“Everything is my business. Everything. Anything I say is law…literally law.” Barbara Geddes, et al in their How dictatorship works (2018) quoted Malawian dictator, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, as having once said the above.
In Nigeria of a little more than a week ago, they all came in quick successions: A National Assembly where libido ran riot; a son who said his father was Nigeria’s best president; a corps member who condemned that same father as terrible and that president, when he wakes up and looks at the mirror, like Banda, sees himself as “the law”. In the hands of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria appears to have become one complex, complicated web of mess and intrigues. When a people suffer such plague of multiple, endless afflictions, my people deploy a phrasal description to denote it. So, they compare such situation to an “egbinrin òtè”. Egbinrin òtè is a situation that defies solution. It scorns the biblical exhortation that affliction would not rise a second time. Under Tinubu’s egbinrin òtè Nigeria, afflictions come in multiple folds. Literally, egbinrin òtè is leaves of conspiracy. In usage, however, it is a scary, endless tale of repetitive sorrow. The affliction is sustained by a coldblooded-ness or bloodlessness. When you cut a leaf out of the branch of this tree, another sprouts immediately. In manifestation, you can compare an egbinrin òtè situation to the biblical cursed fig tree, doomed to bring out a sap of sorrow.
1957 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, French philosopher and journalist, Albert Camus’ 1942-published book, The Myth of Sisyphus, explains egbinrin òtè better. Using Greek mythology of the gods’ punishment for Sisyphus, we see a man condemned to a repetitive labour. In Tinubu’s Nigeria, like Sisyphus, citizens seem to have been condemned to a ceaseless and eternal task of rolling a boulder up hill, only for it to roll backwards down hill. In Fela Anikulapo’s word, “everyday na the same thing”.
Seyi Tinubu, son of Nigerian president, was in Adamawa State last week. As he spoke to youths, arrogance dripped out of him like foul-smelling bead of sweats. Except for the bombastic claim that his father was “the greatest president in the history of Nigeria,” which empirical facts do not support, every other claim in that address lacks collocation, context or even logic. Who are the “they” who keep coming “for your father” and for “me”? Whose father is “Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu”? Did Seyi mean that fatherhood in the sense of Tinubu being the Nigerian president?
Fatherhood requires responsibility. It is not just by an accident of seminal fluid. Not every person who occupies Aso Rock is the Nigerian’s father. Children must see themselves in their father and vice versa. Nigerians will indeed desire that Tinubu ‘fatherlizes’ them, in which case, he will act like a father in all material particular. To the millions of Nigerians who go to bed hungry every night, and the democratic tenets that Tinubu stomps upon like a matador, he is better described as a dictator next door.
If you attempt to overstretch blood ties but fail in family responsibility, my people will stop you in your strides. They then will tell you that, when issues get to the brass-tack, a “mother-of-all” can identify her biological children (Ìyá ẹgbẹ mọ iye ọmọ ẹ). If Seyi needs to hear the truth, what Nigerians see in Tinubu isn’t a father. That is why his other claim that the Tinubu economy has “benefited all” must have rankled suffering Nigerians. When he now said his father was “the only president that is not trying to enrich his own pocket,” many Nigerians must have fainted.
In Nigeria of close to two years now under Tinubu, we are faced with what, in grammar, is called irregular comparative and superlative adjectives.They are adjectives that don’t follow methods. When you conclude that a thinking coming out of Aso Rock is bad, wait for the next minute, worse one will follow. When you begin to lament the worse situation, then the worst happens. And this trajectory happens endlessly, like Sisyphus’.
As Seyi was waxing illogical in his mis-canonization of his father in Adamawa State as “one who gave the youth the wing to fly”, another egbinrin òtè was billowing. Ushie Rita Ugamaye, a serving corps member, was literally told that in Tinubu’s Nigeria, the youth can only fly if they grovel by the president’s feet. In Bob Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, I was told that even while locked up in the sacristy of your closet, you could only criticize old Bob in whispers, lest the wall transmit your criticism to the Fuhrer. In a social media post she made, Ugamaye lamented the excruciating existence Nigerians live under Seyi’s father’s government. Speaking directly to him, she said: “I don’t know if there is any other president that is as terrible as you… you are such a terrible president.” Thereafter, NYSC authority subjected Ugamaye to threats and eventually got her to apologize for her views on the grueling economic life Nigerians live today.
Ugamaye’s tortuous week in the hands of Tinubu’s hirelings is a mirror of the kind of life citizens live under repressive governments. Another example of this kind of rule was under the Malawian president, Banda. The people lived in palpable fear of their president. Not only was dissent criminalized, condemnation of the Fuhrer was treasonable. Their despotism began with negligible cases like Ugamaye’s and gradually, they harvested a captive citizenry from whom they wrung cult-like devotion under an atmosphere of fear. In Malawi, national grovelling and beatification of Banda were the norm. It was so bad that in June, 1967, Banda was awarded a honourary doctorate by a university which called him a “… pediatrician to his infant nation”!
Then, another billow of a smouldering egbinrin ote oozed out. On March 18, Tinubu wielded the big stick. He imposed a state of emergency on Rivers State, suspending the governor, Siminalayi Fubara, deputy and the House of Assembly for six months. In my last week instalment, I referred to Tinubu as a partial judge. With the proclamation of emergency rule, he earned another infamous medallion. In his nationwide address which read like a coup speech, without any remorse or pretence, Tinubu unapologetically removed the veil of his partiality. A few hours after, allegedly under heavy disbursement of grafts, the two national parliaments gave his coup against democracy legislative imprimatur.
I do not want to bore you with condemnations that followed Tinubu’s dismantling of democratic structures in Rivers State, which I share. The most disingenuous corroboration of that declaration of martial law that shouldn’t escape my comment came from Magnus Abe. On a national television last week, he said Tinubu had the latitude to read S. 305 of the constitution, which gives a president power to impose a state of emergency, in his own way, as different from Goodluck Jonathan’s reading of same. Not only does this nauseating drivel make one want to puke, it tells you the length people’s brain can travel to manufacture inanity in defence of their tenuous political location. That section of the constitution is not ambiguous. No president is allowed to collapse democratic structure. Abe must mean that Tinubu is the law that lawyers and Nigerians in general must read.
I think, judging by his almost two years in office, there is an urgent need for us to begin to assess the psychology that underpins Tinubu’s actions in power. We can do this by conducting a post-mortem on his words and actions in private. This will enable us know how tortuous the road with Tinubu as Nigerian leader would be in the years to come. In a bid to forewarn that the character in a duel is a principality of humongous evil, Juju maestro, King Sunny Ade, once warned, using the Ijesa dialect as a kicker, that, “Wé m’ẹni o kó, Paddy…” I think, in Tinubu, Nigerians do not realize what principality in power they are entangled with. He carouses power like a tobacco addict fiddles with his pipe.
So, it brought me to critical questions about Tinubu’s persona. The first is, when God’s-creation-Bola-Ahmed-Tinubu wakes up every morning, does he think there is God? Or, put differently, doesn’t he think he is God? Or, more explicitly, that he is the Nigerian God? Simulating the craft of anthropologists who gather information through fieldwork and participant observation, I have spoken with those who sat around Tinubu before he became president. They believe Tinubu has a God mentality. For instance, they cited him telling fawners who gathered round him in his Lagos Bourdillon court at wee hours of the night, when he was ready to go and sleep, that, “Èkó fẹ lọ sún” – Lagos wants to go and sleep. Forget the arrogance in that word, it explains the God that Tinubu thinks he is.
Again, those who witnessed the Nigerian president’s youth period in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, told me he went through a challenging time. He had to cobble together bric-a-brac for existence and learnt rough tackle tactics of the street. He emerged therefrom a street folk to the hilt, with its unorthodox survival methods. Decades after, the man who would be Nigeria’s president had had mastery of the colour of roughness and the language of manipulation. These have proven to be handy and essential tools in the Nigerian gangbanger political underworld.
The street has taught Tinubu to become so versatile in persona code-switching. It is such that, at one time, he is at home in the rough world of the MC Oluomos and musician, Wasiu Ayindes and at another, he blends perfectly with the varnished world of international leaders. He has faced life tribulations that drowned Goliaths, walked through landmines that made mincemeat of the brave and emerged therefrom unscathed. These experiences can get a man to do either of two things: become the staunchest atheist who is persuaded of his own ability and scoffs at the God factor in human affair. Or, become the most supine God worshipper. I think these harsh life experiences and his conquest of battles through street shenanigans must have scarred the president’s soul irreparably. The scar must have made fellow human beings appear as tiny as gnats in his estimation.
Tinubu is one of the boldest leaders in the history of Nigeria. A few days ago, news filtered in that he had just awarded a $700 million contract for the renovation of Tin Can and Apapa ports in Lagos to ITB Nigeria, a construction firm his son, Seyi is said to be a director, and which is owned by his close ally, Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire, Gilbert Chagoury. Earlier, he had awarded another multi-trillion Naira contract to a Chagoury-owned company, Hitech Construction. Same company handles many of Nigerian’s federal roads. Chagoury is already constructing the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway. Nigerians ranted at the opacity and compromise behind the awards but to Tinubu, the people could go jump inside the lagoon. Bishop Godfrey Onah of the Catholic Church of Nsukka recently told us that a nation is doomed when its leaders are no longer afraid of the reaction of the people.
I seem to think Tinubu has swallowed the Devil. With his raw hand, he can pull chestnut from red-hot furnace. He is not afraid to bite any bullet. The whole world may be on the verge of being incinerated but the street folk looks at the end game. It is a trait you get on the street. Street people are Machiavellian. To them, the end justifies the means. Unlike him, virtually all Nigerian military rulers, who were equally bold, got theirs consummated in fiery military traditions, especially grueling military training. Tinubu’s was weaned from the furnace of a heartless street. I recently cited Gen Ibrahim Babangida’s interview in the 1990s with some newspaper editors. He had told them he coveted the ruthless military prowess of Zaka, the legendary Zulu war General. Zaka was notorious for mass killings and violence. These worsened to psychopathic level when, at the death of his mother, Nandi, in 1827, Shaka suddenly thirsted after more blood, as showcased in his erratic blood-thirst. He killed thousands of Zulus, prohibited planting crops and drinking milk for a year while murdering pregnant women and their husbands. So when you marvel at why IBB heartlessly and summarily executed Mamman Vatsa and why torrents of Nigerians’ blood flowed under his rule, remember that Zaka’s ruthlessness fascinated him.
The proclamation of a state of emergency in Rivers State by Tinubu should tell Nigerians that what we have today is personal rule disguised as civil rule. In such rule, the people are forced to swallow dosages of authoritarianism. As consequence, gradually, national public politics wither. Tinubu’s palace politics makes the future of democratic government look bleak in Nigeria. Barbara Geddes, et al cited above also said that a major feature of personal rule is that the ruler conscripts the judiciary, castrates the political system and gets a pliant legislature. An icing on the cake of this infamy is a captive populace. Tinubu has all these by his palm. In the voice vote of the two parliaments last week, a somber Nigeria should not just see a grim democratic future but a gradual incubation of a Kamuzu Banda in Nigeria in the shortest possible time. Villaswill Akpabio will give Tinubu life presidency if and when he wants it.
In his oxymoronic authoritarian-democrat posture, Tinubu is gradually morphing into the Banda model. He is the law. He is the legislature. He is the Fuhrer. So when Lateef Fagbemi, his Attorney General, came out to read an address which reified Tinubu’s earlier rough stomp on the Nigerian constitution, all seems set on this road to Tinubu’s personal rule. Banda also had executioners who helped him dig the grave of Malawian democracy. Fagbemi had threatened Nigerian states that the cudgel with which Tinubu lashed the buttocks of democratic government in Rivers State is on the rafters waiting for any other governor who fails to grovel before Banda. Soon, this same legislature, with Fagbemi’s cavalier lending of self to autocracy, would land us in Malawi of 1970. That year, a congress of Banda’s political party, the MCP, declared him president for life. In 1971, Malawi’s Godswill Akpabio and Tajudeen Abass as heads of the legislature did this. I guess a Fagbemi was there for Banda, too. For the next quarter of a century, it was criminal not to address Banda with his full title, “His Excellency the Life President of the Republic of Malawi, Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamazu Banda.”
Published by the Sunday Tribune, March 23, 2025
