By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
I admit that it’s always ill-advised to use the word “never”
when you prognosticate the outcome of a future event. The vagaries of life can
throw a wrench to the works of the most auspicious auguries. I know that. Nevertheless,
I am prepared to go out on a limb and proclaim that in spite of his feverishly
desperate, frenzied, backstabbing machinations, Bola Ahmed Tinubu can never be
Nigeria’s president. Here’s why.
Tinubu isn’t electable in any region of Nigeria outside the
Southwest, his natal region. Even in the Southwest, his political capital has
suffered incalculable diminution over the years, particularly because of the
growing perception in the region that he is now a mindless minion of a morally maggoty,
Machiavellian, and no-good northern cabal.
His callous, injudicious, not to mention misguided and
evidence-free, exculpation of the alleged murderers of the daughter of
Afenifere leader Reuben Fasoranti rankled many people in the region and helped
seal the notion that he is now no more than a fawning, unthinking automaton for
hostile political forces outside his region.
It is entirely possible that Fasoranti’s daughter wasn’t
murdered by Fulani herders, but saying so without firm, foolproof evidence—and
when raw passions were still inflamed—betrayed his lack of scruples and
independence of thought. That is why an increasing number of people in the
Southwest now see Tinubu as an unreliable, out-of-touch, self-absorbed,
power-hungry, and treacherous narcissist.
Among the electorate in the Southeast and the South-south,
he is seen as one of the principal architects in the emergence of the
unrelieved disaster that is Buhari whose regime has taken the humiliation and alienation
of the two regions as an article of statecraft. Tinubu also infamously
sanctioned the systematic, state-sponsored, and thugs-executed
disenfranchisement of Igbo voters in Lagos in 2019. His wife, Remi Tinubu, was,
in fact, caught on camera lamenting that the Igbo are untrustworthy (Her exact
words were, “Igbo, we no dey trust una again!”) Most Igbos and Southern ethnic
minorities would rather be dead than vote for Tinubu.
Christian ethnic minorities in the North, for whom religious
identity is an important instrument of political mobilization, deeply distrust,
even resent, Tinubu and his politics. Although Northern Nigerian Christians
tend to be largely indifferent to Southern (that is, Yoruba and Edo) Muslims,
they nonetheless nurse deep-seated animus toward Tinubu because of the roles he
is perceived to have played in propping up the fiendish monster of depravity
that the Buhari regime has become.
You would think the Muslim North, particularly the
Hausaphone Muslim North, would requite Tinubu’s support for Buhari in 2015 and
2019 by supporting his presidential aspiration in 2023. That is precisely what
Tinubu himself, in his blissful naivety, expects. Well, as I pointed out many
times before the 2019 election, this is where Tinubu will get the biggest shock
of his life.
If Tinubu were lucky to clinch the nomination of the APC (as
unlikely as this is), he would need to nominate a Christian, preferably a
Northern Christian, politician to “balance” his ticket since he is a Muslim—or self-identifies
as a Muslim—from the South. And that’s where the problem would start for him. In
the North, there is an enduring distrust of the authenticity of the Islam of
Yoruba Muslims.
There is even a Hausa phrase that encapsulates this
distrust: adinin Yarbawa. It
literally translates as the religion, i.e., Islam of the Yoruba. But it means
more than that. It is often uttered to suggest that the Islam of Yoruba people
is fickle, inauthentic, meretricious, syncretic, and untrustworthy. So, as far
as most Northern Muslims are concerned, a Yoruba Muslim/Northern Christian
ticket is as good as a Christian/Christian ticket.
Well, some Yoruba Muslims have been able to overcome this
visceral Northern Muslim perceptual bias against their Islam. A good example is
the late MKO Abiola. And it was because he did more for the cause of Islam than
any Nigerian of his time. You can’t say that of Tinubu who, apart from the
rampant northern Muslim perception that he isn’t a practicing Muslim, always
looks drugged and drunk in TV interviews. Even Abiola had to choose a Northern
Muslim running mate to earn the trust of the Northern Muslim political elite.
Nonetheless, if Tinubu chooses a running mate from the
Muslim North to compensate for his lack of sufficient Muslim bona fides, he
would alienate Igbo, Southern ethnic minority, and Northern Christian voters,
the very people who distrust and resent him in the first place. Contemporary
Nigeria is way more sensitive to the politics of religious representation than
1990s Nigeria was when Abiola ran for president.
The rise of politically tinged Pentecostalism in the South has
made even the religiously liberal Southwest a hotbed for religious
particularism, even though ethnic solidarity is still a more potent instrument
for mobilization in the region than religion.
But I wager that Northern Muslim voters would rather vote
for a party that fields a Northern Muslim candidate—even if that party is the
PDP—than vote for Tinubu even if he chooses a Northern Muslim running mate. So,
heads or tails, Tinubu will lose.
Nevertheless, the most important reason Tinubu can never be
present is that the people who currently wield political power, to whom he is a
witlessly obsequious bootlicker, won’t hand over power to him—or to anybody—in 2023.
Members of the cold, calculating, and conniving Buhari cabal
have chosen Babagana Kingibe as Buhari's successor. As I pointed out in
previous columns and social media updates, in the privacy of their conclaves, members
of the cabal snigger at Tinubu for naively imagining that Buhari will hand over
power to him. In the service of this self-delusion, he is bending over
backwards, including throwing his loyal lieutenants under the bus, for the
cabal in the presidency. But all this will come to naught.
Before the 2019 election, a friend of mine who is close to
Abba Kyari confided in me that after the election they would “deal with Tinubu
and his people.” He bragged that by the time they are done with him and his
underlings, he would be so damaged that he won’t even be an option for the 2023
presidency. It’s already starting.
Of course, the cabal isn't banking on any legitimate
election to get Kingibe into power; INEC, which is now in their begrimed pockets,
will just pluck imaginary figures from the air, ignore actual votes, and
declare him "winner"—like it did Buhari this year. And the Presidential
Election and Petitions Tribunal and the Supreme Court will uphold the travesty.
However, I predict that should Buhari survive until 2023, he
won't hand over power to anyone, including Kingibe. Apart from his hopeless
love of power for the hell of it, Buhari needs power to stay alive—literally.
The obscene amount of money Nigeria habitually fritters away in medical bills
to keep him alive can only be sustained if he is in power. He won't get that sort
of money outside power.
Only sustained, nationwide, pan-Nigerian civic insurrection
can save Nigeria from the current fatal grip on it by Buhari and his cabal of ruthless
power mongers. Tinubu has contributed to killing the culture of civil disobedience
because of his inordinate, unrealizable political ambition. When the cabal
finally comes for his neck, there will be no pan-Nigerian coalition to save
him.
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