THOUGHTS ON TINUBU’S RETURN BID
I have been wondering why Nigerians are not agitated by the devious scheme the Presidency is unleashing on the land for the single purpose of having a Bola Tinubu return as their country’s president. I have, painfully, come to discover that there is actually no difference between the leadership and the led in Nigeria. They are one and the same thing.
In today’s Nigeria, President Bola Tinubu is the face of the leadership that we have. That leadership is grotesque. It is an ugly manifestation of everything that is wrong with Nigeria. You need not describe it as incompetent. That won’t make meaning to it because it does not believe that there is anything called competence in leadership. For the leadership therefore, competence is a misnomer. The true colour of leadership in Nigeria revolves around ineptitude, recklessness, corruption and devil-may-care disposition.
This is where the led come in. The average or typical Nigerian has the largest of hearts, but in a most negative way. He can accommodate anything. No situation is unusual. Anything and everything is acceptable. With this mindset, he does not think that the leader should be held to account for whatever he does. Who, really, should the leader render account to? Is it the led that do not care a hoot about anything?
When you marry the character of the leader with that of the led, it is easy to see that they are the same thing. Each is typically carefree and uncaring. Both live for the moment. They do not worry about tomorrow. Whereas the leader plunders the treasury as if there is no tomorrow, so do the led care nothing about the perverse behavior of the leader. Perhaps the only difference there is between the leader and the led is in the station each occupies in life. One is at the commanding heights, the other is at the receiving end.
It is because of the way Nigerians are that gave Tinubu the audacity to dream freely about a second term in office. If Nigerians are different from Tinubu, they will see something strange in his second term scheme. They will realise that a man who has led them so badly has no business seeking to continue in office. The disapproval of whatever he is planning would have been boldly demonstrated through their actions. But Nigerians are not capable of anger. They are a happy-go-lucky lot who live by the moment. If anger has a place in the mental makeup of Nigerians, they will be loathing their president to no end.
But they are not because they are abnormal beings. Nigerians of the Tinubu era are behaving, more or less, like John Milton’s fallen archangels none of whom had any plan to escape their agonizing banishment in a hellish state.
In Tinubu’s Nigeria, insecurity has grown from bad to worse. Today, terrorists are comfortably nestled in our forests, abducting and killing people at will. The terrorists are not in hiding. They are in our forests. Their pathways are known. Yet, no one is prepared to confront them. Our security agents know that they live in the bushes from where they carry out their nefarious activities. But they are not doing anything about it. It is as if the terrorists are licensed to occupy our forests. They are reigning supreme there. It is their safe haven.
They are everywhere in Nigeria. Just the other day, they imported the abduction of schoolchildren into Oyo State. Schoolchildren and their teachers were abducted from three schools in Oriire LGA of Oyo state. Toddlers aged between two and three years were among them. These terrorists are somewhere in Oyo forests. But nobody is looking for them. They are having telephone conversations with the concerned, but nothing is being done to track them.
Oyo is not alone. I had, a week ago in this column, drawn attention to the material condition in Imo State. But the situation is not abating. The terrorists that occupy the forests bordering Owerri West, Oguta and Mbaitoli LGAs are still kidnapping and killing people on a daily basis. Nothing is being done to rein them in. The affected communities in the aforementioned local government areas no longer go to their farms. They cannot move freely on the roads. Road users stand the risk of being abducted at any time. Is this state of affairs normal? How can a country that has leadership become such a jungle?
What rankles the most here is that this Tinubu, while angling for the office he now occupies, made Nigerians to believe that he has the magic wand that would take care of insecurity in Nigeria. People of southern Nigeria whose forests were under threat under the Buhari regime felt then that Fulani terrorists were emboldened by the fact that their kinsman was at the helm of affairs. It was thought that a southern president would not encourage a situation that would threaten southern forests.
Now the big irony is here. Fulani terrorists who were at the periphery of southern forests under Buhari have now fully moved in as landlords under Tinubu. They are more comfortable now than they were before Tinubu. Even more disturbing is that the president is not even bothered by whatever we are saying about insecurity in the land. There is no programme of action. No clear-cut agenda towards tackling the cankerworm. A few weeks ago, Plateau state boiled over following the gruesome massacre of many by Fulani terrorists. Rather than visit the state and see things for himself, the president touched down at Jos airport and remained there. The distressed and the injured had to be ferreted to the airport for the president to see them. If Nigerians were a proper people, they would have made an issue out of this aberration. But they moved on as if it is normal. That is why I insist that there is no difference between the leader and the led in Nigeria.
While papering over the Plateau massacre, the president told the people of the state that such would not happen again. Three days after, there was another round of bloodletting. It has continued to happen since then. Did Nigerians stop to remind the president of what he said in this regard? Of course not. They will not because nothing is the issue. Because nothing really is the issue, President Tinubu can afford to ask to return to office in order to be with the people again. If Nigeria has a standard of measurement, Tinubu would not be seen anywhere near where comparisons are being made. He would dissolve into anonymity because it would be too embarrassing for him to present himself for assessment. Here in Nigeria, those parameters are absent. Indeed, if performance in office were to be a yardstick for measuring who should be re-elected, Tinubu would have been the bold face of failure. But he can afford to grandstand because Nigerians are the most unserious beings on the surface of the earth.
QUOTE:
“If performance in office were to be a yardstick for measuring who should be re-elected, Tinubu would have been the bold face of failure. But he can afford to grandstand because Nigerians are the most unserious beings on the surface of the earth”.
