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APC’s boolaba blues as tragic nemesis

By Alade Rotimi-John
23 February 2023   |   3:15 am
The negative emotional consequences of the Tinubu obloquies or isokuso so mischievously displayed in his campaign outings may appear to be bearing fruits now. From the Emi l’o kan diatribe at Abeokuta all through the seminal exposé of Buhari’s F9 parallel unscholarly performance at school and in office, up to and including the alleged naira crunch and petrol scarcity “agenda” of the presidency cabal targeted at him, Tinubu has left no one in doubt that he does not set much store for reputational capital respecting what one may say or not say with his mouth.

President Mohammadu Buhari canvassed support for Bola Tinubu in Nasarawa.

The negative emotional consequences of the Tinubu obloquies or isokuso so mischievously displayed in his campaign outings may appear to be bearing fruits now. From the Emi l’o kan diatribe at Abeokuta all through the seminal exposé of Buhari’s F9 parallel unscholarly performance at school and in office, up to and including the alleged naira crunch and petrol scarcity “agenda” of the presidency cabal targeted at him, Tinubu has left no one in doubt that he does not set much store for reputational capital respecting what one may say or not say with his mouth.

For him, his contempt for any perceived obstacle to his “life-long ambition” of becoming Nigeria’s president need not be disguised in any form. Tinubu has, by his unguarded utterances, presented President Buhari as a bearer of hollow authority who does the bidding of a proverbial cabal within his administration.

In Buhari’s presidency, according to Tinubu, a faceless cabal calls the shots. Tinubu’s confrontational carriage has tended to define what is popularly alleged to be his desperation. His needlessly arrogant stance is deemed preposterous because it runs against the grain of civility and comradeship.

For Tinubu to publicly excoriate the head of a government formed by his party and in which he holds the titular, if sinecure, position of National Leader in an election season speaks of a jinxed or bewitched ordination.

Embittered by a sense of a gang up or of a programmed conspiracy against his presidential bid, Tinubu has accused certain forces in the presidency of engineering a hoax in the form of a petrol supply shortages panoply and of a devious national currency crunch. He may have conceived in his mind that it would be a grave injustice to himself to deprive himself the opportunity to confront his traducers. But he chose an utterly wrong medium. The timing too was inauspicious.

For portraying Buhari as not possessing enough intelligence to perform his official duties in a competent manner in order to maintain the dignity of his office or for alleging the cavalier assignment of his constitutional functions to crooked presidency officials or hirelings, Tinubu may have lost or exhausted the president’s goodwill. That feared loss now haunts Tinubu sorely. The role of his handlers too has been un-dignifying. As experienced media men they ought to have established in-house the basis for restraining Tinubu’s basket-mouth vituperations knowing his penchant for bala bloo or incomprehensible drivel.

Their failure to rein in their principal’s excesses is today causing every one of them serious embarrassment. The campaign organisation has today become more reactive rather than proactive in the responsibility to counter the clear-eyed observation of the public regarding Tinubu’s faux pas each time.
The expected concerted hostility of a public that is opposed to a recycling of the ancient regime is also proving insurmountable or impossible to overcome. Tinubu’s identity problem, his controversial age, his alleged brush with the law regarding a putative drug-running circuit operations in the U.S, etc. and the absence of clear or unambiguous answers to these controversies have badly hurt him among the electorate.

An urbane, less character-challenged and imaginative candidate would have restrained ammunition from the enemies of a lack-lustre administration angling to replicate itself or re-enact its woeful drama of the absurd which a Tinubu presidency presages.

More reprehensible of the style or tactics of the APC presidential candidate is his latter-day resort to a trumping of the ethnic card. Tinubu, while campaigning in Ekiti, appealed to the base instinct of his fellow Yoruba people as he curiously told the bemused crowd that the battle for his presidency was theirs. They should therefore not allow the opportunity to slip through their hands or pass them by. For a man who failed or refused to identify with the plight of the people in times of their need for forthright leadership, it is patronising or offensively condescending for Tinubu to seek the overwhelming support of the people in his own time of need.

Tinubu at the said Ekiti occasion prudishly announced that hunger was far from him and that he was not in the race for the office of president because he is looking for what to eat. He has thereby reduced the otherwise noble enterprise of running for the highest office in the land to a bread and butter pursuit. He is stupendously rich and comfortable. He does not need the people’s money, he blabbed.

He just wants them to invest him with power over affairs and events concerning their welfare. Tinubu touts his controversial performance as governor of Lagos State and the overhyped “follow-ups” of his successors in office as good enough credentials for seeking to reproduce “the Lagos miracle” all over Nigeria. He appealed to the people, perhaps in vain, to help him reduce prejudice from the entire exercise of running for the presidency by voting for him.

Reports of massive swing of people to other candidates outside of his native Yoruba land have been pouring in as if to suggest that the ethnic card being attempted by him is self-abnegating and will not help his case after all. His public denunciation of an alleged stigmatisation of the Fulani herdsmen militia has not gone down well with his people particularly in the light of forensic evidence to the contrary. The militia men brigandage had aroused the epochal counter-offensive of Sunday Igboho.

Tinubu neither noted nor acknowledged as one of the potential sources of communal angst, the security breach or compromise of the people’s right to peace and to the unhindered enjoyment of their environment. Despite a deluge of appeals by the victims of the militia men’s onslaught, mum was the response from Tinubu.

Some have argued, not without merit, that he assumed the position to keep quiet so as not to hurt his allies from outside Yoruba land who may withdraw their support if his patriotism becomes too obvious or is perceived as combative.

Before now APC governors have been fawning around the presidency. Today many of them have become lords unto themselves as they openly disrespect the president who by convention is the leader of their party. They slam suits on the federal government with such facility that you begin to think they are an adverse party to the government. This is happening as a result of the president’s born-again posture which, out of tune with the prevailing mongrel disposition of the party, is at variance with his sworn resolve that Nigeria may not continue business as if she can go on doing the same things and expect to achieve different results under his watch.

The president appears to be saying he will not be succeeded by persons whose antecedents do not assure a departure from the “mongrel coalition” mentality that has held the country down these eight years. Buhari seems to be apologising to the people for the ruinous excursion of the last eight years. He thinks the people deserve to be apologised to for the misrule of his government and the mischievous adulation of the cheer leaders and their supporter

He further seems to want to apologise for the egregious waste of the time and opportunities of the people. It is strange that Tinubu and others like him do not think the people deserve to be begged. Rather they want to be hugged or otherwise embraced with votes to deodorise the putrid effluent of the government they formed. Returning the present sets of persons to power under whatever guise will tend to give the impression that yesterday will continue to be better than the future in Nigeria.

Kaduna and Kano state governors, Nasir El-Rufai and Abdullahi Ganduje respectively, will appear to have been bitten by the bug of boolaba as they too now mouth inanities or incomprehensible verbiage even as they are treading the dangerous path of treasonable felony. They are challenging the sovereign authority of the state. They are issuing conflicting orders to the president’s directives in matters in which they have no competence or authority.

They have threatened to take over the statutory functions of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) even as they have assumed the authority to determine what is legal tender in Nigeria. Kaduna State residents may continue to spend or exchange the old N500 and N1000 note in spite of the declaration by the president that they have ceased to be legal tender from the 10th of February 2023. On his own part, Ganduje has threatened to pull down the building of any bank that refuses to exchange the old note for the new version. The spirit of boolaba has taken over good reasoning in the APC as evidenced by the disjointed vituperations of El-Rufai and Ganduje.

They are attempting to pull down Aso Rock and its chief occupier. Buhari is no longer the sought-after hero he had been marketed to be. As if El-Rufai and Ganduje had been away in Outer Mongolia these eight years and therefore not familiar with the Buhari government methods for which it has become notorious, they are openly challenging the government and its helmsman.

Cronyism, nepotism, selective justice, selfishness, wickedness etc. have been the known benchmarks of the Buhari government. These governors are just curiously knowing the character of their government.
Diminutive, pocket-size governor El-Rufai who roars like an over-sized lion has emboldened his people not to “feel stampeded to deposit your old notes in the banks” but “hold on to them: continue to use them as legal tender… No deadline can render them worthless ever” and all the old and new notes “shall remain in use as legal tender in Kaduna State”. It remains to be seen what the Federal Government will do regarding this seething insurrection.

Evidently, boolaba, balablu, balooba or silly talk, by whatever name called, have become the incomprehensible verbiage of governance in Nigeria. Rescue Nigeria, somebody!
Rotimi-John, a lawyer and commentator on public affairs, wrote vide lawgravitas@gmail.com

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