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John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), a Canadian-American economist, diplomat and public official once said: “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”
Undeniably, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, is one rare leader of the 21st century that is typically obsessed with the trait Galbraith identified in leaders who attained greatness through heroic defence of their people’s rights. A study of his 31 years of politicking before now, embodies unwavering progression of extraordinary leadership escapades, which were consistently directed one after another towards the socio-economic emancipation of the people. Indeed, there cannot be any other thing as fulfilling to a politician of his caliber than living to witness the glory of his ascension to the highest political position of his country or be the first president of the country that had made politics to be sexy for having a better half, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, who spent twelve years in the Senate beside him in the leadership of the country.
Of course, lots of the good, the bad and the ugly has been said and written before now about 71-year old Bola Tinubu, Asiwaju Tinubu or Jagaban as Nigeria’s 16th President is popularly addressed. Having built a formidable political machinery over the course of three decades within which he’d fought and won political battles, the septuagenarian president can be described as a maverick political leader and more of a revolutionary who is set to bring about a fundamental and relative transformation to his country’s socio-political status.
Elected as a Senator in 1992, representing Lagos West on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), then as a technocrat cum politician with over 13 years of meritorious work experience in big American companies, President Tinubu’s innate leadership prowess and pro-democratic activism can be said to have been passionately actuated by the political storm that the annulment of the results of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, which was won by the late MKO Abiola brought about. As a founding member of NADECO, a pro-democratic group, he joined other compatriots in the fight for the reclamation of the people’s mandate and went on a self exile in the western world during the struggle.
As Lagos State governor (1999-2007) on the platform of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) after the restoration of democracy, Asiwaju Tinubu prudently transformed the fortunes of the state to the admiration of his supporters and envy of his rivals. And towards the 2007 elections, he dumped the AD and moved his supporters to the Action Congress (AC), a mega party launched in September 2006, at the Eagle Square, Abuja, to serve as a credible alternative to the then ruling PDP.
However, from a philosophical point of view, the ‘Change’ the ruling APC effected in 2015 which swept the PDP out of the centre after 16 years of governance, can be said to have marked the beginning of a kind of revolution in the country, a ‘Broom Revolution’ to be precise. And the trajectory, unerring logistics as well as formidability of the revolution can also be said to have been maneouvred by no other leader than President Bola Tinubu.
To political theorists, revolution is usually considered as a fundamental socio-political transformation of a society which can either be brought about through violent or non-violent means. In this regard, the revolution President Tinubu has started is of the latter strand with the broom as its symbol.
A non-violent revolution is thereby a kind conducted primarily by unarmed civilians using tactics of civil resistance, legal means, human rights activism and other forms of non-violent protests to bring about the departure of a government seen as anti-people or undemocratic. Noticeably, some of the non-violent revolutions in mainly post-communist states, have been known to use symbols of colour or a particular item to represent the advancement of this strand of fundamental change. For instance, the People Power Revolution or February Revolution in the Philippines (February 22-26, 1986), the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia (November 17-28, 1989) and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine between 2004 and 2005. In similar vein, the broom was identifiably the symbol of the non-violent revolution which was perceivably launched in Nigeria by President Bola Tinubu 18 years ago.
Memorably, the broom revolution was actually birthed in the early hours of Sunday, July 24, 2005, when President Tinubu, then as the outgoing Lagos governor, led thousands of AD supporters like warriors, with brooms in their hands as weapons, to a symbolic sweep of the traces of the PDP out of the state. The sweeping was started at the Ojota area of the state and was ended up at the end of Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. “Today, we join you to sweep out the PDP from Lagos State. We sweep the evil away. It will never come back. PDP will never capture this state,” the president had vented then while brandishing the broom to echoes of cheers.
The symbolic sweeping was in swift counter to a ‘Tsunami’ rally that the PDP held in the state the previous day on Saturday, July 23, 2005, at the Tafawa Balewa Square (TBS), with former President Olusegun Obasanjo, along with five sitting governors of the party in the Southwest at that time and other party stalwarts in attendance. Then, President Tinubu was the ‘last man standing,’ the only ‘deviant’ AD governor in the six Yoruba-speaking states whom the ‘Operation Capture Southwest’ of the PDP failed to seize in the 2003 general elections. Hence, the umbrella party rephrased its electioneering theme towards the 2007 polls to ‘Tsunami’ and chose Lagos for its launching. But the tsunami failed to dislodge Asiwaju Tinubu’s hold on the state in the election, as his Chief of Staff, Babatunde Fashola (SAN), the immediate past Minister of Works and Housing was elected as his successor on the AC platform.
In 2008 as an opposition leader, Asiwaju Tinubu gradually saw to the AC reclamation of Edo State, as well as Ekiti and Osun States respectively in 2010 through legal means. In the 2011 general elections, Ogun and Oyo States were confidently added to the sweeping after the AC was transformed to the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).
Point blank, Asiwaju Tinubu was a major thorn in the flesh of the President Obasanjo-led PDP government. He was instrumental to the APC’s ascension to the seat of governance in 2015 and reelection in 2019, and obviously ran the toughest presidential campaign across the country than other contestants despite the insinuations that he is ill and unfit. So, it isn’t surprising that Nigerians gave him massive support to knock other contestants into a cocked hat in the presidential election with the highest number of votes, 8,794,726.
Although the two major contestants that trailed behind him, Atiku of the PDP polled 6,984,520 votes and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) scored 6,101,533 votes, have since approached the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) to challenge the outcome of the results released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). They alleged malpractices, with both insisting that they are the rightful winner of the election; sooner or later the court will come out with its final verdict on whether any of the two petitions before it is well Atikulated or logically Obidient to justifiably upturn the BATified victory.
Be that as it may, nobody needs to dispute the fact that Nigeria is sick and she’s been in that sorry state for decades, much more than half of the 63 years of her independence. It is quite disheartening that since 1999 that the naturally endowed, multi-ethnic and culturally diverse nation returned to a democratic government, none of her successive administrations have been able to find lasting solutions to the lack of “Water! Light! Food! Housing!” Pitiably, as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (1938-1997) sounded in Original Sufferhead, an album he released in 1981 in criticism of the common lots deficiency of basic social amenities. Since then, it has been gradual increment in the prices of these essential commodities along with other Sufferheads of insensitivity to security challenges tenure after tenure.
For instance, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in a November 2022 presentation of the country’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) survey, “over half of the population of Nigeria are multi-dimensionally poor and cook with dung, wood, charcoal, rather than cleaner energy.” The report further stated that: “High deprivation are also apparent naturally in sanitation, time to healthcare, food insecurity, and housing.”
But in order not to throw the baby away with the bath water, the immediate past President Buhari-led APC administration can beat its chest that it has successfully revamped quite a number of critical infrastructures which never saw the light of the day under previous administrations, as well as started and completed new ones in spite of the peculiar challenges it faced in the last 8 years, through the economic recession of 2016 caused by the sudden nosedive in the price of crude oil (the nation’s major source of revenue) in the global market, inherited Boko Haram insurgency in North East, adverse effects of COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 #EndSARS protests, including the spread of kidnapping and armed banditry from the North to some parts of the South, and lately the Russian-Ukraine war. Some of these projects were officially commissioned barely six days to the end of the Buhari administration.
Notwithstanding, an hungry, jobless, disappointed and terrorized man, whose hopes have been raised and dashed times without number will definitely be a furious, frustrated, depressed and hopeless man. He will not entertain any rhetoric or excuse from any government or its agencies about the challenges confronting it, except to start experiencing access to affordable ‘water, light, food, house’ along with lasting solutions to other Sufferhead of rising unemployment rate, lecturers’ strikes and students’ unrests, depreciated currency, insecurity of life and property, brutality and abuse by security agencies.
Meanwhile, as there’s always light at the end of every tunnel, the hope of a better Nigeria can be argued to have been brilliantly renewed and a new dawn of a prosperous Nigeria enkindled right after May 30 that President Tinubu officially assumed office as the 16th President of the country.
In other words, President Tinubu can proudly tell the world that he’d learned how to climb the political ropes perfectly, thoroughly and diligently as a ‘city boy’ under the tutelage of his darling mother, the late Alhaja Abibat Mogaji (1916-2013), the Iyaloja-General, Association of Market Women and Men during her lifetime. Alhaja Mogaji was an astute woman mobilizer for the AG, UPN and the SDP during the era that the ‘city boy’ was elected to the Senate. So, the ‘Jagaban of Borgu’ must have all the while, acquainted himself with the intrigues and the dynamics of his country’s political terrain while growing up and must have studied the actions of great political thinkers before him, in setting forth the parameters of his own political direction towards the actualization of his political aspirations; like Nicolló Machiavelli (1469-1527) observed in his popular book, The Prince that, “the prince ought to read history and study the actions of eminent men, see how they acted in warfare, examine the cause of their victories and defeats in order to imitate the former and avoid the latter.”
And to a very large extent, President Bola Tinubu has been walking the talk that he is very much aware of the herculean task ahead of his administration and knows that the political landscape is and will be full of booby traps as well as thorns and thistles. He is as well confident that he has the experience and the wherewithal to walk the tightrope in surmounting every form of obstacle. His bold utterances and swift disposition towards national issues, along with the calibre of people he’d appointed as aides and service chiefs in less than a month since he assumed office have been sagacious, aptly attesting to his promise to hit the ground running as soon as his administration comes on board.
It wouldn’t, however, be illogical to point out that his Broom Revolution had only just begun. That in the next four years, there’s likelihood that his course of action would embark on a re-examination of the country’s existing social order and thereby experiment on it continually, through restructuring and improvement of areas that he sees to be essential in the drive of his socio-political transformative agenda. By doing so, he definitely would and must step on powerful toes, grapple with serious confrontations and resistances from the fifth columnists who have long been enjoying feeding frenzies on the country’s economy. And going by his supreme acumen, industriousness, vast political experience, versatility and awesome magnanimity, he is poised to overcome the obstacles in a row and achieve big time in his political leadership of the country. “Because one who creates themselves,” says Robin S. Baker “is remarkably unstoppable.”
Furthermore, It wouldn’t be illogical to predict as an ordinary political observer, that it will no longer be business as usual; that the foundation of the sweeping out of every undesirable conditions that Nigerians have been facing will be duly laid by him. At the same time, it wouldn’t also be inappropriate to assert that soon and very soon, he will enter into the league of famous world leaders like Pericles of Athens, Gandhi of India, Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Winston Churchill of UK, Franklin Delano Roosevelt of US, and others that are forever revered in history for being great orators, risk-takers, visionaries and masterminds of the progressive transformation of their countries.
Nigerians need nothing else at this period of the wake of his administration than patience, as well as wishes and prayers for his hale and heartiness, more and more wisdom and vigour in the steering the rudder of the country’s political ship on a voyage towards the shores of liberation.
“Philosophically, it is my belief and faith in education, freedom fighting. On my cap is a broken shackle. It is freedom. The shackle is broken and you cannot put us in bondage anymore. You have broken the shackle of poverty, ignorance, disease. You develop the capacity to improve the quality of lives of the people. It has been my philosophy and it will remain my philosophy,” the city boy had asserted many years back while explaining the meaning of his cap logo which he is used to wearing.
Abimbola Olaoluwa Makinde. [email protected] 09081681680
