Tinubu as a glorified power hostage

 

Practically reduced to a jester in President Muhammadu Buhari’s power court, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu who goes by the honorific “National Leader” of the ruling APC has taken a stand in the front row as a leading chorister in Buhari’s choir of ignorance. Whereas Tinubu openly condemned as well as ask Nigerians to reject Goodluck Jonathan’s sandy plate of rice in 2015, he now commends Buhari’s pebble laden plate of rice, while urging Nigerians to accept him in 2019. That Tinubu who worked tirelessly to change an administration, which despite its short comings, sustained a growing economy, contained emerging security challenges and modestly tackled corruption in 2015, is now working even harder to return an administration in 2009, under whose watch Nigeria has degenerated into a sorry state of the poverty capital of the world, third most terrorized country on earth and one the most corrupt country, according to global ranking by Transparency International.

Arising from a fundamental lack of understanding of Nigeria’s socio-economic problems leading to wrong diagnosis resulting into the administering of equally wrong antidotes, the Buhari administration has made worse the bad socioeconomic situation it inherited in 2015. The rate of failure of the Buhari administration out paces the desired effect of its carefully choreographed propaganda. With the 2019 elections fast approaching and little or no yield of the promised dividends of governance, the desperation of the current political players in the current administration may drive them to carry out a grand election rigging scheme to maintain their hold on power.

Not a few people share this concern over the suspected plot of agents of the Buhari administration to compromise the electoral process to achieve a predetermined outcome of returning President Buhari to power in 2019. This fear was clearly expressed in a statement; “Points for Concern and Action” by former president Olusegun Obasanjo.  While likening the Buhari administration to the Abacha military junta, Obasanjo said, “It is the sole reason he has blatantly refused to sign the revised electoral bill into law. His henchmen are working round the clock in cahoots with security and election officials to perfect their plan by computing results right from the ward to local government, state and national levels to allot him what will look like a landslide victory irrespective of the true situation for a candidate who might have carried out by proxy presidential debate and campaigns.”

For a man who has emerged Nigeria’s foremost statesman who tells truth to power even at the risk of his life, this latest intervention in what can best be described as the nation’s most trying times since the fourth republic, is most timely. Obasanjo has once risen to the occasion as a steady voice of courage and truth to power in a nation that suffers the dearth of truth in the public arena. As has become a habitual way of responding to criticisms, agents of the Buhari administration and their attack dogs are let loose on the messenger to deflate the message. By deploying the ingenious use of ad hominem, attempts have been made to puncture the message of Obasanjo as a clever decoy to divert attention from his spot on assessment on Nigeria’s tragedy of failure of leadership.  Tinubu has once more emerged at the head of the effort to cover up Obasanjo’s truth with falsehood. Despite the fact that Obasanjo has never credited himself with presiding over the conduct of best of elections, Tinubu reacted by describing  him as “an election rigger without peer” who stands on no moral ground to task President Buhari on the need to preside over the  conduct a credible election.

Tinubu’s questioning of Obasanjo’s moral right to speak out against the rigging of election is akin to saying a prostitute mother has no moral justification to guide her children against habitual sexual promiscuity. Obasanjo’s assertion about plans to rig the forthcoming elections is an open secret that is frequently disclosed as a way of intimidating the opposition into submission by Buhari’s hatchet men that mainly comprises underperforming governors, past looters taking refuge in APC, political prostitutes and corporate undertakers all feeding fat on the public treasury.

Tinubu’s pretentious progressives’ credentials have been shredded exposing him to be an integral part of the problems of Nigeria with his hands and feet deep in the malfeasance that has characterised the Nigerian polity. Tinubu has unfortunately failed to redeem himself by his feeble attempt to hoodwink Nigerians into reinforcing Buhari’s colossal failure beyond 2019.

Tinubu’s fervent support for Buhari’s re-election has nothing to do with a patriotic commitment to a better Nigeria but for selfish political reasons. His high level of hypocrisy as seen in his shifting of the goal post to accommodate Buhari’s colossal failure is discernible to those who know as only a survival strategy as Tinubu has become a hostage to Buhari’s ruthless use of state power in addition to being a hostage to his own excessive love of power for self-service.

As a hostage to Buhari’s power, Tinubu who is the master of perhaps Nigeria’s most sophisticated ring of power purchase syndicate, which has kept Lagos state permanently deformed in the past 20 years has a lot of skeletons in his cupboard and scared stiff of the current administrations use of state power to suffocate political opponents on the pretext of fighting corruption. Tinubu like many other power hostages like him don’t exactly like Buhari or his style of leadership but are only tolerating him for their own existential exegesis.

Similarly, as somebody who has fed fat on public treasury for about two decades since the return of democracy in 1999, Tinubu has become a sucker for power and has become a hostage of his infatuation with power for self-service as he is reported to be nursing a presidential ambition post Buhari’s Nigeria. Unlike Obasanjo who has nothing to fear, gain or lose from the Buhari administration, Tinubu has a lot to lose if he threads the path of truth.

Like palace servants, Tinubu and his co-hostages have become the proverbial “hewers of wood and drawers of water” in the effort to return Buhari to power while the Power Princes are having their siesta waiting for feast on the next ready-made meal. While focusing on Obasanjo’s personality, Tinubu and his cheerleaders fail to appreciate the grim reality of the slide of Nigeria into a totalitarian and autocratic state comparable only to the Abacha military junta in the history of Nigeria. Those who feed the tiger with hopes of taming it usually end up in its belly.

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