OPINION: Red flag Tinubu

Give or take, we are 60 days away from what could turn out to be a hotly contested presidential election. The signs of what will be are already all over the country. Real and contrived endorsements of the perceived four leading gladiators- Labour Party’s Peter Obi; Peoples Democratic Party’s Atiku Abukakar; Bola Ahmed Tinubu of APC; and Nigerian National Peoples Party’s Rabiu Kwankwaso.

In a normal country only two of the so-called frontrunners should be in the race for the office of the President of Nigeria next year. But our country has since lost virtually all the qualifying indices to be categorised as a normal place. The documented baggage of Tinubu and Atiku are in the public domain. But some of us don’t seem to care. The political parties which are sponsoring Tinubu [APC] and Atiku [PDP] respectively are not different from the candidates in terms of their uppity. Interestingly, the English word uppity sounds very much like apiti which is Igbo for dirt or mud. But of the two obvious evils, one is worse than the other. Tinubu is a far more damaged good than Atiku.

But the problem is that where the country has been taken to by the grossly inept regime of this President, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari and his ruling APC, does not conduce for us to settle for the lesser of the two evils in the upcoming elections. The situation of the country is grave, graver than the ruling political elite are willing to acknowledge. Hunger is already ravaging the land in spite of claims to the contrary by the spin doctors of Gen. Buhari and the APC. The prognosis and the reading of the global trend is that hunger in Nigeria and in some other countries will get worse in the coming years. The war on Ukraine by Russia will not make the situation any better.

Back home, our bleak future courtesy of Buhari and APC, is becoming bleaker by the day. Gen. Buhari has since given up on governing the country, that is, if ever he had interest in leading Nigeria since he acceded to the Presidency in 2015. Elsewhere, we had written that for Buhari, the presidency was a trophy to be won not a call to duty. His becoming president has been an end in itself.
As Buhari winds down in a wimp, the man who said publicly and repeatedly that he installed Buhari as the president now wants to be president himself. There’s nothing wrong with his “lifelong ambition” except that there are emergent issues on his aspiration. The one is that Tinubu insists it is the turn of the Yoruba nation to produce the president of Nigeria next year. And since, according to him, it is the Yoruba turn, it is his for the taking which gave rise to ’emi lo kan’. A statesman of Yoruba extraction has since declared that corruption is embedded in the concept of “emi lo kan.”

Another problem with Tinubu’s candidacy is that it is rooted in blackmail and intimidation. Tinubu went public with the tactics he will deploy to grab the presidential ticket earlier in the year in Ogun. He accused and abused everybody around the venue of his own event including the state governor who was present and threatened to pull down the roof if he was denied the APC presidential ticket. He then proceeded to cow other aspirants to the party’s ticket. Those who refused to be cowed were bought with wads of United States Dollars along with delegates to the party’s primary. To rub it in he disparaged his rivals to the ticket and personally humiliated Vice President Oluyemi Osinbajo right at the Eagle Square venue of the primary. The triumphant Tinubu had to be begged to acknowledge and shake hands with Osinbajo in front of live television cameras.

After Tinubu had procured the ticket he then threw down the gauntlet to other candidates. He declared that he was primed to ”fight dirty” to become the president of Nigeria. His then inchoate team went to town for damage control and to give a different meaning to “fighting dirty”. But Tinubu the candidate has since unravelled. He really meant to fight dirty when the ‘jungle matures’.

READ ALSO: Tinubu, Atiku, Obi, others unfit to lead Nigeria in right direction —Sowore

Part of the strategy of Tinubu is not to be accountable and responsible to anyone including the electorate. He is corksure that the Buhari template of 2014/15 will work for him in 2022/23.

In Chatham House London he varied the tactic by deploying ‘teamship’ created by him and for him. Teamship means abdicating responsibility and holding Nigerians in contempt. At home he engages in the intimidation of non-pliant media outfits. He avoids town hall meetings with rival candidates and shuns live interviews with reporters. In spite of the best efforts by his handlers to shield Tinubu from critical publics, the man has become the favourite of skirt makers because of his one day one gaffe proclivity.

With Buhari Nigerians have lived the full effects of an infirm person as president. Since nature abhors vacuum, members of the so-called cabal freely effected and perfected state capture. The fear is that the cabal in Buhari’s regime will turn out to be apprentices to that of Tinubu in the unlikely event he becomes president.

We can say that election is about choice and that voters have a right to their choice. But it’s not as simple as that. Those who campaigned for and ensured the election of Buhari in 2015 and 2019 made a choice but their choice which birthed a failed regime has taken a toll on virtually all Nigerians. If the looming disaster of a Tinubu presidency will be limited to his current cheerleaders, some of us will keep our peace.
As I wish you happy new year, I pray that 2022 will be the last full year that Nigerians will have the misfortune of living or dying under an APC regime for the foreseeable future.

AUTHOR: UGO ONUOHA

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Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.

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