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Tinubu, Osinbajo, Buhari: A Troika of Treacherous Villains

By Farooq Kperogi Twitter: @farooqkperogi Muhammadu Buhari, Yemi Osinbajo, and Bola Tinubu represent a triumvirate. They reinforce, reflect,...

By Farooq Kperogi

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Muhammadu Buhari, Yemi Osinbajo, and Bola Tinubu represent a triumvirate. They reinforce, reflect, and inflect each other. 

While Osinbajo is clearly a talented, well-spoken man, he is entirely a Tinubu political creation.

 It was Tinubu who appointed him as a commissioner in Lagos State. It was also Tinubu who facilitated his emergence as Vice President. Politically speaking, without Tinubu, there would be no Osinbajo. 



Although Osinbajo is undeniably brilliant (and don’t forget that IBB is brilliant, too!), there are way more brilliant lawyers in Lagos than Osinbajo that Tinubu could have elevated to political visibility, but he chose Osinbajo. 

In other words, Osinbajo is an extension of Tinubu. They’re ideologically indistinguishable. They feed off each other’s values. To prefer one to the other is to prefer six to half a dozen, which is another way of making a distinction without a difference.

Both Tinubu and Osinbajo have been important props to Buhari’s ongoing disastrous regime of ungovernance. Without them, Buhari won’t be president. 

They also helped plant, grow, and fertilize Buhari’s autocracy and monstrous incompetence every damn step of the way.

In other words, Buhari, Osinbajo, and Tinubu are tarred with the same brush. People who are picking favorites among these monsters of deceit and fraud are not only clueless, they are also enablers of Nigeria’s progressive descent to the nadir of hopelessness.

Our options are not limited to Tinubu, Osinbajo, or even Atiku Abubakar and all these other old stagers who have been endlessly circulating themselves in the political arena and who’re responsible for the perilous state of the country. 

To ask who among these monsters we must choose is to impose unnatural limits on the choices Nigerians have. 

Tinubu, Osinbajo, Atiku, and all these other old warhorses of corruption and ineptitude in APC and PDP wanting to be president are some of the worst people to ever get close to power in a nation that is blessed with scores of bright, far-sighted people, but many people are limiting our choices to the worst of us. 

When people say Nigerians are their own worst enemies and are complicit in their own oppression, this is what they mean. Nigerians love to create false dilemmas for themselves and claim that they’re compelled to choose the lesser of two evils.

When you’re being roasted in a frying pan, you don’t jump into the fire to seek reprieve. Fire isn’t the only alternative to the frying pan.

The choice mustn’t be between Tinubu and Osinbajo (who’re actually one and the same thing) or between APC and PDP.

If we really want national salvation, we must be prepared to do the hard work of looking beyond the villains who have got us to where we are today.

4 comments

  1. Thank you Prof for the piece. The last paragraph particularly captures my musing. As an advocate of 'looking beyond PDP and APC' I must confess that Nigeria has got a long road to walk to be free from ineptitude. But the good thing is that I will not give up on the poor country.

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    1. Aptly & succinctly put! But the saying:"when the gods want to destroy a pple,they make them make the wrong choices" - is true. We are a pple tranquilized or inured or even spelled irredeemably by ethnic nationalistic interests & its foisted belly-filling appendages-a handy tool & spell for the political chauvinists & scoundrels. I have contually adduce that our national seeding or foundation & phylogeny of history, fraught with landmark errors, make it inextricably intractable for this precipitous decadent fall. We had played with the "baby python", enthralled in its ephemeral pleasures! Now the python has come of age to take up its natural proclivities, & we are certainly fettered by our age-long imbibition to behead it. The only plausible succour that keeps us going & sustains our never-give-up resilience, is our opium of divinity fondly expressed in " God will help us."

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  2. Love your analysis of the political quagmire we are in now as a nation. Big question is the "HOW TO". How do we get the fresh eyes and legs in. There seems to be only scattered individuals seeking to fulfil their political ambition by starting at the very top, with no real grassroots engagement or backing. The existing arrangement for choosing Pres/VP is a perfect recipe for failure. When will we see a new and strong political base outside of this current collection of old men?

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  3. We've have reached a point where political labeling and grouping can't solve our leadership vacum but a search for a competent and proven individual with altrustic ambition to reset Nigeria regardless of the platform

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