The sterner stuff of Tinubu’s presidential ambition

There is a tide in the affairs of men, 
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat.
And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.
 
– William Shakespeare

Shakespearean strategic calculation, the tide in Nigerian politics has moved, almost with a natural gale force to the South, where the next president of the country should come from. There are not many political juggernauts flowing with it. But, of all the visible ones, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu (Jagaban) – ex-senator and ex-governor of Lagos State – is about the only one whose profile is most assuring for the post of the next president of the country in 2023.

Tinubu, it’s true, has been nursing the justified ambition to be Nigeria’s president, since the birth of the Fourth Republic, in 1999. His ambition to be elected as the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, in the 2023 polls, is one that is made of sterner stuff.

If any presidential election is held today, Tinubu, by the account of some seasoned psephologists, would emerge victorious with about 22.5 votes – well ahead of about seventeen contestants.

All these – and many more than all these – tend to justify the reasoning that it was a grave political error, on the part of Nigerian voters, not to have voted for genuine pro-democrats, like Tinubu, at all the three tiers of government at the inception of the Fourth Republic.

Perhaps, still, there was the factor of the military, which used state resources to sponsor such shameless opportunists – chiefly to ward off genuine pro-democracy warriors from featuring prominently as the captains of the new democratic era.

Those who are campaigning – unflinchingly – for a Tinubu presidency, like the swarming members of South West Agenda for Asiwaju (SWAGA) say they are, indeed, impressed by his strategic and crucial role in toppling the wasteful and corrupt People’s Democratic Party (PDP), in 2015.

As a seasoned political strategist, who was desirous of a truly democratic change, in the Nigerian political space, Tinubu took the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) into an alliance with the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) and Citizen’s Progressive Congress (CPC). When sweet victory came for the new alliance – All Progressives Congress (APC) – Tinubu, was, yes, naturally, jubilant; jubilant that the incumbent and corrupt PDP had been booted out after its misplaced and shallow boastfulness to govern Nigeria for sixty years.

He has, since that historic victory, earned the respect of not only the APC but also a majority of Nigerians in other political parties. It explains why he was made the National Leader of the APC. Tinubu deserves, as a case of merit, to be the next President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The past PDP presidents and vice-presidents of Nigeria were imposed on the country not because they took an active part – as did Tinubu – in the energy-sapping and patriotic struggle for the emergence of the Fourth Republic.

Tinubu – for his glistening pro-democracy profile – ought to have been the first democratically elected President of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. Whatever the military did to the contrary – and this is true – was decidedly to spite him for daring and firing from the trenches in favour of democracy.

Write the history of the hard-fought political battles and well-deserved electoral victory, Tinubu’s name would be generously mentioned. If it’s how, for the first time, in Nigeria’s chequered political odyssey, the incumbent was booted out of office, by a rock-solid opposition, dispassionate and conservative historians would present numerous chapters of glowing tributes to Tinubu: the famous political strategist, who has built a strong network in the north of the country; a man with a polished record of winning voters’ hearts. Come 2023, Tinubu is the candidate, whom every other aspirant would wish they could race past.     

Today, the political tide in the country, as Tinubu has, rightly, read, favours his justified presidential ambition. He has decided – as an Olympic gold medalist, of the Shakespearean mould – to take advantage of it.