Bola Tinubu: The Jagaban’s disappearing acts: Every day, Tinubu’s vuvuzelas continue to impudently tell anyone who dares to ask questions, no matter how pertinent, to take a swim in a crocodile-infested lagoon, which was what Daniel Bwala did this week when he claimed that the president could govern Nigeria from anywhere because Aso Rock, the seat of Nigerian government, was neither a block industry nor Tinubu a bricklayer… But aren’t leaders, particularly in fractured societies such as ours with so many problems, supposed to be bricklayers, literally, laying the building blocks of a renascent society brick after brick?
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria’s president since May 29, 2023 is a man of many parts, talented in multiple areas of life. As someone who is able to do many different things almost effortlessly, Nigerians perceive him as a superman – the “ideal superior man of the future,” as described by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values.”
Notwithstanding, it has become glaring in the 11 months of his presidency that what is still unknown about him far outstrips what people thought they knew. For instance, Nigerians didn’t reckon with his ability to do a disappearing act on them. Again, how could anyone have imagined that Tinubu had the ability to cast a spell on an otherwise vibrant people and turn them into zombies so much so that even in the face of egregious conducts, the people would rather relapse into portentous silence?
On Wednesday, May 8, the president returned to the country after disappearing, literally, into thin air for more than one week. Tinubu left Abuja on April 23 for the Netherlands on what the presidency described as an official visit.
His Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, said the visit was on the invitation of the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. While there, Tinubu engaged in high-level discussions with the Prime Minister and the Dutch royalty, including His Royal Majesty, King Willem-Alexander and his wife, Queen Maxima. Thereafter, he proceeded to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to attend a special World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting scheduled for April 28 and 29.
But after what looked like a successful trip to the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, rather than return home as scheduled, the president vanished into thin air. All attempts by Nigerians to know his whereabouts were rebuffed. Otherwise loquacious and impertinent mouthpieces of the government uncharacteristically had sealed lips.
Then on Tuesday, May 7, eight days after his disappearance, Tinubu’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, finally confirmed that he was hibernating somewhere in Europe, but will return to Nigeria on Wednesday, May 8. “President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, along with his aides, will return to Nigeria tomorrow from Europe,” Onanuga tweeted.
And in the early hours of Wednesday, Tinubu moseyed back to the country which he left two weeks ago as if nothing happened. And it will be business as usual until the next time he will do another disappearing act, which no one needs to be a Nostradamus, the man who saw tomorrow, to predict that it will happen sooner than later.
The truth is that President Tinubu took ill at some point during the Riyadh WEF meeting and as has become customary, cancelled every other state duty to attend to his health. Fair enough. But why make a fetish of the silence? If he had been in Nigeria, Aso Rock spin doctors would have told us that he went for a private visit. But because he was already abroad, it was convenient for them to be tongue-tied and ignore Nigerians.
I have no doubt in my mind that Tinubu will get away with these disdainful acts. He believes that he has conquered Nigeria and in a sense he has. If not, how can someone who claims to be occupying the highest office in the land by virtue of the people’s mandate act with so much impunity? Daily, the president and his cohorts game the system and dare us to do our worst.
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Maybe, the state capture is now complete. But ultimately, as the conquerors who masquerade as leaders continue to humiliate Nigerians with their contemptuous silence in situations where explanations are needed, the joke is on them because as Nietzsche further noted in the Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.”
Every day, Tinubu’s vuvuzelas continue to impudently tell anyone who dares to ask questions, no matter how pertinent, to take a swim in a crocodile-infested lagoon, which was what Daniel Bwala did this week when he claimed that the president could govern Nigeria from anywhere because Aso Rock, the seat of Nigerian government, was neither a block industry nor Tinubu a bricklayer.
Whatever that means. But come to think of it, aren’t leaders, particularly in fractured societies such as ours with so many problems, supposed to be bricklayers, literally, laying the building blocks of a renascent society brick after brick?
Bwala, the erstwhile Atiku Abubakar Man Friday, who is excitably doing everything to be invited to the presidential dinner table said rather incredulously: “The President is in charge of the country and can govern from anywhere in the world whether the Vice President is also in Nigeria or not. Aso Vila is not a block industry and the President is not a bricklayer. Read Section 5 of the Constitution.” And he must have been happy with himself after such a “profound” pronouncement. How dumb can some people get because of avarice?
Of course, Bwala did that to further ingratiate himself with Tinubu. And in doing so, it didn’t matter to him that he was throwing shade at his former paymaster, Atiku, whose only crime was cautioning against Vice President Kashim Shettima and Tinubu being away from the country at the same time as Shettima was preparing to travel to the U.S. for the US-Africa Business Summit even in the absence of his principal.
Atiku said a foreign trip by the vice president at such an inauspicious time would create leadership vacuum at the nation’s seat of power and a damning impression that the country was on autopilot. Fortunately, reason prevailed and the vice president tactically aborted the trip on the excuse that the presidential aircraft malfunctioned.
But the intervention of characters like Bwala, one of the unofficial spokesmen of Tinubu, should worry every well-meaning Nigerian. The fact that these hustlers who are prepared to do everything to be admitted to the table have become the lodestars of the Tinubu administration can only spell doom for Nigeria.
Of course, Bwala was talking about the provisions of Chapter 1, Part 2, Section 5 of the 1999 Constitution which deals with the executive powers of the Federation. But as a lawyer, he knows that no section of the Constitution says that the president can govern from the moon if he so wished. He knows that Nigerians deserve to know the whereabouts of the president. It is a right, not a privilege.
Recently, there was an uproar when the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was admitted to hospital without making it public. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers criticized him early this year for failing to disclose a prostate cancer diagnosis and subsequent hospitalizations in December 2023 and January 2024. He was summoned to testify before Congress on February 29 about the situation.
Subsequently, Austin, a retired army four-star general, the 28th U.S. secretary of defence, who, before retiring from the military in 2016, served as the 12th commander of U.S. Central Command, apologised during a televised news briefing for failing to disclose his health condition.
.And guess what? He was hospitalised at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre right there in Maryland.
When he had a relapse in February, the Pentagon released a statement saying he had been taken to Walter Reed for treatment. Not only that, the Pentagon also announced that he had “transferred the functions and duties of the office” to Deputy Defence Secretary Kathleen Hicks. And he is just a minister, not the president. But as a public official, whether appointed or elected, he is accountable to the people and such accountability includes disclosure of his health status and whereabouts.
That is how things are done in sane climes where leaders are accountable to the people at whose pleasure they hold and exercise power. In Nigeria, the reverse is the case. The people worship their rulers.
It is simply inconceivable that even here in Africa, a President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, or Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana, for instance, will go AWOL after attending an international conference, and return after more than a week without any explanation and consequences.
It is only in a banana republic that such idiocy is normalised. But can Tinubu be blamed for his hubris? There are precedents. He took a cue from his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, just as Buhari learnt the ropes from Umaru Yar’Adua, enabled by a largely acquiescing populace. One thing is sure, these are early days. Tinubu’s disappearing acts can only get worse.