Follow Us on Google
ALHAJI Bola Ahmed Tinubu said very publicly that his “lifelong ambition” was to be the president of Nigeria. On May 29, 2023, he attained that office, the controversy that trailed that accession notwithstanding.
The election held in February of that year, and the results were being collated and announced in piecemeal at the International Conference Centre, which has since been renamed after the president. The announcements were supposed to continue on that particular day in early March when the corrupt henchmen of the “Independent” National Electoral Commission (INEC) woke up in the wee hours of the morning to declare candidate Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the presidential vote.
Tinubu’s rivals to the presidency and the entirety of the country woke up to a fait accompli. Claimants to the presidency and citizens had retired the previous night to the announcement that the process of collating the results would continue the next day at 10 a.m. Then came the ambush which happened six hours before the scheduled resumption time, and under the cover of pitch darkness, if you realise that the darkest part of the night is usually just before the break of dawn.
Of course, all these shenanigans had been preceded by the notorious and still unexplained computer glitch that afflicted only the presidential balloting. It did not matter that Amazon, which was the host of the website, said that there was no history of the glitch at the particular time INEC claimed it happened, nor throughout that day, nor the days preceding that day, nor the days after the incident was alleged to have happened.
Any man who was created through this process would, ordinarily, have monsters to contend with. And Tinubu’s case was worse. He came to the presidency with enormous baggage including, but not limited to, bogus names, illicit drug dealings and the consequent forfeiture of a hefty amount of money to a foreign government ($460,000), phantom schools that he claimed to have attended, including those he claimed to have graduated from long before the schools were founded, and the allegations that he was, still is, an asset (read spy) for a foreign government, the United States of America.
In the presidency, Tinubu became like the proverbial bird that perched on the twig of a tree — the twig had no peace, and the bird had no peace either. Given the situation, there was a pervasive sense of lack of legitimacy even within the ranks of the regime itself. So the regime could have verily believed that the prospective or sure cure for the apparent lack of legitimacy was to take some drastic measures. And that was the beginning of what could be described as a self-death wish.
On inauguration day, Tinubu announced that “subsidy is gone” in reference to the alleged existence of subsidy in petrol consumed in the country. That announcement was without any forethought. Tinubu said so himself days after the recklessness. He said it was not part of his formal speech and that he was seized of courage while he was on the podium that 29th day of May 2023.
The removal of the so-called petrol subsidy was not a policy. A policy should, in a liberal democracy, be preceded by the formation of a reasonably full complement of the government, a wide consultation with a spectrum of stakeholders, an exhaustive consideration of the pros and cons, a fallback position in the event of a wild and adverse swing in the course of the implementation of the policy, timelines and timeframes, and possibly measures to cushion the dire effects of the policy on the most vulnerable segments of the population.
Such measures cannot and should not be taken on a whim. But that was certainly and sadly what Tinubu did. It was his self-death wish number one, and it came on the very first day of a regime that has inevitably turned out to be very tumultuous and disastrous — for the economy and for the polity.
It was a self-inflicted injury of choice. But it was not taken in a void. On the petrol subsidy question, Tinubu invariably took the path of least resistance. It was reasonably believed that he was more interested in protecting his class in the ruling elite.
We have consistently and stridently contended that there was no subsidy on petrol as such, certainly not on the scale that was turned into a narrative by some politicians who were aspiring to the highest elective office in the land in 2023. That sector of the oil industry was wracked by pervasive corruption orchestrated by the ruling elite and their collaborators outside successive administrations. The stories of the bazaars and the numbing perfidy were in the public domain.
This was epitomised by what transpired between Femi Otedola, a petroleum product dealer, and Farouk Lawan, a member of the House of Representatives at that material time. Lawan was caught in the web of accepting bribe money in a sting operation. He was tried and sentenced to prison. He was recently pardoned by Tinubu and was reported to be getting set to contest election next year for a return to the same House in June 2027 on the platform of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
In 2023, Tinubu had no interest in fighting his people [the elite] who constituted the powerful cabal in the oil industry which held the country by the jugular. Nobody really deliberately commits class suicide. Do they? So, for the new president, it was better and easier to inflict pains on the mass of Nigerians.
Before he was created as president, Tinubu knew that the federal government was paying bogus (false) bills of millions of dollars for ghost shipments into this country of petroleum products. Shipping documents were routinely and fraudulently contrived, the names of vessels bearing products were manufactured, discharge certificates into tank farms were procured out of thin air, alleged foolproof documentations were presented to relevant government agencies, and payments were promptly and hurriedly effected.
Other News
The thieves in government and the thieves outside of the government smiled to the banks where their collaborators laid in wait. That was the period that this country was minting millionaires on a spin. At the other end of the spectrum, which the ruling elite spun as subsidy, was another cabal who were into wholesale heist. They stole crude oil through monster ocean-going vessels. The monster vessels beth on our shores, spent days loading millions of barrels of crude oil under the supervision of the military and sundry security agencies, set sail and “vanished” on the high seas. The irony is that no ship of that size can just disappear on the oceans except the ones bearing Nigeria’s stolen crude oil.
At a time a former managing director of Chevron Nigeria Limited cried out. He publicly bemoaned the situation and described it as an industrial-scale theft of Nigeria’s prime asset. Tinubu knew about the existence of the leeches, but he deliberately chose to look the other way.
The stealing of crude oil is still said to be a thriving business, with fingers pointing up to the highest levels of this regime, either as active participants or of condoning the brigandage. A vessel, “Iya Oloja”, said to be owned by an agency of the federal government is reportedly still in on the game. It was retroffited to make it fit for purpose.
The other day, the man who bears the obviously hollow title of the vice president of Nigeria, Mohammed Kashim Shettima — but who actually is an orphan in the presidency — claimed that his principal, Tinubu, was told that he, Shettima, was planning to kill him (Tinubu) and then inherit the presidency. A kind of replay of the events in this country in 2010, though the circumstances were different.
Then-president Umaru Yar’Adua was terminally ill and eventually died abroad, setting off a chain of events that tried the core and soul of Nigeria until the Doctrine of Necessity was invented. In this instance, Shettima said that some persons whispered to the president to avoid gifts of clothing from the vice president, otherwise he would be a dead man.
Shettima said that Tinubu ignored them and proceeded to wear the “charmed” clothing. And he did not die. To the extent of the tale told by Shettima, the vice president can be listed among those who want Tinubu dead.
The other people who wished Tinubu dead, according to the president himself, are the cabals who profited from petrol subsidy before the declaration that “subsidy is gone,” and the rent-seekers in the foreign exchange market who thrived on arbitrage prior to the massive devaluation of the naira in 2023.
The president blamed the worsening insecurity in the country on the cabals. He said through a representative at the 32nd anniversary of NADECO (National Democratic Coalition) that insecurity was being promoted and fanned to disrupt the peace of the country by people he had offended when he cancelled multiple exchange rates and removed oil subsidies.
“Those cabals who are doing round-tripping will wish him dead any time, but he is determined that if that is the only thing he would do, he would make sure that he rearranges the economy. No matter what, he is determined to face it.” Of course, right now some people are facing trial in a court of law and a military tribunal for allegedly plotting a coup. Are those ones Tinubu’s well wishers. If they wished him well, would they allegedly plot to separate him from the office he had coveted all his life?
Many Nigerians may also be harbouring and nursing death wishes for Tinubu. But I do not know that anybody dies because someone else wished it. Business owners whose outfits had been crippled by the harsh economic reforms of this regime may not be too eager to extend good wishes to the president.
The same could be said of persons who drop below the poverty line daily; families that can no longer make ends meet; students who are on federal government scholarships abroad but who now neither receive their tuition fees nor their upkeep allowances; industries and individuals who have been priced out of the energy market, whether in the electricity or petroleum products sectors; or those Nigerians who have been under the tyranny and oppression of galloping inflation and explicit and implicit taxations.
Nobody dies on account of death wishes alone. But the Good Book tells us that there is power in the spoken word — and in the tongue. But as those who wish the president ill speak, the people who are profiting from his administration will be making counter-covenants, praying for his long life and for the party to never end.
Those who wish Tinubu dead should accept one fact: it would only happen when his Maker calls him home. If Tinubu represented evil to them, they should also know that God created Satan who was not Satan in his prior incarnation. So they should devise other means to get rid of him if they truly believe that he is the cause of their suffering and hopelessness; that Tinubu’s “Renewed Hope” slogan is hollow through and through; and that the message “Expect More” in one of the billboards promoting his election to a second term in office is foreboding.
