He assumed leadership loaded with a hidden agenda against other parts of the federation to prove his long standing opinion of ‘I don’t believe in one Nigeria.’ He ventured into the presidential project to serve as a convenient platform to execute an ethnic agenda. During the campaign, he pretended to be an ailing Saint deserving pity with a mandate. Unknowingly, it was Emi-lokan and Yoruba Lokan deeply rooted in his mind for immediate implementation.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu has redefined what nationalism and patriotism entails in leadership. He doesn’t pretend to be a nationalist for further trust even by those insane and morally bankrupt politicians that loiter on the corridor of power usually armed with credentials and contract proposals seeking his attention. His key appointments into critical sectors of the economy, security, infrastructure and judiciary are enough to prove show his determination of disfiguring Nigeria along ethnic line.
In his two-year stay in power, whenever we gather the courage to objectively complain that the country is failing, he doesn’t believe our evaluation of the nefarious roles that the so called politicians in the ruling party (APC) have played within the period under discussion.
Recently, we debated the merit and demerit of his Tax-Reform Bill now passed by the docile National Assembly which we had expected and our expectation was born from the usual body language of the legislative arm on issues of national importance. It was a debate pitting the nation’s circumstantial “parasites” with reference on how to first generate the wealth for the ensured fight to share.
Under the Tinubu presidency, whether we like it or not, Nigeria has transformed further into the league of poor countries irrespective of our abundant resources because the key element of quality leadership in national development is lacking; a fool and his money or wealth are easily parted. The US currency (dollar) equivalent of what all the tiers of government of the federation and the private sector budget every year is less than what some few private corporations in developed countries expend on Research and Development within the same timeframe. Any serious discussion about the economic well-being of Nigeria, whether official or private, should be focused on how to defeat APC and their Tinubu in 2027, we can then improve our overall productivity, stabilize the polity, create wealth and incrementally improve the economic worth of the suffering people.
An economy in which under the APC brand of Change, a single public officer illicitly and corruptly acquired an estate with 753 duplexes while the majority of the population groan in abject poverty and malnutrition is heading to perdition. There was the case of Ahmed Idris who stole N109 billion as Accountant-General of the Federation, Yahaya Bello that butchered the resources of Kogi State and played the fox before he was arrested. GodsWill Obot Akpabio has a heap of financial and sexual scandals starring him on the face. We are not talking of toddler criminals the likes of Sadiyya Umar Farouk, Betta Edu and Halima Shehu.
We can recall the criminal activities of AbdulHameed Aliyu Abati at NIRSAL, Mele Kyari of the NNPCL who has since jumped the fence immediately he was sacked along with his co-travelers in the scandals that bedeviled NNPCL.
If those scandals had involved the poor and unconnected, their names and family history could have been splashed on the nation’s major newspapers and television screens “to serve as deterrent to others” but when it is one of those high profile rogues, the matter is conveniently shrouded in secrecy, casually explained as being “sub-judice until it eventually fizzles out of public memory and finally, “case closed” through plea bargain in our courts. This is simply the case of crooks in public office colluding with like minds to hoodwink the ordinary people of Nigeria——class solidarity.
It has been argued severally that all through human history, the factor of leadership has always been a major determinant in the success or failure of the society. A well governed nation will always prosper while a poorly led one will surely fail and that is exactly what Nigeria is facing today in the Tinubu presidency.
In the Aristotelian sense, the decisive entry requirement for the political club is that members must have so distinctively distinguished themselves in their various callings that the rest of society would intuitively trust their judgments on matters of leadership to be always altruistic, legitimate and patriotic. In all progressing societies, every effort is made to ensure that those who are elected into leadership positions are respectable and patriotically tested persons. Even in the animal kingdom, we also find out that leadership is always entrusted to the most capable member of the pride.
Unfortunately, this model of leadership recruitment started losing its primary logic right from 2015 under a poorly administered democracy and other forms of policy deficiencies in which it becomes possible for incompetent and morally depraved individuals to corruptly manipulate themselves into political positions through seriously corrupted electoral and judicial processes that are often not based on rational premises but largely on greed and bigotry motivated by sentiments and other debased considerations.
These low grade sentiments and primordial loyalty probably explain why at about the same time that Singapore was recruiting Lee Kuan Yew, a Cambridge graduate as its leader, Nigeria conveniently settled for half-educated leaders in the various regions who had neither sound education nor the required exposure needed in leadership. Once you vote for a typical village politician to represent your interest at a larger gathering in cities, you must have voted for a wrong and unfit representative. What you should expect is garbage-in-garbage out, no progress other than egocentrism and show-off.
Lee Kuan Yew and those our leaders after independence couldn’t have the same quality of vision for their countries due to poor education, exposure and sentiments because you cannot give what you don’t have—-nationalistic instincts.
Today, in Nigeria, the constitutionally prescribed qualification for national leadership is just “education up to secondary school level or its equivalent” which practically means you really do not have to be well-educated conventionally, skilled or endowed to be enlisted into national leadership. One is not against that aspect of educational requirement since there were those who administered the country well in the past with low education but blended with enough exposure and sincerity of purpose to our benefit. Some of those fully educated persons that parade themselves today as academicians or elites are the albatross to our national progress. We have tested Professors and PhD holders with certain public responsibilities and found most of them very incompetent, and highly corrupt.
That educational requirement from some views, speedily devalued the quality of recruitments into the nation’s governing class. It marked the beginning of the rapid fall of genuine elitism in Nigeria and serves as a perfect reminder of Lord Action’s axiom that: “There is no greater heresy than the saying that the office sanctifies the holder…….” which one does not necessarily agree with that view because of the aforementioned reason. Most if not all of those crooks who stole Nigeria blind are, fully educated even to doctorate level. The fact that a nonentity is nepotically appointed into a high political office does not automatically transform him/her to be an, elite in the Aristotelian sense. It is this same logic that has promoted criminal enterprises like armed robbery, advance fee fraud (419) and kidnapping for ransom as direct entry qualification and a short-cut to the elite class typically assessed materially.
The resulting sharp collapse in governing standards under a Tinubu presidency naturally extends to all facets of the society. In fact, hard-work has become a veritable limitation as people have quickly learnt how to cut corners into affluence, stardom and political power following the leadership style of their leader. This gives credence to the fact that not all our professionals can genuinely claim to possess the requisite expertise in their claimed fields of study. It is not surprising that scammers and counterfeits, who flaunt fake titles of “Doctor”, “Chief” and even “Professor” without expecting societal scrutiny, have taken over leadership.
To add flavor to this discourse, in the 2025 budget, Tinubu intends to ‘waste’ N266 million on a single street light and another N396 million to fix 1,477 other street lights and N10billion for Solar installation at the presidential villa to be funded from external borrowing while our docile national assembly hurriedly ratified the perceived scandal in their usual style of docility.
Our post colonial politicians and those several military interventions were fundamentally ill-prepared for the roles they improperly assumed, the quality of leadership rapidly degenerated into some form of glorified robbery and banditry that proceeded to destroy all that was good in governance which resulted in the steady deterioration of our national institutions and core values.
Ascendency to leadership in APC style is not based on personal genuine achievements of contestants but on how much each has accumulated legally or illegally for feast, where the contestant hails from and which religious faith he professes and can he be manipulated as Tinubu manipulates Akpabio and the national assembly? APC has replaced merit with mediocrity, garbage in garbage out leadership!
As a common citizen with interest in our ecosystem, I have been pondering on how our gazetted forest reserves have turned to criminal hideouts occupied by bandits, insurgents and kidnappers for ransom while few were greedily overtaken by our thieving public officials for commercial farming and estate development, leaving nothing for herders that, creates sharp misunderstanding and violence.
A visit to most government-owned estates; low cost houses etc, reveals that our so called elite-ruling class are compromised social vandals that recklessly allocate to themselves all provided play grounds, recreational parks and buffer zones of the estates originally set aside for recreation for residents to even their cronies, girl friends, pimps and fronts with reckless abandon.
Today, most of those estates are nothing but perverted versions of the original master plans. It was that same vandalistic mentality that compelled the Obasanjo government to dispose-off critical national monuments like Apo legislative quarters, Abuja, and several other public assets for peanuts.
In our Nigeria of today, the Tinubu system of government shows as if after his tenure, there would be no more an entity to be called Nigeria. The style of his presidency is inflicting, such a hideous anti-people and vandalistic policies that fortifies, any claim of democracy and patriotism.
Whereas the political class elsewhere works hard to build their communities, societies and preserve their core values, our dysfunctional and corruption ridden politicians, on the contrary, are on a vandalistic mission and looting “state capturing” exercise, a development which has left the nation’s political economy in tatters and seemingly irreversible; an oil producing nation suffering from perennial fuel scarcity; a nation endowed with abundant fertile land, facing famine and starvation has to be an “extractive” and “degenerative” one, a pitiable phenomenon which has to be rescued in 2027 by same suffering citizens that “installed” or “Imposed” an ailing regional leader as president who has turned to be a liability on the nation’s resources shamelessly.
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues
