#Reflections

2023: Tinubu and ‘burdened ambition’

Busuyi  Mekusi

I concluded the highlights for this piece two weeks before October 20, 2020, that we had a midday-blackout, and waves of arson and reigns of hooliganism, but could not publish it due to other pressing reflections. In conformity with the order in nature, individuals, nations and empires have their periods of glow. Just that as for beautiful roses, the withering height is inescapable. Events, situations and circumstances do shape persons and nations, as the pathways are often laced with dynamites, both natural and man-made. The rise to stardom is evidently a product of sacrifice, commitment and ‘infringements’ on the benefits of others. Little wonder we are patently looters! The Nigeria political turfs have differently made and unmade heroes. While some ‘heroes’ like Babangida and Abacha live and die substantially unsung, others like Awolowo, Balewa, Ahmadu Bello, have their effigies reduced to political magic-wands.
Even though 2023 is still a little removed from now in spatio-temporal Gregorian calendaring, it is simply ‘tomorrow’ for Nigerian politicians, who are more concerned about the ‘capturing’ of political powers than good governance. The 2023 discordant tunes are already staging the North against the South, in relation to the expected unwritten rotational arrangement that would get the presidential seat to the Southern hemisphere, after the Buhari Presidency. One unique character that has made his intention to contest known is Orji Kalu, who could be trusted in terms of fidelity as he expeditiously fulfilled the promise of Solar Light he made to Kuje Correctional Centre while there, as soon as respite came his way. He must have been right with his ambition to rule Nigeria, as we all seem to be in crowded Kuje, peeping to the ’emptiness’ in Abuja. The three-score independence celebration left us with scotching sun; politically, socially, psychologically, economically and security wise.
Tinubu is no doubt a gargantuan personality with nine lives, political inscriptions across the country, having taken a firm root in the commercial capital of Nigeria, Lagos; the city with sprawling blinking lagoons. Tinubu has been a student of political travails, starting from when he pulled out of Mobil, to try his luck in the ‘murky’ waters of politics. In many interviews he granted, he left no one in doubt about his capacity to predict the attritions of detractors before they hatch their political coups and perpetrate their shenanigans. However, BAT seemed to have been caught unawares and left to reel in the ruins and ashes of some of his investments when youths poured invectives on him, and miscreants harangued his business empire, after he was fingered as the brain behind the shooting of armless protesters at the Lekki Tollgate; a space also considered to be an epicenter of the daily flowing revenues of the national leader of the ruling party.
Although Bode George has vehemently argued that Tinubu is an outsider in Lagos, the sagacious enigma in the latter is reminiscent of the tenacious growth of the Lagos aborigines, who benefitted from the twin ‘evils’ of the slave trade and colonialism to access western civilization and leverage on commerce. Tinubu is arguably an iconoclast of a sort, with the ‘revolt’ against the old establishment of Afenifere, which tried to dictate the political pace for younger generation. His recalcitrance led him to grab and maintain a firm hold on Lagos State and its politics, with allegations made about his culpability about the death of Funso Williams, an extraordinary personality that typified refinement and goodwill. Tinubu, as Governor of Lagos, tangled with the brutish presidency of Obasanjo and, against the odds of the illegal withholding of several monthly allocations to the State, creatively ran Lagos State with internally generated revenues. His expertise in taxation and the birthing of Alpha-Beta gave him a palm-tree by the sea side, with fresh palm-wine for both the ‘living and the dead’. The company is presently embattled as a disgruntled former accountant of the company dragged the company to court. Fowler, the former Chair of FIRS and ally of Tinubu, is allegedly being quizzed by the EFCC. Evidently, the systematic emasculation of Jagaban is being achieved, apparently to weaken his supposed ambition to contest the presidential seat in 2023.
Tinubu is said to have developed a political template and developmental master-plan for Lagos State, even though some people are of the opinion that such purported ingenuity are inadequate, considering the quantum of resources accruable to the State. Political leaderships in the State have similarly responded to his gimmicks, with members of his immediate family clinching political offices in the Senate, and the Market, the latter being the enclave of traducers of spirituality and the metaphysical. Little wonder that some believed that the late mother of Tinubu, Abibatu Mogaji, who was the Iyaloja of Lagos, cut his teeth and straddled him on the path of ownership by women, who form the larger percentage of ‘gossipers’ and voters. Tinubu’s hold on the political leadership of Lagos would have ended when he attempted to stop Babatunde Raji Fashola (BRF) from returning to the government house. The popularity of BRF was so loud that Tinubu had to reluctantly support his second term in office, creating bad blood in BRF, his followers and the populace. BRF is today leading a political group in Lagos, independent of that of Tinubu, to sustain his political presence nationally.
The abortion of the second term aspiration of the immediate past Governor of Lagos State, Akinwumi Ambode, was made possible because he was said to have disconnected himself from the people, but the backlash among his fellow Governors was that he was fallen by the bullet of the unforgiving godfather, Tinubu. That act grounded the revulsions some people have for him, within and outside Lagos, and must have accentuated why players among the Governors’ Forum decided to cut the ‘Iroko Tree’ to planks, if not firewood. Starting from the removal of Adams Oshiomole, Tinubu’s ‘Man Friday’ as the national Chairman of APC, to the inglorious video speech made by Tinubu as part of the build-ups to the Edo State gubernatorial election, with Obaseki’s victory, to the allege sponsorship of #ENDSARS protests and the unjustifiable allegation of his having ordered the shooting by soldiers, the conspiracy against the master strategist appeared to have been well-coordinated by his old former allies, who are now naturally better than their old teacher and mentor.
Fayemi was rumoured to be behind the wedges being constructed between Tinubu and Buhari, on the one hand, and Tinubu and Nigerians, on the other. JKF, the Chairman of the Governors’ Forum, is rumoured to be nursing a presidential ambition, just like Tinubu, his estranged co-traveler and godfather, with El-Rufai as his running mate. Apparently to neutralise the national scope and larger-than-life posturing of Tinubu, with the avowed chieftaincy title as the Jagaban of Borgu Kingdom in Niger State, JKF recently was showcased as the adopted son of late Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, by the Sultan of Sokoto, at the 50th anniversary celebration of Arewa House, where he was a guest speaker. New permutations revealed Amaechi/El-rufai contest. With the centrality of the diminutive recalcitrant El-rufai, with no-love-lost between him and Tinubu, the stage appears set to confront the ‘Lion of Bourdillon’ to submission! ‘2023’ is not just still far, but heavily ‘pregnant’. To be continued!

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