who do you hold responsible when you excuse everyone who has played a part in it at various levels?
The saying that only the truth can set you free is not known in Nigeria and so the country remains in the bondage of modern-day slave dealers garbed as politicians living off the fat of the land. Truth in Nigeria is anathema.
One of the reasons why they say Tinubu is ‘great’ is because he has kept a leash on Lagos and almost the entire SW for 13-21yrs unbroken. And I say that’s the exact reason to politically lynch him! Look at Lagos…once the clouds darken, residents start thinking of boats. They spend maybe a fifth of their lives in traffic and that one single metro line cannot be completed in a state governed solely by one party (progressive so-called) for 21yrs! Non-state actors fondly called Area Boys or Omo Onile function as a parallel government in a 21st-century state and governance is at its most opaque in a state whose GDP is reputedly the fifth largest in Africa.
They also say he is great because his mentees hold or have held high public positions. And I say the more reason to lynch him! He is a major producer of many of those responsible for the bad leadership which we all agree is the bane of Nigeria’s development. It isn’t ghosts who are running Nigeria down.
But if we want to behave the typical Nigerian way where we praise Hishpuppi before asking how he got his wealth, I will join in praising the great Jagaban. He is a great man indeed! His immediate political family has produced VP, Govs, Senators etc while he is the mastermind behind the greatest political event in Nigeria’s history – the removal of an incumbent through the ballot. Yes, in the Nigerian sense, he’s a great man.
After all, when OBJ’s infamous roguery was sweeping through the SW in 2003, he held his ground and with political sagacity, kept Lagos for himself and expanded his empire nearly exclusively through Court of Appeal judgments until he started winning elections proper. So in a dysfunctional system like Nigeria’s, Tinubu is great, no doubt!
But you see the thing about Tinubu… look, Buhari’s brethren may follow him to hell (that’s the strength of ethnoreligious affinity in Nigeria) but there’s NO WAY someone like Tinubu could not have foreseen the tragedy of leadership Nigeria is in today. With Tinubu’s perspicacity, there’s absolutely no way he can claim he did not know that Buhari would provide such poor and lifeless leadership as we witness every day through the most shocking revelations in the administration.
He saw Buhari’s empty incompetence very clearly no doubt. I will not belittle Jagaban’s famed headhunting skills by assuming he didn’t. He saw through Buhari obviously but because of a narrow selfish ambition, he brought out the General who had cried at a news conference and gone to bed, created a strange new image for the man, dressed him up in English suits and Igbo isi agu, propped him up with egregious lies and sold him to Nigerians in the most despicably and desperately mercantile manner. At the time of this marketing, the clear signs of these ills which have benumbed Nigerians today never mattered to Tinubu who is someone who should know better.
All because of selfish ambition.
And so you can imagine the sneering faces which greet Tinubu’s appeal to sentiments when he seeks to be seen as a self-sacrificing politician in his flowery missive yesterday. Oh really! Now that it has become clear that control of the party has been torn from his grasp, he begins to wax philosophical and play the OBJ card who claimed he never wanted a Third Term only when he had seen that it was impossible. Today, as it suits Tinubu to pretend his motives were never personal, his dialectics is desperate to impress it on Nigerians that he never hungered for the Presidency now that he has hit a brick wall. No-one is deceived.
It is now evident that Tinubu has resolved to commit his entire political career of decades to the exclusive magnanimity of his Northern collaborators in APC. If he was ever a political threat to those in his party who carried out the coup whom he kept referencing in his statement, he has been effectively neutralized. Philosophy or no philosophy, that is the practical reality today. Even his latitude for political manoeuvres has been forcefully curtailed and reduced to only that extent permitted him by the indulgence of those he thought would play fair and square with him. And he can’t say he was not warned.
Whether he accepts the takeover of APC or not, whether his capitulation has anything to do with a fear of what they hold over him or not, the political reality is that Tinubu is now merely a tolerated passenger in a vehicle he designed, built and drove.
Truly, Jagaban should have known better.
