By Onome Osifo-Whiskey
It is a robust truth, quite universally held, that Nigeria is a nation of great records. Most assuredly.
The last two years couldn’t have given better testimony to this truism. The Guinness Book of World Records has a befitting, even revered, role to play in much of this — from its world records won by Nigerians in Culinary Science [a sweetly perfumed label or name for what rightly is just Mama Put’s roadside food business of Amala and Gbegiri, Ofe Owerri, Edikaikon and Tuwo Sinkafa]. There are other illustrious attainments, too, by Nigerians in other fields including the one of Creative Art.
Yet, there is no doubting the entrenched reality that the gentlemen and ladies of Messrs Guinness Book of World Records have with a deft sleight of hand denied us as a nation the double award of World’s Greatest President and Damaging Director of the Democratic Space, an award which the very powerfully jagabanised Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu incontestably deserves. In every sense, low or high, Tinubu is it!
Yes, no elected Nigerian ruler is as powerful as Tinubu, as he brews for Nigeria’s political consumption and consequent inebriation a Putinuosly Trumpian wine. His works show this clearly. Winning perhaps no more than 25 per cent of the electoral vote, he is today surely master and king of the Nigerian state.
In less than two years in office, he more or less transformed himself from a minimal winner to a carbon copy of the African Maximum Ruler, the very one whose electoral victory is a thunderous bombast of 98.89 per cent of the vote. Before the elections, like a feudal lord of the manor, he surveyed the Animal Farm that is Nigeria’s political space and declared with audacious insouciance that it was his turn to rule. And his turn it did turn out to be, no matter the unseen hand of his electoral gamesmanship.
A little flesh in facts and figures may help make more stark this reality. In the 2024 National Budget, there was an initial provision of the great figure of N26 trillion. Then followed a whirlwind of government magic as, in a few weeks, this budget figure would breathtakingly gazump to some N36 trillion. Amid accusations of budget padding, there emerged, in and around the budget, an extra-worldly figure of N16 trillion for the construction of a 700 – kilometre road from Lagos to Calabar — the figure, itself, another unawarded Guinness Book of World Records achievement.
There was more to this. This very contract came along with a gladsome heart, having sweetly avoided legislative scrutiny amidst wondrous revelations of Tinubu and his son, Seyi, being part-owners of the construction company.
There is something of a masterclass ingenuity to Tinubu’s politics. After his first- day-in-office removal of subsidy from the Nigerian economy and the consequent surge of inflation in the land to Olympian heights, he designed, with a blessed political alchemy, a new Nigerian society, one of a large class of hugely satisfied, unprovocable plebeians with a befitting minimum wage of N70,000 a month and a tiny one of giltedged but sumptuously giddy aristocrats among whom belong, especially, Tinubu, Governors, Senators and the likes.
While Senators go home with their visible, just manageable table-top salaries of N21 million a month and N160 million worth bulletproof SUVs to match, their sacred under-the-table treasuries are a black hole of giant financial inestimables.
Tinubu himself comes along respectfully honouring his adorable office, one of a great trinity of power, majesty and inexorable righteousness. He has bought for his official use a limousine just worth a billion naira. And a presidential yacht, the first by a Nigerian leader, that is yet to be built for it a waterway from Abuja to Lokoja for an onward class ride to Lagos via Onitsha and Port Harcourt.
No one knows the exactitude and latitude of his official earnings, ranging from monthly pay to undeclarable security vote, free medicals and royal visits abroad and a thousand and one financial free rides for self and possibly the First Lady, First Son and First Daughter. With a political setting built around a clear, balanced system like this, nothing can go wrong and has, of course, not gone wrong.
Yet, nowhere is Tinubu’s aristocracy of intellect and governance given an extra-terrestrial dimension more than in the political arena. Late Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, a former Speaker of the United States Congress, was famous for his aphorism that “All politics is local”, thus underscoring the importance of local tendencies and interests in politics.
Not so now with the Jagaban for whom Lagos State was once all there was in politics, the same Lagos that took then President Olusegun Obasanjo to court to retain and preserve its state rights and constitutionally allowed privileges. Today, for him, all politics is global, at least within the exclusivity that is the Nigerian society. Nothing now matters and counts until it is subsumed under the power of his own Aso Rock. Thus, in a way — just ONLY in a way — Tinubu’s power politics today is like the Risorgimento nationalism of the 19th century Italian nationalist, Giuseppe Mazinni.
Unlike Mazinni’s Risorgimento, Tinubu’s is a poorly deodorised, poorly garnished, poorly disguised move for personal power and personal aggrandisement. It is a move that makes him pocket the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC] and through it capture the rest of the strong opposition parties — the PDP, Labour Party, etc — and bring their governors under cheap control.
Today, Tinubu’s smart politics is simple: destroy the opposition parties and victory, like in the countries of the maximalist rulers in Africa, is assured, even two years in advance! That will be great! Really? No. Rather, it will grant his ambush of history and of the nation’s democracy a Pyrrhic victory.
It may guarantee him power in 2027 but it will be one that will stamp on the nation a one-party dictatorship, one worse than military dictatorship, the very apocalypse he joined other Nigerians to fight against in the ’90s. In the end, what a great blot, what a sunset at noon, his Emi L’okan [It’s My Turn] Manifesto will prove to be!
And while in some way it may win him some record as an astute National Damaging Director, but what a Jagaban pity, whether in Borgu, Lagos or Abuja, that will be!