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In a piece I wrote entitled “A o M’erin J’oba At Tinubu’s Colloquium” (1 April, 2018) I warned that the man who has now become the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was making a strategic mistake in assuming that Buhari loved him. Or that he would probably want to relinquish power to him. Using a famous folklore rendered as a tale told by the moonlight in traditional African Yoruba, but which Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s minister of works and folklorist/writer, Joseph Odunjo, brought into vivid perspective in his Alawiye Yoruba literature series, I explained how Tinubu, resting on an erroneous belief that Buhari would requite the good done him in making him president, would make a fatal mistake.
Using the animal world as a motif, Odunjo told this story which ancient Yoruba belief used to depict gross human deception and how human beings are easily susceptible to and capable of mischief. Represented as a character with power, majesty and acclaim, the mammoth-sized elephant, the beast, was the untouchable king of the jungle and lord of the manor whose humongous size was a huge bother to other animals in the jungle. Several efforts were made to oust him, to no avail. So, a plot was hatched using his majesty as his destruction. Tortoise, a cunning and serpentine animal, was procured to do the hatchet job. Tortoise resolved that, given Elephant’s size and height, violence would not bring him to his hilt but a seemingly innocuous strategy of deception, praise-singing and bootlicking.
Tortoise then went into the cave of the Almighty Elephant. His message was that, all animals had purposed to make him their King in the jungle. Elephant was to come to the palace adorned in the full regalia of a King. Prior to the day, Tortoise had dug a very deep ditch that could swallow Elephant’s elephantine and mammoth size by the palace. He however decorated it with a beautiful wool carpet worthy of a king’s royal feet, complete with an ornamented chair just at the edge of the royal carpet. Encircling the carpet, all the animals in the town clapped and hailed the new King dressed in flowery royal robe as he walked majestically towards the royal carpet. They cheered the Elephant on, shouting “a o m’erin j’oba, eweku ewele”. The Elephant, in turn, fascinated by the splendor and cheer, walked majestically to be crowned and fell into the ditch and unto his death.
My conclusion in that piece about the Tinubu-Buhari silent tango was: “The President is thus prepared to play the Tortoise, sing “a o m’erin j’oba” and fawn Tinubu the elephant so as to humour him. The strategy would be that, by the time it would be too late for Tinubu to make a U-turn, the Hannibal and Chaka the Zulu would lift up his scabbard, draw out his dagger and skewer the flesh of an Elephant who cannot see that he is on a dangerous path.” Is this folklore apt in the description of what is playing out between the duo today?
As they say in legal parlance, the most recent outburst of Tinubu in Abeokuta, Ogun State, last Wednesday has provoked issues for determination. The issues are in the form of rhetoric. You will recall that Tinubu, on a campaign train to the ancient city, had stirred the hornet’s nest when he alleged that the currency re-designation policy of the Muhammadu Buhari government and the current fuel scarcity that has literally turned Nigeria into a Dystopian disaster were orchestrated by a veiled God-knows-who, with the aim of ensuring that he didn’t win next month’s presidential election.
To be sure, the allegation of a conspiracy theory was already in the public domain, long before Tinubu made that allegation. With this final Tinubu affirmation of the ploy woven masterfully in high places against him, the headline of this piece should then have been “The Columnist As A Seer”. In previous installments entitled “Emefiele’s Terrorism Mess” (25 December, 2022) and “Buhari and Emefiele’s Buga Handshake” (20 January) except for the fuel scarcity addition to the conspiracy theory, I submitted that the naira re-designation policy could be targeted at the APC candidate.
Even a fool knows that Buhari does not want Tinubu to succeed him. Second is that there is a mutual disdain between the two, which both have clothed in shawls over the years. Buhari has, over the decades, built an impregnable moral universe round himself; a universe whose precinct was delineated by him, membership of which he defines from his narrow conception. Tinubu does not fit that definition. Tinubu is also too agitative, too, perhaps in the mould of MKO Abiola…
In Abeokuta last week Wednesday, Tinubu mortally bit the bullet again. In his now familiar drawl, delivered in Yoruba, he hit his bare knuckles on the spatula. “If they like, they can change the ink in the naira note, we will shock them, we will win the election; the opposition (the umbrella party) will be defeated… We will take over the government from them; they are traitors that want to wrest the government from us…We will use our PVCs to take over the government from them, if they like, let them say there is no fuel, we will trek there. They are full of mischief, they want to create fuel crisis, they have started creating fuel crisis…Let the price of fuel continue to increase, they are the ones that know where they are hoarding it. They are hoarding naira notes, they are hoarding fuel, we will vote and we will win,” he told a jubilant but rowdy crowd of supporters. He thereafter revved the people up to a revolution.
The issues for determination from this outburst are tripodal. One is the domain that Tinubu always chooses to rouse Nigerian people to militant action and provoke the beast in them, apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Why the choice of Abeokuta? Is it deliberate? Was Tinubu doing this, conscious of the historical signification of Abeokuta or it occurs by mere happenstance?
Second, who exactly were these arrows shot at? Forget the very jejune and I dare say, lacking-creative-acumen press release issued by the Directorate of Media and Publicity of the APC Presidential Campaign Council. In the statement, it pointed the arrows shot by Tinubu at the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) .
“For the records, Asiwaju Tinubu during APC campaign rally at Abeokuta on Wednesday, in his statement, did not mention, blame or accuse President Muhammadu Buhari for the current challenges in the country… (he) was only adverting government’s attention to the sabotage being carried out by some Fifth columnists in the system, possibly working in cahoots with the PDP…Tinubu is aware of the salutary efforts by President Buhari to end the fuel queues, by chairing a 14-man panel…How does an advisory genuinely made by Asiwaju Tinubu to protect and create goodwill for the government of his party become an attack? It can only be so in the jaundiced view of the PDP,” the statement said.
But for the dog-eat-dog mentality and sabre-rattling deployed as language of communication and accepted as part and parcel of the political language and temperature of Nigeria, the APC PCC should be scandalised nationally by this barefaced cookery. It is a very tame effort at assuming that the Nigerian is a fool and has a very low reasoning capacity. The reasons are obvious.
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