Tinubu’s Ambition and the Sinking Boats

TYPICAL politicians have the capability of speaking from both sides of their mouths at the same time without accident occurring. For the ardent and stunt politician, morality is a very scarce commodity. In whatever and whichever classroom the astute Nigerian politicians gathered as students to receive tutorial, there can never be found one single “holy man” because “in the classroom of politics angels are never students”. May be, it is for these and more reasons that politics is referred to as a “dirty game”, at least in the Nigerian parlance.

Yet, the Nigerian politicians go around doing what they know how to do best – deceiving themselves, with the conviction that they are deceiving the people. Again, it is in attempt to achieve their games of deceit that they must speak from both sides of their mouths. The older in the game of politics a Nigerian politician becomes, the more is his fluidity in deceit. Today, let us listen to a recent statement credited to one of the most outstanding politicians in the annals of Nigerian political history – Senator Alhmed Bola Tinubu; the “Jagaban” of the South-west geo-political zone politics.

At a recent event in Akure, during the inauguration of Oluwarotimi Akeredolu as Governor of Ondo State, Bola Tinubu made it clear that the choice of contesting for the Nigerian presidency is one very dear to his heart. In other words, it is an ambition he did not jettison at any given time. For him, becoming president of Nigeria remains a challenging issue on his front burner; to be tackled with “political ferocity” until it is conquered. It was like telling Nigerians and the whole world that “watch out for me as the next president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”.

This proclamation went virile and for good reasons too. It is an open secret that the All Progressives Congress, APC, which Bola Tinubu almost single-handedly built and made to come to power at the centre, had been hijacked from him. Even the “driver”; Muhammadu Buhari whom he [Bola Tinubu] employed to drive the vehicle he built [the APC] refused to drive the vehicle according to his own [Tinubu] charted voyage’s plan. Both the driver and the vehicle stopped doing Bola Tinubu’s bidding.

Yes, he lost control of command, of both human and material investments, right from the onset of the journey on 29th of May 2015, when the APC government was inaugurated in Abuja. This however is not the issue of examination in this exercise, again for many reasons. One, there is nothing wrong for any Nigerian citizen; constitutionally qualified, aspiring to the highest office of the land – albeit the presidency. Bola Tinubu, by all purposes and intents, is eminently qualified to such aspiration. If that proves to be the fact, his later moderation or explanation of his ambition early announced in Akure, to the extent that he was not going to contest “against Buhari” was uncalled for because such elucidation could only remain an option in cowardice, or in the alternative, the best trade mark of the Nigerian politician’s game of deceit at display.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu has invested so much in the Nigerian political enterprise that his expectation of bumper-harvest, from all the segments of “reward from the market” may not be faulted. Think of this man’s battle, as a member of the opposition, against that “principality and power” called General Sanni Abacha, in actualising the late Moshood Abiola’s mandate. After the futility of that battle, this man became Lagos State Executive Governor and in that capacity, he contested against another most dangerous “principality and power” by the name of Olusegun Obasanjo; then President of Nigeria. Bola Tinubu saw hell but he contended against the then President and caged him very competently. From that time, he created his political empire and kingdom to the admiration of many and consternation of many as well.

He kept building from that little beginning of Alliance for Democracy, AD, through many other creations until he put together the APC which eventually assimilated the “Ebora Owu” himself; Olusegun Obasanjo, and by extension, all those within his constituencies. It is this final onslaught by Bola Tinubu, in the formation of the APC that threw up Major General Muhammadu Buhari to the presidency. It means that if Bola Tinubu did not put that colossal investment of human beings, money and material together, Buhari obviously would not have emerged Nigeria’s president in 2015. This is a fact of statement with evidence. One, Buhari tried three times, for twelve years, to become president, with brutal legal battle that took him to the Supreme Court at each time, but with a lamentable result.

It was when Bola Tinubu anointed him that he became. Bola Tinubu himself attested to this when he said sometimes in April, 2015, that “I sacrificed my ambition for Buhari to become president”. A statement Buhari himself confirmed in one of those celebrated gathering immediately after the general election of April 2015, which produced him [Buhari] as president. He specifically singled out “Ahmed Bola Tinubu as having sacrificed his ambition to pave the way for me in becoming president”. The wife of the President, Mrs. Aisha Buhari, also made this remark in one of those ceremonies preluding the inauguration of the APC government on 29th of May, 2015.

What all these have proved is that Bola Tinubu, by the grace of whatever, made the present APC government and its key personae dramatis, the presidency inclusive. The question that confronts us now is this: Does these feats qualify Bola Tinubu to be the next president, either in contesting against Buhari in 2019 or waiting till 2023, when a “supposed” second tenure of Muhammadu Buhari would have ended, all things being equal?

Mr. Godwin Etakibuebu, a veteran journalist, wrote from Lagos.

Culled from VANGUARD