Follow Us on Google
All his political life, Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu has held before himself the image of the daring cowboy, cast in the mold of a lion. He sees himself as the man with the capacity to outrun the wild herd, riding at the end run in the dark of the night, knowing there were prairie dog holes all around. But what can a dog do to a lion? It’s this definition of manly courage that made his swanky residence in Ikoyi to be called “the lion of Bourdillon”. It’s not for nothing. He had triumphed over a former President and military Head of state, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, when OBJ had the audacity to freeze local government funds in Lagos. The Supreme Court gave Tinubu victory. He still holds firmly unto Lagos politics and its vast resources all these 23 years, and counting.
But like everything in life, all things must pass. The sun is about to go down with the life ambition of the ‘Jagaban’, the self- styled national leader of Nigeria’s governing party to be the President of Nigeria. That ambition seems extinguished now. For long, the forces more powerful than him have been looking for how to cage him. They have now got him. Sometimes, what a man says with his mouth is more relevant than what he says with his eyes. His attack on President Muhammadu Buhari, last Thursday in Abeokuta, Ogun state, ‘I made you President’ was, perhaps the final straw. As the National Chairman of APC, Sen. Abdullahi Adamu said, the rant must be visited with appropriate sanctions. If you read Adamu’s lips, his eyes must have told you Tinubu is in the hole they have dug for him. That’s one of the lessons in power.
Now, consider politics as a classic boxing match. It offers useful lessons for seizing opportunities during a downturn. As Donald Sull, a Professor Strategy and International Management and author of “The Upside of Turbulence”, writes, ‘true champions have the capacity of both agility and absorption’. This is because, uncertainty is a defining characteristic not only in business, but also in politics. These days, especially in our unpredictable politics, stiff competition feels much like a boxing arena, where punches come from different directions, strategies change blow by blow, and another challenger is always waiting to take you on. That’s why Tinubu is now on the ropes. His political future looks pretty uncertain as the All Progressives Congress (APC) finalises today who will be its Presidential Candidate in next year’s election. It’s Tinubu’s final hours.
While it may be true that “all politics is local”, as the late Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Tip O’Neil famously said, leadership is another story entirely. Ground-level execution, experts in politics say, is essential leadership skill. It involves knowing what to say, and knowing what to leave out, especially at critical times. That’s why conventional wisdom teaches that in politics, leaders should not overdo their strengths. This is an advice Tinubu has always failed to heed. Recall when he meddled into Edo politics, telling the people not to re-elect Governor Godwin Obaseki for second term. He failed. Obaseki was re-elected by a landslide. You see, “Edo no be Lagos”. Did Tinubu learn the hard way? He did not, because he thinks he’s the sun around which all planets must revolve. No humankind can play God and prevail.
That’s why politics doesn’t favour subtlety. From the very day he officially announced his presidential bid in the rarefied Aso Villa, he was not only making a definite intent, he ought to know he had entered the boxing ring. But he lowered his guard with the infamous quote, ‘I have been a kingmaker for a long time, now I want to be the king’. He repeated almost the same in his outburst last Thursday, when he said, the next president should be him. Unknown to him, taking your strength to an extreme is always detrimental to performance. Even a mild tendency to overdo it can be harmful. By the time his media team tried to do ‘damage control’, Tinubu had done his presidential ambition irreparable damage. Respect for the President was a hot button for him immediately he discovered that things were fast slipping away from his reach. You need to be adept leader to avoid such emotional trigger. But his emotions betrayed him.
By this, Tinubu showed he was a poor candidate for ‘Change’. Or perhaps as one cliché says, “those the dogs want to destroy, they first make mad”. Who didn’t know Tinubu was God’s tool in making Buhari President? But framing and communicating well is of national importance for a leader. Anger and frustration took the better part of him, when he said he never got any ‘ministerial slot or contract’ from the President. Well, that’s part of the currency of politics in Nigeria. But, that’s not the stuff of a great leader. You can’t be passionate and lose compassion. He could be right without being righteous. But he failed to understand the difference between the two. His ambition has taken a hit. He may not recover from the convention blues.
From the very day Sen.Adamu was chosen by the President to be the new National Chairman of APC, sacrificing his Senate seat, I smelled trouble. It was compounded by the selection of Chief John Odigie-Oyegun as the Chairman of the Screening Committee of the presidential aspirants. If you don’t get the drift, this is what happened: Tinubu was the Sleight of hand in Oyegun’s ouster as APC national chairman in favour of Adams Oshiomhole. Was it a payback time? This is the paragraph in Oyegun’s report that stung Tinubu like a bee. “We engaged every aspirant on the issue of consensus and it was pleasant that 99 percent agreed that the party is supreme and whatever the party finally decides, with proper consultation, they are likely to accept. [But] , there is only one person who said I will accept consensus as long as it is based on me”. Oyegun added that he needed to “emphasize on that”. You can decode the rest in its proper context. Before now, I had thought that Tinubu was an Alchemist, not just a master strategist. I was wrong. What, indeed, sets an Alchemist apart from a strategist, is his ability to renew or even reinvent self in a remarkable way. That’s why Developmental Psychologists will tell us that what differentiates leaders is not so much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or their style of management, but their “action logic’. This entails how leaders interpret their surroundings and react whenever their power or safely is challenged. Again, this is where Tinubu, in my view, scored near- zero. Most of his speeches in recent times, in particular, his overweening pride in Abeokuta, showed how his vaulty ambition and inherent determination to be the next President of Nigeria, went from virtue to vice. He was a talker and a tackler at the same time.
It has been proved beyond doubt that in leadership positions, problem arises the very moment a leader begins to confuse his personal ambition with the destiny of his nation. The greater problem here is that, sometimes, such willfulness that such a leader brings into the arena of politics, can, if care is not taken, either pull down the party with himself, or consume him entirely. Such leaders are called opportunists. This fact is made evident by David Rooke and William R. Tolbert in their book, “The Secrets of Timely and Transformations of Leadership”. It’s s title that reflects a leader’s tendency to focus on personal wins and opportunity to control others, and bend them to his will.
As the postmortem of the APC presidential convention begins, and the countdown for next year’s elections begins, we should begin to build leaders who don’t see the world in zero-sum terms, but who appreciate the unique contributions of all stakeholders. That’s the most challenging assignment before the elections start. We are in this together. Our politics of “ it’s my turn”, is over. That’s where Tinubu lost it.
