The Unnecessary Tinubu-Osinbajo Debate

VP Yemi Osinbajo and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu

 By Tunde Asaju

From the relative obscurity of my winter hideout in Ottawa , it is dishearteningly entertaining to follow the views and counter arguments of western Nigeria’s best on TheNews WhatsApp group. One is supposed to feel entertained except that there is nothing entertaining about the debate.

What becomes obvious is a broken system and a group of people unwittingly trying to maintain and  sustain it. A system that makes trite of individual struggle to rise above the waters of systemic defeat to gratitude to a system that from time to time pulls one person out of the deep to adulation forgetting that a dozen or more equally qualified people are left to drown. Canadians love and respect their firefighters. From every drowning or fire incident, these volunteers (so-called because there is no price tag to the job they do) risk their own lives to save potential victims. Canadian firefighters who rescue people very often no longer see them after the incident. It doesn’t stop them from rescuing others because this is what they chose to do. They are heroes, but they don’t wear capes nor do they seek undue praise. This is a virtue lost to Nigerians. We have lived with and tolerated abuse for so long that we don’t know how to demand for something systemically better.

A broken system renders people unable to make it on merit without the help of a godfather. In Canada even before any kid becomes a citizen, they have equal potential to be admitted to university or college based on their academic performance. In Nigeria, we tax the pupils and by God even if they meet the cutoff marks, they need godfathers to be admitted for the course of their choice. JAMB boasts of the revenue it generates and not the openings it gives to potential candidates. Dare to criticise this system, and they’ll come for your intellectual jugular. Even those who benefitted in the past from working systems rerurn home to lionize the broken system that keeps our country and its citizens bound. We resist change because it grants us privileges over those who do not know and have not experienced better.

From the debate going on, one can deduce the following : Babfemi Ojudu, an editor before he met Bola Tinubu would not have made it as senator or anything on his own merit without the Tinubu rigging machine. Merit counts for nothing and qualification means nothing if you’re not aligned with the movers and shakers or shapers of destiny. Only Nigeria could coin the phrase – destiny helper. Ojudu failed re-election bid the moment his ‘ingratitude’ unplugged him from thst machine. The machine was playing the Almighty with his destiny and any dissent is sacrilege.

Hearing or reading this in 2022 makes me shudder! Wither merit in the scheme of things? When will the son of a farmer in Okeagi ever have the audacity of hope to contest an election without the rigging machine of a Babasàlẹ̀ in Boirdillon? Obama dreamt in America and achieved it. Could he have done so in Kenya?

Yemi Osimbajo, a professor of law credited with drafting laws that put Lagos above all other states in revenue generation and surviving Obasanjo’s crippling ‘sanctions’ must never aspire to higher public office if the man who appointed him to that position is gunning for that same office. In the debate, he’ll be biting the fingers that fed him if he did on his own merit and should be dumped in the bottomless pit reserved for ingrates.

And in all these, it doesn’t matter that the man for whom the coast of opposition is being cleared is a man of questionable credentials yet to answer questions about but not limited to:

1. Clarity about his original name and why the need to change it.

2. Uncleared questions about his educational qualifications, an issue once raised by a Lagos-based news magazine that led to the near execution of its editor and the mopping up of a whole production of copies in a vain attempt to erase history and bury the truth in perpetuity.

3. The veracity of his real age. It looks unimportant that a man claiming to be 69 is the biological father of a 62 year old lady whose age is verifiable.

Ordinarily, these issues ought to be superficial seeing that this is over the right of the North and West to keep scheming the East out of the presidency in perpetuity. But it goes deeper than that. It attempts to break the age-old dictum of the late MKO Abiola that you cannot shave a man’s head in his absence. These debates removes the rights of the Nigerian electorate to make rational choices. In Nigeria, the peoples choice means nothing where the cabalistic kingmakers sit in the comfort of their homes determining and ruining destiny, buoyed by the absurd arguments of their online sniffer dogs arrayed against anyone with a contrary viewpoint or opinion different from what they want it to be.

This was how we debated Buhari in 2015, saying his lack of a school certificate meant nothing to his supposed mental capacity and governance experience. We are here in 2022 abjectly suffering the effects of our lack of simple clairvoyance in governance, lack of vision or mission. Buhari couldn’t bring his fighting experience to bear on security that is supposed to be his domain. His incapacity to use his gumption has left us in N32 trillion debt with zero things to show for the indebtedness.

It is therefore shamefully disheartening to see elites debating how to perpetuate the same system and exemplify Fela’s legendary song – perambulator on the entire nation. Coming at a time when elites ought to be worried about the exclusion of the electorate in the decision-making process, the elites are divided by their proximity to stomach infrastructure in helping to push the future of Nigeria into the open mouths of the gargoyles of corruption. Their rationale is that we must pay back a godfather who, essentially has piggybacked on others to position himself for a day like this.

These ‘grateful’ elites would rather plunge Nigeria into deeper bog of corruption to pay back the master to whom they owe their loyalty and rise in society than put their elite brains to work to push a candidate of any extraction whose only debt would be to redeem the pledge they make to the electorate. They deftly refuse to answer a very germain question how Nigeria can continue to claim to be united if the Igbo, the third of the troika that makes up the nation are being edited out of the equation of providing a candidate if rotation is the core of our political wheel.

These core of elites are unconcerned about the capacity of their candidate to pull this nation from the musical chairs of governance ineptitude into the able hands of a candidate that can hold his or her own in global politics. They are not marketing a candidate whose leadership qualities would help mobilize the potentials of our citizens at home and abroad into turning the fortunes of the nation around. Other countries continue to benefit from the incredible expertise, resilience and intelligence of Nigerians forced into exile to succeed but these elites want to maintain the motion without movement system hinged on patronage.

Just for the records, I have never had contact with Tinubu, Osinbajo, Ojudu, Fashola, Mamora or any of the personalities mentioned in these debates. I am just a curious observer shocked and awed to the bone that from all indications, we have learnt nothing and even in the midst of the enormous challenges we’re currently facing, we have forgotten almost every vital lesson. Is this how we will continue to stir the ship of this great nation into the abyss? Are all our problems solved on the altar of gratitude to godfathers? Would our childish steps ever change to first walks and struts?

In ten, twenty or thirty years from here, what would the future of Nigeria be? Would we be paying another godfather, a godson of the present or would we be looking for leaders with passion vision and mission to position Nigeria as a regional giant and a global player? What would we stand and tell our grandchildren? Would we say we used our intellect to help redirect Nigeria to success or would we hide under some of the age-old dictums that have kept us bound as serfs to whoever could guarantee our immediate future.

Is politics the way forward for Nigeria or would we soon follow our neighbours in Mali or be foisted with a sir-tight leader or a ruling dynasty?

*Tunde Asaju, multi-lingual journalist and public affairs analyst, writes from Ottawa, Canada