WHEN
I wrote the piece: ‘Tribute to Tinubu: A Parody of Shakespeare’ a few
friends and colleagues said I was un-characteristically ‘patronizing.’
Tinubu deserved that tribute which I paid to him; I still think him
worthy of all the sentiments contained therein and I still feel proud
that I wrote that piece.
Tinubu
has fathered a peaceful political revolution in Nigeria which has not
only moved our democracy beyond a notch by its shattering of the myth of
the invincibility of incumbency, but it has saved the nation from the
malignance of a ruinous era of political impunity which was bent on
balkanizing our country.
And
let me say that if Tinubu, afterwards should, for any reason lend the
instrumentation of his time, his prowess and his resources in the
promotion of any contrary ideal odious or antithetical to the noble one
of growing our democracy and developing our nation, I should also, with a
measure of antipathy equal to the enthusiasm with which I had praised
him, deploy the venom of my pen to harangue and to dis-approbate him.
But
come to think of it, if you ask me whether I think Tinubu is ‘evil’ –
politically, I should answer as much with the affirmative ‘yes’ as with
the negative ‘no’.
For
as ‘beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’, logically speaking I think,
so should ‘ugliness’ be also ‘in the eyes of the beholder.’ And so to a
bitter PDP whose defeat the Asiwaju’s deft, adept and adroit politics
had caused, Tinubu is most definitely ‘evil’; and thus in the subjective
eyes of members of PDP Tinubu is uglier than the mythical Gorgon.
But
to the APC whose political fortunes Tinubu’s (even if) neo-Machiavellic
master-tactic has now raised from ‘nothing’ to ‘everything,’ the
Jagaban is most definitely no ‘evil’ but ‘good.’ And thus in the
objective eyes of sincere members of APC Tinubu should be the
personification of beauty itself – politically that is.
Presently
in the treacherous hustle and jostle for political positions, this is
not so with the hawks and vultures in the APC who now masquerade as
altruistic progressive change-agents of the Buhari government.
To
these neo-conservative opportunists, all of a sudden ‘Asiwaju’ ‘The
Leader’ is now simply Tinubu ‘The meddlesome interloper’! He is as they
now claim ‘unnecessarily interfering with our democratic processes’ and
must thus be cut to size.
And
on this you cannot but have a sense of the poignantly disgusting and
the de ja vu: especially if you recall what the then Rhodesia’s
oppressive head Colonist Ian Smith said to the anti-colonial world of
the 70s about Zimbabweans: “These blacks are spoiling my democracy!” ‘my
democracy indeed!’
Or
maybe if you have some appreciable knowledge of the UPN’s Second
Republic politics when the then ‘Adedibu’ of that era’s Ibadan politics,
Adelabu Adegoke, after a resounding UPN victory achieved through the
instrumentation of Adelabu’s political enfant terrible, was told plainly
by Awo that since he had no western education, he could not be a
Commissioner!
Though
academics is not the basis of this comparison, Adelabu’s reply aptly
typifies, today, the mentality of those who have contributed next to
nothing to the birth and ascendancy of APC, but whose hubris is now
questioning the leadership of the man who almost singlehandedly formed,
midwifed and nurtured it to power. Adelabu was said to have asked
rhetorically in Yoruba: “adiye da lori iresi, sugbon ko da n kpalo?”
meaning: ‘so cooked chicken is good sitting atop a bowl of rice, but a
live one is not good to grace the hallow of the parlour?’
They
said that the Asiwaju wants to install surrogate leaders for the
legislature so he can remote-control them. And I say: ‘assuming, without
conceding, that this is true, to what end, if we may ask, would Tinubu
want to remote-control the NASS?’ Is it to prevent it from passing good
progressive bills that will give effect to the promise of ‘change’ by
Buhari? Or is it to egg the NASS on to anti-Buhari tantrums so that the
General’s government cannot effectively function? I really don’t get it!
And
I even wonder more: did they not invest Tinubu with all the sobriquets
and appellations of a ‘Leader’? Did they not say that he was the
courageous ‘Jagaban’; the one who led from the front? And did Tinubu not
lead them from the front? Selflessly giving his time, his energy and
his resources? Did he not put his life on the line of a hysterically
dangerous incumbency desperately angling to keep power by hook or crook?
Did they not say that Tinubu’s was a goal-oriented and decisively
go-getting ‘Leadership’?
Did
we not see the series of political mutations afterwards initiated and
set in motion from the pre-natal stages, the singular efforts of one man
to corral several ideological eggs into one political embryo, so as to
give life to a new all-embracing political party around which both
progressives and even repentant fascists could congregate to make
practicable what was thought well-nigh impossible, namely enacting the
parting of the political Red Sea to say to the behemoth PDP ‘let my
people go!’
We
thought that we saw Tinubu walk the miles from the North West to the
North East; from North Central to the South East and from the South West
to the South-South to build strong bridges of geo-ethnic and
geo-political consensus; planning and strategizing to form alliances, to
create leagues of political amity and to search out for men and women
of weight and of mettle; political and non-political actors with diverse
gifts and varying competences, to man the many points of the
opposition’s political rudder.
These
efforts were rewarded with successes in the creation of the first ever
successful merger, the formation of the first ever peoples party, the
conduct of one of the most transparent party primaries, the emergence of
the most popular presidential candidate, the running of the most
competitive presidential campaigns, and the first ever defeat of
incumbency by an opposition party in one of the most transparent
presidential elections.
But
now that the political dinner table is set, surrounded, unfortunately,
by opportunistic political vultures and hyenas, they are telling us that
although Tinubu is an excellent political cook, he is not as good in
the culinary art of dishing. That the Party Leader must stay away from
the Party’s First Political Supper! In fact like Caesar, they accused
the Asiwaju of ambition. The same Tinubu who had publicly announced that
Buhari had offered him a chance to be on the Presidential ticket – an
offer which he said he politely declined.
Tinubu
does not deserve this kind of treatment. The Asiwaju as the Party
Leader and the Party are the veritable taproots of Mr. President. If
they who care about Mr. President’s success are left at the mercy of the
Party’s vultures and hyenas who only care about the spoils of politics,
sooner or later the shrub of the Presidency and its blooming foliage
will feel the wilt. It is both morally and politically expedient that
Buhari steps in to restore rank discipline and to assure the Asiwaju and
the Party hierarchy that he has ‘got their back’; just like they,
through thick and thin, had always had Mr. President’s back.
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