The National leader of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has very strong enemies and a few of them would not wait for him to die before burying him. As soon as there were indications last week that President Muhammadu Buhari had withdrawn support for APC National Chairman, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the floodgate of attacks opened.
Apart from its obvious collateral damage, Oshiomhole’s ouster was scrutinised and interpreted for the worst it could mean politically. It has since been widely celebrated as the ultimate proof that the relationship between Buhari and Tinubu has broken down irretrievably.
At last, they said, Tinubu has been thrown under the bus. The man who sold the South-west to the Northern slave-masters has met his Waterloo. The betrayer of the Yoruba cause has met his foretold end.
Every empire ultimately declines and now the sun has set on the Tinubu political empire, never again to rise. The man so long blinded by ambition and selfish interest, has met his comeuppance. Save your tears: It is finally over or if not, it’s definitely the beginning of the end!
Is it really? I suspect that those who are anxious to see Tinubu’s political decline – for real and imaginary reasons, and more imaginary than real reasons, to be honest – may be disappointed to hear that the end is not yet near. It’s not even close, and I’ll tell you why, if you’ll suspend your rage for a moment.
We’ve been here before. In the days of the Alliance for Democracy, when that party controlled all the six states in the South West, former President Olusegun Obasanjo launched a no-holds-barred attack that led to the hijack of five of the six states for the People’s Democratic Party, with only Lagos left standing for AD.
But it really wasn’t about mainstreaming, was it? Obasanjo was being mocked as a stooge of the North, who failed to win even his ward in the election that brought him to power in 1999. So, it was not about mainstreaming. It was the wounded lion fighting back in sheep’s clothing.
Sadly, five South-west governors bought the mainstreaming lie and were consumed. Obasanjo left Tinubu for dead. The man lived not only to tell the story but to lay a foundation which virtually turned Lagos into the last surviving stand of progressive politics, from where four of the hijacked states were reclaimed one by one.
It’s easy to forget now or to underestimate the risk Tinubu took against the vicious tide of the ruling PDP that wanted to take Lagos at all costs. But had Obasanjo and the PDP succeeded, we would be living in a different Lagos today and the map of South-west politics would be significantly different.
The floods came again in 2011. By this time, the AD was dead and the core replaced by the Action Congress of Nigeria. During the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, Tinubu faced a three-count charge at the Code of Conduct Tribunal for allegedly operating foreign accounts between 1999 and 2007 when he was governor of Lagos.
To teach Tinubu a lesson, Jonathan’s government threw the kitchen sink at him, hoping that the shards of broken glasses and table knives would cause enough bloodletting to put him out of action, possibly in prison, while they move in to dismantle and take over his political base. Again, it seemed the end had come. It was no joke. I recall the trial judge saying he was under pressure to follow the government’s script.
In the end, however, the man was set free and what seemed like the end for him, turned out, in fact, to be the beginning of the end for the Jonathan government.
A few months after Tinubu’s acquittal, massive public protests erupted in January 2012 over the mismanagement of trillions of naira in petrol subsidies by the Jonathan government. The protests, later compounded by Boko Haram insurgency, would eventually lead to the fall of that government three years later.
