Rotimi Fasan
Nigeria’s political landscape still looks like a confused field of play with politicians running around like headless chickens bound for the cooking pot. The political parties are in disarray and their members pretend to be hard at work with their avowed plan of moving the country in a new direction. They are full of motion even when it is obvious they are headed for nowhere.
Speaking from both sides of the mouth and on just about everything they claim is not right about the country, the only thing uniting them is their grudge against the governing All Progressives Congress and, indeed, the President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Yet the one thing that is clear to any impartial observer is that the very conduct of opposition politicians is fast transforming Tinubu into something of a political leviathan that will be increasingly very difficult but, more probably, impossible to defeat. At least not in 2027.
He has become both a magnet and a beautiful bride of every suitor. They want to befriend, if not marry him. He is living the dream of every politician with the manner he holds court with every defector of either solid or middling electoral value. The optics must be thrilling for him and his old supporters. He has always had a larger-than-life image in the political life of Lagos. Now, he is expanding his base and spreading his tentacles to other parts of the country. It’s a strand of the opposition that boasted of setting up a big tent, complete with a nebulous shadow(y) government. It’s Tinubu that is offering a cover that is capacious enough to keep both infidels and true believers under one umbrella. He is at this moment a politician with the accommodating principles of a polygamist. His political opponents might say a prostitute. But what nobody can deny is that Tinubu has always kept an open door through which everyone is welcome.
He may be a taskmaster who must have the last word but he rarely, if ever, fights to the finish once people, especially his minions, know their place around him. T’eru ba ti mo ra e l’eru, t’iwofa ba de ti mora e n’iwofa as the Yoruba would say. Bola Tinubu’s open-door policy is a major advantage for him as any other politician. It can also be a personal albatross and a formidable hurdle and test for democracy, with every important politician running to him and coming under his wings. As I write this his party has 68 of the country’s 109 senators and 207 of the 360 members of the House. Many of these are defectors from opposition parties and more are still being expected to join the bandwagon. Those still holding back obviously do so for reasons best known to them, including no doubt, the optics of being labelled turncoats. They might have either chosen to work with and for Tinubu from inside their own parties or are too aware of arriving a tad too late at the breakfast table where the jostling for a space is getting fierce.
The rush into the APC or romance of the president, his family, aides and associates leaves nobody out. Not even the wife of Tinubu’s one time enemy and the nemesis of many political actors, the former maximum ruler and Nigeria’s worst dictator, General Sani Abacha. He is on record as the most corrupt soldier who ever strayed into Nigeria’s leadership. The full extent of his plunder of the treasury is yet a matter of mystery nearly three decades after he suddenly died. His wife Maryam has been talking just days to the 32nd anniversary of the annulled election won by MKO Abiola who died in Abacha’s dungeon. His second wife, Kudirat, was assassinated by hired goons on a Lagos street. Maryam is again talking 27 years after her husband died. She has in the last few days been the dutiful wife defending her husband’s soiled legacy. Although a tough call but it’s a clear attempt at political rehabilitation probably with the imprimatur of the Tinubu jolly ride.
She has spun the widespread story of looted state funds as money kept by her husband on behalf of the country. She’s querying who ever cares to hear her about the whereabouts of the funds – where are they, what have they been used for? she’s asked. Well, can anyone blame her? Sani Abacha might have been the nightmare of Nigeria but to his family he was a loving father as Stalin was the dotting father of Vasily and the loving husband of Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Let those under the direct gaze of Abacha’s dark glasses worry about that. The important thing is that his widow is comfortable enough to speak with Tinubu’s TVC while Oluremi has named a monument after her as a former First Lady.
As the rush into APC persists, the likes of Senator Ali Ndume can hold forth with his lone cry in the APC wilderness. The “injustice” against him ala Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan will not be sustained! Although it seems more like a call for attention, yet he can wail more while his party hawks for an appropriate sanction for his anti-party (yes, he has been speaking against his party now?) rant. If it was possible, he would surely have left the APC given his disenchantment. But where would he go when others are rushing headlong into the APC fold? Tinubu may have proven to be the master of his opponents but he cannot have everyone on his side even if they are walking or running into his party with their eyes wide open. That is the beginning of hubris. We should be building strong institutions not personality cults. Nigerian politics is all about the self. It’s about power grab which is why many are abandoning ship and running into the next harbour.
Going by his own personal example, Tinubu can only take a part of the blame if at all. The real blame goes to the politicians with neither principles nor ideology. They shift allegiance like prostitutes change partners. Those who stay back often do so out of lack of where to run to. At present our opposition parties offer no credible alternative programmes. Not even Peter Obi whose modest personal lifestyle and life choices recommend him far more than his mixed grill of political naivety and identity politics. His present Northern co-travellers like Atiku Abubakar and Nasir el-Rufai are either driven by raw ambition, anger for the loss of power and a mixture of both and more. The opposition’s prediction that Nigerians will decide who will be their next president might well happen but not in the manner they envisaged and only after Tinubu has served two terms.
