Tinubu wants to grab power

TUNDE AKANDE

Bola Tinubu, All Progressives Congress, APC’s candidate for the 2023 presidency is dead serious, deadly serious to win the election by hook or crook. Though his party was part of the peace accord signed in Abuja for peaceful elections, he doesn’t seem ready for any peace. Perhaps that is why he did not make a personal appearance at the signing of the peace accord. But now Bola Tinubu, the man who has been projecting himself as a democrat and a brilliant politician is baring his fangs. He was seen recently in a video that ran very well on social media talking to a group of his loyalists telling them that ‘power must be grabbed, power must be snatched’. I don’t know why the APC allowed that video to go public, but it is the most shameful act ever committed by Bola Tinubu whose ambition knows no limit. I have said several times that Bola Tinubu is a fluke and that everything he has done in life has been centered only on his ambition for himself. He claimed to have built Lagos but those who have carefully monitored him know that he has only served himself, his immediate and extended family, and his narrow group of friends or those lackeys who derive their sustenance from him.

Lagos State has been sucked dry by these leeches. A story is told that the former governor of Cross River State once brought the idea of a cable car which he had used in Obudu cattle ranch to organize transport from Apapa across the Lagoon in Lagos to Marina. Tinubu was said to have ordered that the name of Duke be removed from the project while his own name is substituted. The project subsequently died. If anything will not benefit Bola Tinubu or has his mark, it will not go, no matter the benefit to the suffering people who daily put up with the hectic life in the mega city. Having conquered Lagos, the biggest commercial city in Nigeria, he now wants to conquer the whole of Nigeria. This is the only agenda of Bola Tinubu; all those manifestos are nothing but make-believe.

I don’t know the group Tinubu addressed in the video I watched. I don’t also know why it went viral. The possibility is that it was leaked. It is also possible that the Tinubu team released it to intimidate its opponents. But whatever the intention of the leakage, it shows vividly that Tinubu means no good for Nigeria. In a decent nation, Tinubu should have been arrested by the secret service for threatening the collective existence of Nigeria as a nation. What he said is nothing short of a coup against the nation. He advised his followers, perhaps thugs of the APC that they must grab and snatch power. Only coup plotters use that kind of language. But who will arrest Bola Tinubu since he has been flattering President Muhammadu Buhari who has done nothing in seven years other than impose his Fulani kinsmen on Nigeria? Tinubu said Buhari is a quiet achiever. But Buhari is a lousy failure.

Whoever doubts that the elections of 2023 may not hold must be living in a fool’s paradise. If it holds at all, it will be attended by large-scale rigging and violence. This is the signal Tinubu’s Machiavellian statement has given out. The end justifies the means, however crooked or condemnable the means are. By his utterance in the video circulating on social media, Tinubu gives himself away as no better than the coup plotters, who had held the nation by the jugular, which he has just confirmed to Nigerians by his utterances. Clearly, Tinubu is not a democrat. Democrats don’t grab power; they don’t snatch it. The last man that said something close to that is former President Olusegun Obasanjo who said in his contest for a second term in 2003 that members of his party must recognize that election as a do-or-die affair. And really Nigeria witnessed great violence during the 2003 general elections. The whole of Southwest which was up till that time under the Alliance for Democracy, AD, a party fully opposed to Obasanjo, was snatched and grabbed by the PDP, Obasanjo’s party. The only man in that era that survived Obasanjo’s political tsunami was Bola Tinubu as governor of Lagos State and only by a countervailing force. He was described then as the only man standing in the AD. His other colleagues in AD fell in a swoop because they were not power-grabbing and power-snatching politicians. They thought it was going to be a level playing field. But Tinubu met Obasanjo violence-for-violence and rigging-for-rigging.

Tinubu is far from being brilliant as he likes to project. I have said to some in his generation that left Nigeria to stay or to study abroad that they left because they were incapable of competing in the few universities in Nigeria then. What goes for Tinubu makes him better than people like Buhari is that he knows to source brilliant talents and let them work. But he is also brilliant at taking credit for what is not his. Tinubu surrounds himself with many hangers-on and praise singers who feed from the crumbs that fall from his table. He buys loyalty and dumps his loyalists when they are no longer needed. If Tinubu is ever allowed to rule Nigeria, the nation may break up not intentionally but by his divisive politics. He is a master of intrigues. He successfully divided the AD. He has finally divided the Afenifere, the Yoruba socio-cultural group. All the trouble that Tinubu has now concerning all the allegations against him is a product of his Machiavelli tactics. He loves to be opaque. Such cannot build Nigeria because what the country needs most earnestly now is moral rearmament. We need men of great morals to turn this country around. Tinubu is no different from the man on the street in Nigeria, the man who needs to be morally rejuvenated.

If Tinubu and his other co-contestants, especially Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar are compared based on their manifestos, it would be seen that they are only obscurantists covering their lack of comprehension of the problems of the nation in economic jargon. It seems current politicians think the more they sound obscurantist with highfalutin economic terms, the more they will be seen to be brilliant. Gone are the days of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe who kept their manifestos so simple that even a man with little education can read and understand them. Nigeria does not need Harvard education to turn the nation around, the nation needs bus-stop economists who have lived practically among the people and feel their sorrow and their stupidity, and are also ready to make sacrifices to lift them up from poverty. Awo’s four cardinal points were a product of such experience with the poor. Read the manifesto of Tinubu and you see the emptiness of a man who wants us to think he is brilliant. That he worked in Mobil does not mean anything. Experience has shown that people who thrive in such places are at best corporate politicians. The more they can help the white man to cheat the system, the more they are loved, used, and promoted. They don’t do any brain work. They are mostly bootlickers. Anybody who faces the kind of allegations being levelled against Tinubu now will thrive in such organizations. The same with Atiku Abubakar. So also, Peter Obi whose use of statistics has been found to be dishonest. If he lives in Festac Town as Obi claimed, a middle-class area, he should sound like somebody who has interacted with the poor, but he sounds no different than Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar using economic jargon to becloud lack of comprehension of the issues starring Nigerians in the face.

The beautiful ones are not yet born, in the language of Ayi Kwei Armah. Tinubu has openly declared that he is not the beautiful one Nigerians are waiting for. He is going to grab and snatch power. This is exactly what he did for Buhari when he with others hounded the lily-livered Goodluck Jonathan out of power and inflicted the nation with Buhari. We must not underrate Tinubu’s threat. He is employing everything to plant himself in power in 2023. A Nollywood actor was seen on a social media video near the ocean stripping himself and praying or cursing to the sea gods that Tinubu wins the election. Though the man lied that he heard a voice that told him to pray for Tinubu as he did, he did not know that a prophet of God had leaked it about two weeks before that Nollywood actors would be going to the seaside to offer prayers because they have been bribed by the politicians to do so. The prophet warned that the actors must be careful because the politicians would only buy their souls with money and that they risk death if they take money from the politicians. At least three have so far gone to the Atlantic Ocean to pray to the sea gods, one for Tinubu and one against him, and the third for Funke Akindele, a popular actress who is running as deputy governor in Lagos State on the PDP ticket.

This is December and the elections are in February 2023, all these are happenings showing that it is not yet Uhuru for Nigeria. The elections will be grabbed and snatched by guns and by both fair and foul means.

Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. he earned a Master’s degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos