Whenever I think of Bola Tinubu, I easily recall an Igbo proverb that says: “Ochu okuko nwe ada,” meaning that whoever chooses to chase a chicken always inevitably suffers a fall.
By Tiko Okoye
President-elect Bola Tinubu’s grass-to-grace, Cinderella-like tale is an enactment of the Scripture that says: “Though your beginning was small, yet your end shall greatly increase.” As the Deputy General Manager superintending all six revenue-generating departments and subsidiaries of the newly formed Intercontinental Merchant Bank in the late 1980s, the Managing Director/CEO and I considered Pius Akinyelure, Tinubu’s boss at Mobil Oil Corporation after he was transferred from Internal Audit to Treasury, as our go-to man for foreign exchange purchases and mega naira deposits.
Despite how Tinubu’s job at the Treasury Department was subsequently sexed up by Akinyelure, it is worth noting that we never even sighted him, talk more held any discussions with him, in the four years we engaged in top-level discussions with Akinyelure. But as soon as the whistle was blown to mark the supposed ending of Ibrahim Babangida’s (IBB) convoluted Political Transition Programme, Tinubu, who left Mobil and joined politics, leveraged on the vice-like grip Shehu Yar’Adua’s highly influential pressure group within the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – the People’s Democratic Movement (PDM) – had on Lagos State politics to represent Lagos West in the Senate during the short-lived Third Republic.
Consequent upon the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election by IBB and the attendant suspension of the Constitution and sacking of the Legislature, Bola Tinubu became a founding, front-line member of the National Democratic Convention (NADECO) which mobilized support for the restoration of civil rule and formal recognition and swearing in of MKO Abiola as winner of the election and president respectively. But when Sani Abacha seized power from the paperweight Interim National Government (ING) and commenced an orgy of assassinations of high profile political figures, Tinubu went into exile in 1994 and returned to Nigeria four years later upon the death of his tormentor-in-chief.
‘Eto’ in Yoruba means ‘planner’ and ‘baba eto’ means ‘chief planner.’ Considering the times we now live in, let me hasten to calm sensitive nerves by disclosing that the first man to don the moniker was an Igbo man called Peter Amaechina. He was the highly successful coach of the all-conquering Stationery Stores Football Club of Lagos during the civil war and even coached the Nigerian senior men’s national football team between 1969 and 1970. He was so proud of the coinage conferred on him by dotting fans of the football club that he adopted ‘Eto’ as his middle name!
Bola Tinubu has truly earned the same appellation by displaying similar mind-boggling manoeuvres in the political arena. During the run-up to the 1999 elections, Tinubu, who had surmised by now that his only chance of survival was courting new powerful political godfathers and forging new political alliances, managed to transform himself into a protege of the leaders of the pan-Yoruba organisation, Afenifere, and its political appendage, the Alliance for Democracy (AD), Abraham Adesanya and Ayo Adebanjo, who, strictly speaking, had all the while been on opposite sides of the political divide with Yar’Adua and PDM chieftains like Tinubu.
But Adebanjo still preferred his long-time friend and fellow Awoist, Ganiyu Dawodu, as the AD governorship candidate in Lagos. Some other Afenifere leaders backed Funsho Williams and Wahab Dosunmu. In the end, Adesanya had his way with Tinubu, on the condition that Kofo Bucknor-Akerele must be his running mate. Interestingly enough, the ripple of distrust, misapprehension and malice that consequently passed through the top echelons of both organisations bedeviled – and is still bedeviling – the foundations and structures of both organisations.
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It must have been at this very stage that Tinubu dreamt of being the president some day and he started casting himself in the garb of a mentor and survivalist. He hammered out both tactical and strategic plans to prepare for the highly tasking, dangerous, expensive and thankless political odyssey that a presidential contest entails by learning how to surmount man-made hurdles using his patented political survival kit.
Even at the risk of being pedantic, let me again repeat that preparation is the mother of manifestation and that there’s no substitute for smart hard work. What ended up giving Tinubu the edge in the highly contested 2023 presidential election – the like of which has never before been experienced in Nigeria – was his unmatched capacity to organise, plan and plant mentees and various administrative bodies in all the states in Nigeria.
Besides the manner in which he emerged as a dark horse in the Lagos AD primary in 1998, there are other developments that marked Tinubu out as a man destined for greater heights. He was the only AD governor standing after the Obasanjo-contrived tsunami swept off his colleagues in the South-West in the 2003 governorship elections. He fearlessly stood toe-to-toe and eyeball-to-eyeball with then-President Obasanjo and ultimately got the Supreme Court to declare the seizure of local government allocations due to his state as unconstitutional and ultra vires.
Tinubu practically transformed Muhammadu Buhari from a serial three-time loser of presidential polls to a first-time winner in 2015. But he was kept at arm’s length by the Presidency and hirelings were continually empowered to abuse and humiliate both his wife and himself in proxy battles. The straw that finally broke the camel’s back was when the APC national party chairman gushingly unveiled Senate President Ahmad Lawan as the party’s “consensus presidential candidate approved by President Buhari, the leader of the party.”
It was logical to think at this point that Tinubu’s goose was practically cooked and toasted. But not the cat-like Tinubu, the ‘baba eto’ with nine political lives. He immediately reached into his survival kit for the most effective repellant, and the famous words “Emi lo kan,” meaning “It is my turn” has since entered into the nation’s political lexicon. At the end of the day, six Northern APC governors had to embark on separate missions to Aso Villa and Daura aimed at convincing Buhari to provide a level playing field for all aspirants.
Still, the powerful anti-Tinubu cabal didn’t give up. They set about loading the dice in a bid to split and diffuse Southern delegates’ votes by ‘sponsoring’ every Tom, Dick and Harry from the South – and particularly the South-West – to enter the race, with the aim of pushing Lawan over the finishing line with a Northern block vote. But Bola Tinubu still proved too smart for them. He won the primary race by a landslide, leapfrogging from a virtual zero to a full-blown hero!
A couple of months to the February 25 presidential poll, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, with the President’s approval, launched a hare-brained scheme called the naira redesign policy. Nigerians are no fools; so friends and foes immediately saw through it as being designed to stop Tinubu from ‘buying votes’ with his ‘Jagabullions’ and winning the election.
The objective of stopping just one individual from winning the presidential election was far more important to the highly-insensitive Aso Villa cabal than the hundreds of Nigerians who prematurely lost their lives and thousands of small businesses that were ruined due to the chronic currency scarcity that attended the implementation of the ill-fated policy.
Before the dust raised by circumstances surrounding the election could even settle, the desirability of a military putsch or interim national government had started making the rounds like wild fire in the Harmattan season. The Defence Headquarters had to uncharacteristically step up to the plate to completely denounce the rumours linking the military to the satanic plots.
Now this: parties that have submitted their petitions to the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal are already orchestrating an awe and shock campaign to intimidate and blackmail the Judiciary into willy-nilly accepting not to swear in the President-elect after the expiry of 180 days provided in the Electoral Act for the adjudication of such cases. Truth be told, any time I hear cries of a “stolen mandate,” I am attempted to ask whose mandate was ‘stolen’ between Atiku and Obi because one or both of them must be afflicted with the delusions of grandeur.
Be that as it may, Tinubu doesn’t need any advice in this regards because he’s a proven survivalist who’s always a step ahead of his traducers who strive to do him in at every juncture. Whenever I think of Bola Tinubu, I easily recall an Igbo proverb that says: “Ochu okuko nwe ada,” meaning that whoever chooses to chase a chicken always inevitably suffers a fall.
I haven’t a scintilla of doubt that a politician like Bola Tinubu who has successfully swam the metaphoric seven seas and climbed seven mountains to thwart the dodgy plots and dangerous routines of master-puppeteers is very well placed to make Nigeria great again.
