THERE are many persons in this republic whose names should never appear in the same sentence with the word democracy. Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria’s current president is one such name. There are many others. He has been around for more than awhile. His reputation precedes him, but hardly for good. There’s no suggestion here that he’s a thoroughly bad man. And irredeemable. But he carries such a heavy baggage that ordinarily would have killed off the social, cultural, political, economic, public and private lives of three persons combined. You will be living in denial not to give credit to any person who has allegedly lived with a false name almost all his life, and who has travelled the world and also worked in transnational corporations with the said dodgy name. You probably may have read or known of someone who claimed to be an alumnus of a school they never attended. Tinubu is one such person.
Claiming alumnus of an academic institution not attended is almost an everyday occurrence these days. He had once claimed to be a former student of the University of Chicago, and actually filled a form in that regard for election purposes. But it turned out that he was not a former student of that college. He was caught. He recanted, and then quickly recruited one Senator Tokunbo Afikuyomi to play the role of a fall guy. He got away with it in spite of a dogged pursuit in the law courts by the late fiery attorney, Gani Fawehinmi.
In line with what appeared to be his life and career, the same person who is today the president of our country attempted to hoodwink old students of the prestigious Government College, Ibadan in Oyo State to host a reception for him as one of their own who has made it in life, decades ago. Again, he was caught at the last minute when nobody could identify as his classmate. However, he was undeterred. Somewhere in his dark past, Tinubu had filled out yet another application to the effect that he had attended yet another Government College, but this time in the Eric Moore, Surulere area of Lagos in 1970. A casual search indicated that Government College, Eric Moore, was founded in 1974, clear four years after he claimed that he had attended the school as part of a requirement for admission into a university in the US. He reportedly gained the admission into the college. The admission, to this day, remains controversial. He’s said to have acquired a diploma from that university. But the diploma remains controversial. Even forgery has been associated with it. Lawyers say you cannot put something on nothing and expect it to stand. This is not for Tinubu. He puts something on nothing, and wills it to stand. With Tinubu, the so-called learned people are stark illiterates.
In some other climes their citizens and sundry gatekeepers of the sanity and health of their nations work extra hard to keep away some people from the levers of the powers of government. Many fall into the category of people who are usually shut out of acquiring and exercising the enormous powers of government. But for this conversation we will restrict ourselves to only two categories of such persons who should be kept out of wielding state power.
The first of such persons are those who are mired in sullied and questionable past. The fear is that those in this category carry their life of criminal ‘entrepreneurship’ into government to the hurt of the majority of the people. A leopard does not change its spot. The second group that every sane society tries very hard to keep out of the very top echelons of government is the extremely wealthy, especially those with riches of the questionable type. During the 2023 presidential election, the phrase ‘wealth without enterprise’ gained currency and traction. There are many of them in government today. Lawyer and politician, Muiz Banire, it was who once described them as politicians without a second address. For such people partisan politics and access to the public treasury is their sole and only means of sustenance and livelihood. To them the talk of democracy and its ethos are tales by idiots. To them majority of Nigerians are fools and only good enough to be used as canon fodders in the quest for political power.
Tinubu is baked in the furnace of the streets, at home and abroad. Apart from becoming the president of our country, not much has changed concerning him. During his soujourn in the US in the 1970s, he was also law onto himself or an outlaw as some would like to say until he was not. He was alleged to be a banker to outlaws and henchmen of the underworld. And reportedly refunded a huge sum of money to the US authorities in Chicago for alleged illicit deals. A lawyer who was one of his campaign spokespersons in 2023 said Tinubu was not sued for the recovery of the money suspected to be proceeds from illicit drugs. He said only the bank accounts which bore his name were sued for wrongdoing. The man who was engaged in that lawyering, Festus Keyamo, is today the minister of aviation in his principal’s clueless regime.
In countries and jurisdictions where there are strong institutions and laws, and the will to enforce laws, Nigeria’s president in his past life, which may actually not have passed, could only thrive in the underworld. Or ‘overworld’. And he did. But in Nigeria, Tinubu as president is the law. Only fools still doubt this. Anybody who is the law can do no wrong. In theory we have three equal co-branches of the Federal Government. But in reality we have one ‘branch’ of government – Tinubu. He showed his hand from day one on May 29, 2023, the very day he assumed office as president after a controversial and hotly disputed election. He scrapped the so-called subsidy on petrol. In tow he handpicked his own senate president, Godswill Akpabio, who’s also the chairman of the National Assembly (NASS), and installed the Chief Justice of Nigeria who is the head of the judiciary. One was facing imminent prosecution by the anti-graft agency over alleged fraud running into billions of naira from his era as governor of Akwa Ibom state. The other who heads the judiciary is alleged to be a personal non-grata in the United States of America (USA) through visa denial. Tinubu enjoys sovereign immunity, the other heads of the so-called co-equal branches of government don’t. The president controls the armed forces, the regular police, the secret police and all other instruments of coercion. So his co-heads of government who are alleged to be tainted survive at his (Tinubu’s) pleasure and mercy. They can’t lift a finger. They must necessarily do his biddings. And they do – one quietly, the other noisily.
Therefore, I was amused when some compatriots who have been slumbering since 2023 when Tinubu took office with his dictatorial tendencies so glaring, started throwing tantrums at his sacking of Rivers state governor, Siminalaye Fubara; deputy governor, Ngozi Odu, and members of the State House of Assembly over a case of two (executive & legislature) fighting. The dismantling of the critical structures of our nascent democracy in Rivers State had nothing to do with claims of clear and present danger to the economic wellbeing of the country. It was a political move ahead of the 2027 election. Tinubu has determined his Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Nysom Wike, who awarded the state to him while he (Wike) was the governor in 2023, as erratic and potentially a liability to his reelection in 2017. Tinubu wants to take his fate in his own hands given the electoral value of the oil-rich Niger Delta state. Other states are in Tinubu’s cross hairs too, though the approach to capture them will vary. His surrogates have already given voice to the plot. Those who operate in the gray areas of the law do not have scruples. It’s worse when the man at the head is the law himself.
When Tinubu took state governors to the Supreme (Court) Cult last year we raised an alarm that the move was not altruistic. He wanted to control the 774 council chairmen throughout the country directly from Abuja, and use them as foot soldiers in 2027. His effort to use provisions in the Constitution as a basis to justify his political action was akin to an attempt to hide behind one finger – apologies to the late MKO Abiola. There seems to be nowhere else where federalism like Nigeria’s that the central government funds the local governments directly as a statutory obligation. In our tortured federalism, the federating units should be between Abuja and the subnationals. So each state should ideally create as many administrative units as catches their fancy, and fund them. It should never be the business of Abuja. And by the way, is President Tinubu not the same Governor Tinubu who fought then President Olusegun Obasanjo to retain Lagos State control of its local governments and their adjuncts?
Tinubu has no principles. He only pretends to be a democrat. He is driven by selfish interests. He’s a tortured man. He is insecure in spite of his bragaddacio. If you are in doubt about how insecure Tinubu is, look at the form and texture of his security chiefs and kitchen cabinet? Only an insecure ruler will surround himself with appointees who bear similar names to his, who dress like him, and who share the same mother tongue. Check history – people like this end in ignominy. They are usually caught in the web of their own contradictions. The fear is that he could be a bull in a china shop.
