In this report, FELIX OGUEJIOFOR ABUGU writes that the narrow-mindedness that defines the supervening nepotism that seems to drive every appointment, even every move, that the nation’s insouciant President Bola Tinubu makes, is a great Ode, indeed, to the rise of the tribesman as president of the Federal Republic.
With the appointment yesterday (Monday, August 26) of Mr. Adeola Ajayi as the Director-General of the Department of State Services (DSS), to replace the insufferable Mr. Yusuf Magaji Bichi, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT) would appear to have finally completed his capture of the Nigerian security apparatus, economy and even the law, for himself and his South-West people.
To be sure, the people and land of Oduduwa couldn’t have it any better. When Obasanjo was president, he was labelled ‘Omale’ (fake) because he seemed to have taken his Nigerianness rather too seriously: the man had one the most diversified cabinets and other appointees by any Nigerian president in history. In January 2021, in an interview with Daily Independent, Senator Anthony Adefuye, an APC chieftain from Ijebu-Igbo, Ogun swore that former President Olusegun Obasanjo is not a Yoruba but an Igbo from Anambra. “Obasanjo is an Igbo man from Anambra, we haven’t had a Yoruba President,” he had said. Now the real Omoluabi is in power and Oduduwa land couldn’t be any happier.
Save for the Chief of Naval Staff (Vice Admiral Ikechukwu Ogalla from Enugu, South East) and Chief of Air Staff, (Air Marshall Hassan Bala Abubakar from Kano, Northwest) practically every other Service Chief, including the paramilitary ones, is in the hands of persons of Southwest extraction.
Consider these: from the very beginning of his presidency, Tinubu appointed the following South West persons as his security chiefs: 1) Kayode Egbetokun (Inspector General of Police (IGP); 2) Taoreed Lagbaja (Chief of Army Staff); 3) Bashir Adewale Adeniyi (Comptroller General of Customs); 4) Kemi Nandap (Controller General of Immigrations); 5) Olanipekun Olukoyede (Chairman EFCC) and 6) Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo (Minister of Internal Affairs) and now Ajayi, the DSS DG.
Now, add to the mix last Friday’s inauguration of Kudirat Kekere-Ekun (another notable Lagosian like the president) as Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), the fact that Lateef Fagbemi is Attorney-General and Minister of Justice (AGF) and Tinubu’s buddies, namely, Wale Edun is Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy; Femi Cardoso is Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Dele Alake is Minister of Solid Minerals and President Tinubu himself is also Minister of Petroleum Resources, and you’ll begin to get a grasp of how much of the nation’s security, judicial, financial and economic backbones the President of the Federal Republic has cornered to himself and his South West people. And this is the Federal Republic of Nigeria, to be sure!
It has been argued that President Tinubu learnt well from his predecessor, the immediate past President Muhammadu Buhari for whom Nigeria had meaning only where it satisfied the narrow interests of his Fulani kith and kin. But it may well be that Tinubu actually taught Buhari the rudiments of impunity that the effete General was later to hone into an art. Or isn’t the president doing “better” already than Buhari did all through his eight-year tenure? For, while it took some years for the country to come to terms with the repulsive Buhari style, it took less than six months of his 15 months in office so far for Tinubu to show his excessive inclination towards tribe, with so much political insouciance.
Or who will deny that it was the Tinubu tendency that provided the intellectual and media power that deodorized every nonsense disguised as policies and or policy decisions that emanated from Buhari’s Aso Rock. Constantly, complaints about economic hardship under Buhari were labelled as ‘wailing’ via trenchant, even vile, criticisms by those who were merely content to feel good about the perceived political supremacy of the godfather who was idolised for his uncanny ability to have installed the government of the day in wait for his turn. Those who could respond to the attacks on their persons did respond, rather vigorously, in what became a social media slugfest between the hailers and wailers. Many others, however, simply squirmed in anguish at Buhari’s excesses that were strangely celebrated by a section of the population that had hitherto made everyone believe they were fair-minded.
It is safe to wager that the ambitious but intellectually lazy Muhammad Muhammadu was just a pawn in the Tinubu tendency’s complicated political chess game. One would be surprised if not many knew that the tendency organized and funded Buhari’s campaign almost to the last kobo. The tendency hired David Axelrod, chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and later his Senior Advisor, who coined the devastating “clueless” tag on former President Jonathan. After Buhari won the election, it was the tendency that wrote and deployed the template, including the subterfuges and deceptions (how did the Igbo that worked with Buhari in two previous presidential campaigns become his opponents that he became so averse to?), that sustained Buhari in power for all of eight years, unfazed by complaints from different quarters of Nigeria about Buhari’s deleterious presidency. Armed with his famed, presumably incomparable understanding of the nature of Nigerian society and how power can be wielded almost absolutely by those in power who dared, Tinubu stood solidly behind Buhari as the uncaring general and his horde of hedonists raped the country almost to death in broad day light.
But, as it has turned out, the Tinubu tendency which had written the Buhari template of impunity was only doing a dress rehearsal of the level of impunity that was afoot under his pre-arranged presidency. Meaning that Buhari actually learnt at the feet of the Jagaban Borgu (JB) himself. And if anyone was in doubt about the overarching power and pervasive influence of the Tinubu tendency as the power behind Buhari’s throne (perhaps, even its puppeteer), as the kingmaker and the king-in-waiting, the effortless ease with which he marshalled out practically the entire world – from the American judiciary and security apparatus, to the Nigerian judiciary, electoral commission, political and business class, media and the clergy – to pull out all the stops to make him president last year, should have cleared all the doubt. Here was an unstoppable political leviathan with scant regard for the niceties of morality, equity and good conscience, a he who must have his way and be obeyed!
When Tinubu scolded President Buhari at a campaign rally in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, in June 2022, telling him to not forget that it was his (Tinubu’s turn) to be president as they had agreed, many thought he was only being irreverently audacious – how could he talk to the president like that? Only the discerning knew that only a kingmaker and a king-in-waiting could scold a president and only a whimper could be heard. The truth is that Bola Tinubu had been leading Nigeria from the rear since 2015 until last year when he was finally crowned the king and face of Nigeria.
While the nation invested so much hope in INEC and what turned out to be its shenanigans projected as electoral guidelines, including the touted perfectness of its card reader called BVAS, little did citizens know that, showing no qualms of conscience, these people had already conspired among themselves to waste the nation’s billions (over N500bn actually) on an election that they were only going to announce themselves and dare the aggrieved to challenge? Did anyone expect that a man who boasted to have bought his way to power and has, as the Igbo would say, the yam and the knife, would act all lovey-dovey with the electorate, that citizens would have the luxury of expressing their grudges at his rather overweening acts of impunity? In a 200 million plus population, 350 ethnic groups and three major tribes and one tribe corners two of the three arms of government to itself and citizens don’t expect that such overarching power could corrupt even absolutely?
And yet, even the most powerful empires do fall. Human civilization never stands still. Rome did fall after all, and, in contemporary history, the Soviet Union of yesterday. Many wonder how long the Tinubu tendency will sustain what has been described as its ‘unconscionable’ concentration of power in the hands of members of a very narrow circle of friends and family in a country as diverse as Nigeria. Tinubu had to move the statutory retirement age of police officers from 60 to 65 years just to keep Egbetokun with him for four more years. The alternative, as had been widely speculated, would have been to promote a serving State police commissioner, also from the South West, to Ag. IGP. The option of changing the rule to extend Egbetokun’s tenure later won the day.
To many Nigerians, the concentration of the national security apparatus in the hands of friends, loyalists and relatives, irrespective of their competencies or qualifications, certainly does not bode well for the country and the way out, they are argue is to diversify the security leadership.
“It’s as if all the nation’s security apparatus does is protect the presidency. Otherwise, it doesn’t make much sense. Exactly how this enhances the security of lives and property in the entire country beats even us in security circles,” a security source told Daily Query.
The indefensibility, even irrationality, of making national security a ‘family affair’ has been made more glaring by the obviously burgeoning insecurity in the land. In March this year, two months to Tinubu’s one year in office, Vanguard reported that 6931 people had been killed in various attacks across the country and about 7000 abducted.
More have been killed and or abducted since then. Last Sunday, (August 25), it was reported that bandits abducted 150 people in Gobir, a Sokoto State community, barely four days (on August 21) after killing its Emir in their captivity. They also killed six in Benue and, while the president luxuriated in his new $150m presidential jet on a ‘working’ trip to France, the nation’s new presidential destination, sneaked into the Angwan Maigiro community in the Allawa district of Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State and slaughtered 13 members of farming families.
In fact, the security situation in the country has become so dire that about a week ago, the Chief of Defense Staff, General Christopher Musa announced the deployment of soldiers to guard farmers against terrorist attacks in their farms, sparking cries of indifference on the part of the Tinubu administration to the security challenges also facing farmers in the southern part of the country.
“Nigeria lost so much under Buhari, in terms of citizens not having a sense of belonging in Nigeria; it cost us our sense of shared destiny, our sense of oneness, and the nation has been so divided ever since because of Buhari’s nepotistic style of governance,” an executive director of one the CSOs in Lagos, lamented in an interview with Daily Query. So, the question for me is, why is President Tinubu towing that discredited line of action, perhaps doing even worse things in that regard?”
The answer may well lie in the president’s seeming limited vision of his presidency or his understanding of the role he has been called upon to play as president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. If the president very well understood his role as the father of the nation who must be just, fair and equitable in his conduct of public affairs, perhaps he would have understood that as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, his word is every service chief’s, every commander’s, every paramilitary leader’s command, the security chief’s place of origin notwithstanding, and, therefore, that he does not need any special loyalty from anyone or group as to make him appoint into strategic offices mainly people of his ethnic group, thereby alienating the rest of the country by so doing.
According to Adamson Atale (a pseudonym as he would not want to be quoted ‘for strategic reasons’) an Abuja-based political analyst, “my worry is how this will impact the governance process in the country in the future.”
“After Tinubu, who will now pull the country from the cliff-edge where he and the immediate past president would have left it after, let’s say, 16 years of the most visionless, narrow-minded governance of this sprawling land? Who will be broadminded enough to decide that towing Buhari and Tinubu’s lines would only sound the final death knell on Nigeria and, so, to go on to run an equitable and inclusive government?” he queried.
On the hand, assuming that the nation elects another ‘Buhari’ or ‘Tinubu’ after Tinubu, who will have the moral justification to question such a governance style? Right now, it’s like the only people complaining and crying out against the impropriety of the president practically running “an administration of the South West for the South West and by the South West” are non-South-Westerners. When the table turns, will the South West remember that what goes around comes around and that he who demands equity must come with clean hands?
“I believe that if Nigeria survives Buhari and Tinubu (and I hope it does), there is unlikely to be any other president that would be as mean and ethnically bigoted as either of these two. In that case, I believe that there will still be persons to turn the bend for Nigeria and get it working again. To quote Mr. Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), a new Nigeria is actually possible.
