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FOR some period last year, and for a significant part of this year, leading political opposition personages were embroiled in the titanic battle to be on the ballot in next year’s general elections, especially in the presidential polls. The Labour Party [LP], the political platform that Peter Obi used to upset the permutations in 2023 including winning the presidential election in Lagos state in spite of the manipulations that ensured the reduction of his vote tally, and Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, where now president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and the former vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, could not score even 25% of the votes cast.
All mannner of charlatans and for-hire, fly-by-night, politicians were procured to infiltrate the LP to ensure that Obi was frustrated out of the party. Was Obi blameless in the fate that befell the LP? No. He knew that the president that was created in 2023 and the key leaders of the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC] were at the head of the dark forces of the emerging politics and governance in our country. Obi may have been naive. But he can be forgiven. You give what you have, the place and circumstances notwitstanding. Obi had decency. And he offered it. But he underestimated the capacity of others for evil. And they unloaded on him, catching him fighting for his political life.
Obi’s attitude in politics could be likened to the legend that arose with the pulling down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A story circulated about East Berliners dumping garbage into West Berlin and West Germans responding with truckloads of food and flowers accompanied by the note: ‘’Each gives what he has’’. As it turned out with the passage of time, it was an ‘’inspirational parable rather than a documented historical event from the fall of the Berlin Wall’’. What really happpened was that when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, West Berliners enthusiastically greeted oncoming East Germans at checkpoints with flowers and champagne to celebrate the newfound freedom of the East Berliners who had been under the communist rule of the defunct Union of Socialist Soviet Republics [USSR]. It has since been explained that the ‘’garbage-and-flowers anecdote’’ which frequently circulated then on social media could have been a motivational moral story about choosing not to retaliate against negativity. But at a time it acquired a life of its own as a literal historical tit-for-tat during the division of Germany.
However, Obi’s attitude to politics and to his rivals was neither a legend nor an anecdote. It was real. It flowed from deep inside the essence of his person. He was a trader as he describes himself. He happened on politics and governance during which he became the governor of the south east state of Anambra. He governed the state for eight years with interruptions. First, he was impeached by the opposition People’s Democratic Party [PDP] – dominated state house of assembly. The Supreme Court quashed the impeachment and restored him to office. Then the ‘Independent’ National Electoral Commission [INEC] conducted a sham election to fill his office which was not vacant. Again, the Supreme Court voided the election and returned Obi to office. Andy Uba who was created by the INEC as a governor-elect was sacked and removed from the office after barely 12 days as an impersonator. The interruptions during Obi’s tenure ostensibly birthed staggered elections in this country.
After the 2023 presidential election and the performance of Obi, he became a nightmare to those who had dismissed his aspiration to the presidency as a joke taken too far. As it turned out all the three principal gladiators won about the same number of states but with differing vote tallies. He became a target, and a candidate that must be stopped by hook or crook. In the wake of the woeful economic and political performance of, Tinubu, the man who was declared as president in 2023, the obviously scared ruling APC determined the need to widen the dragnet to stop major contenders to the presidency. It was a state policy to have Tinubu as the sole major candidate for president in 2027. Like Obi Atiku also became a target. The plot was not hidden. For Obi it appeared that the scheme to stop him went beyond the normal. The candidate once alleged that there was a credible plot to make him not to live to witness the 2027 election. The ‘’Italian Solution’’ is not alien to some of our rulers.
LP was destablished using fifth columnists, infiltrators and paid agents. INEC and the courts were used as agents to create a cloud of uncertainty in that political party because of the presence of Obi. The party was fractionalised and was in danger of not being allowed to sponsor candidates in the 2027 elections. Obi left and calm returned to the beleaguered party. Obi himself had predicted that LP would be let alone if he left. And it came to pass. Like Obi, the political gangsters took over the PDP on which platform Atiku had controversially contested the 2023 election. He was hounded out of the party. Obi and Atiku flirted with, and joined, the African Democratic Congress [ADC]. The same band of marauders descended on the ADC. The party could not concentrate on building its structures but was forced to dissipate energy in fighting orchestrated fractionalisation and the vicious attempt by the federal government to deregister it using the court.
Obi left the ADC and joined the Nigerian Democratic Congress [NDC]. But the APC and the Tinubu regime would not let go. Proxies were raised to challenge in court the recognition of the NDC as a political party by INEC. It was even accused of stealing the logo of an association that’s not known to any law in Nigeria. A court in Kogi state which had recognised the validity of the registration of the NDC turned around hours later to derecognise it. It was an exercise in futility.
The experience of the ADC was even more brazen. Tinubu’s minister of justice who is also the attorney-general of the federation joined a motley crowd of meddlesome interlopers, one of which called itself an association of former lawmakers, to seek a court-ordered deregistration of the ADC. That move was blunted. But the possibility of deregistering the NDC and the ADC may not be over. Some of the suits are still smoothering in law courts. Both Tinubu and his chief of staff have had cause to boast publicly that they had no apologies for sponsoring insurrections in opposition parties.
While Tinubu said he would have no hesitations in despatching the senate president, Godswill Akpabio, the head of a supposedly co-equal branch of the government, to ‘’scatter’’ opposition parties, Olufemi Hakeem Gbajabiamila, encouraged a disaffected serving lawmaker to remain in the ADC and to ensure that the party did not know peace. He allegedly assured the lawmaker that a place and a ticket would be reserved for him in the APC after he had succeeded in destabilising the ADC.
The problem right now is that the hunter is becoming the hunted. The person who is currently fidgeting and who’s in real danger of not being on the ballot in January is Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He could still use the enormous powers of Nigeria’s presidency to coerce the judiciary, the national assembly, and the INEC to retain him on the ballot, but he would be a lot more damaged presidential candidate. A lot more damaged? Yes, because he had been a person sufficiently diminished by the bagggage he has been logging since 1999. And even earlier. The late people’s lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi, ensured that through a forensic legal exposure of his ‘’Oluwole’’ or suspect certificates.
For a start, Tinubu should have no business near the presidency of this country. He should have been stopped by INEC in 2023 by preventing him from being on the ballot. When that failed the judiciary [court] should have stepped up and done the needful. But it didn’t, rather the court hung on to the technicalities of the non-frontloading of all documents to avoid making a judicial pronouncement on alleged forgeries and perjuries by Tinubu.
Even in spite of the weighty issues in the files of the American Federal Bureau of Investigations [FBI] and the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA], there are sufficient documents locally that should be disqualifying of Tinubu from the presidency. In his political journey since 1999, he had been alleged to have submitted, under oath, papers for elective office that were adjudged to, at best suspect, and at worst, outright forgeries. In 1998/99, Tinubu used Senator Tokunbo Afikuyomi, as a fall guy for his alleged acts of perjury in the documents he filed with the INEC ahead of the governorship election which he won. In Nigeria’s jurisprudence perjury, the type Tinubu had been accused of, is a criminal offence which does not enjoy the statute of limitation. He can be prosecuted at any time, especially at a time such as this. So he should be prosecuted now. His immunity as president does not shield him at this time as a candidate for the presidency.
In Tinubu’s previous filings with the INEC in the pursuit of his political aspirations, he had claimed under oath that he attended primary and secondary schools, but that he lost his certificates when he fled into exile during military rule. His claims were patently false. Apart from certificates, he has provided no shred of evidence nor school mates when he allegedly attended Government College, Ibadan or the primary schools he claimed in Ibadan and Lagos. Abroad, one of the certificates he submitted to facilitate his admission to the Chicago State University [CSU], the Cambridge University General Certificate of Education [GCE] can still not be authenticated as genuine.
The worst is what is currently playing out before a global audience in the District of Columbia federal court in the US. In the wake of the public admission that Tinubu forfeited $460,000 to the US government through one of the bank accounts that bore his name in the 1990s, some activists triggered FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] seeking further details on Tinubu. The forfeited sum was alleged to be proceeds of heroine drug cartel business and he was alleged to be the bagman of the cartel. The Intel Community of the US had once alleged that Nigeria’s president was their asset [spy], so it has not come as a surprise that the FBI and DEA are resisting unmasking their man.
Probably, not satisfied that the FBI and DEA would remain dogged in their resistance in court for his file not to be released, Tinubu filed to be admitted as an ‘’intervenor’’ or a joinder in our legal parlance here in Nigeria. American lawyers do not come cheap and Tinubu has been paying them thousands of dollars through his personal funds or with the patrimony of Nigerians. In 2023, he also hired lawyers to stop one of his political rivals, Atiku, from accessing his transcripts from CSU. Tinubu failed. That was the process that threw up the controversies of whether the Bola A. Tinubu that allegedly attended the CSU was a male or a female, and also the suspect Cambridge University GCE.
For the sustenance of the ‘’life-long ambition’’ of Tinubu, Nigeria is yet being ridiculed, diminished, and its image sullied and tarnished globally. Tinubu’s supporters, better known as Mandate Choristers, claimed that these allegations had been litigated up to the Supreme Court, and discarded. That is a lie. When they are challenged to produce the judgment, they pivot to other subjects. On the FBI/DEA alleged drug business deals, they would readily claim that there was nothing to see. And that moreover it has been obviated by the statute of limitation. If indeed there was nothing to see and that the passage of time has diminished its utility value, why then is their principal spending thousands of dollars to keep sealed a file that contains nothing of value?
The ridiculing of Nigeria in the eyes of the world because of the ongoing disgraceful opposition in a US court to the release of the FBI/DEA files on Tinubu’s alleged heroine business, huge as it is, may not be the biggest drag on Nigeria and Nigerians. The world wakes up everyday to the suspicion that this country, the so-called giant of Africa, is being ruled by a man alleged to be an asset of a foreign country; a man with dodgy certificates and uncertain schools that he claimed to have attended; a person whose name had been alleged not to be his name; a man who has neither siblings nor school mates. Because of one man every Nigerian has become a suspect. It’s worse for travelling citizens who bear the Nigerian passport. They are routinely treated with suspicion and disdain. How do we even begin to persuade foreigners to invest in a country that is headed by a person who appears to be a shadowy figure or at best a comfounding mystery. The same man routinely hops into a presidential jet to travel the world in search of investors. Which investors? Nigerians must rid themselves of this burden. And shame.
