Omisore’s bombshell memoir and Babafemi’s prophecy

Last Sunday, Senator Iyiola Omisore and I had a fairly lengthy conversation about Nigeria and her politics. He had read my column of penultimate Sunday on the political crisis in Kaduna between House of Representatives Speaker, Tajudeen Abbas, and Governor Uba Sani and engaged with me on the issues.

Political crisis of any magnitude and shades can’t be extraordinary to a politician with the kind of history behind the Ife-prince, mostly referenced as Otunba by his own. You can even say his political odyssey is practically forged in the vicissitude of political and electoral adversities as well as the resilience in fortitude that has become the hallmark of his national and local politicking. When you think he’s irretrievably gone, he suddenly surfaces.

A sampler. He made a president who ditched him even before swearing-in. He is still there.

A kicker. He was an impeached deputy governor. He didn’t evaporate though almost eviscerated.

As history maker, he famously won a senatorial election with outsized national significance and global attention, from prison.

He was imprisoned in the first place for an alleged crime which those who railroaded him into gaol would turn around, decades later, to say he didn’t commit.

Well, the judiciary was a step ahead, vindicating him before his accusers’ turnaround.

It would seem adversity in politics always has a vacant spot for him, anytime he shows up for electoral participation. The last time, he was viciously kicked to the curb in a nomination exercise he was almost certain to win, by the same people he once helped into various offices.

He is one Nigerian politician who has had a lived experience, to last a lifetime, relating with practically all the ideological spectrums (though many would argue there aren’t distinguishable ideological lines in Nigeria’s political ecosystem), in the electoral space.

He had been Afenifere, the ideologues of South West politics; was of PDP, believed to mirror more of the conservative North and at present, a once-ingrained but now largely-peripheral chieftain of the assumed progressive clan anchored in Bourdillionism, the political belief of President Bola Tinubu.

Of course we discussed Osun. He had tried severally to become her governor. By the time you are reading this, someone not named Omisore would have been announced the state governor for the next four years. He is not on the ballot but he was largely the main issue throughout the campaign.

Like Maradona too, he managed to leave everyone guessing. Is he in or out? Was he playing against the run of play or not? Hopefully, there won’t be a supplementary election requiring him to take sides again.

Even for his harshest critics, there is no denying him as arguably, the biggest political name in the state whether on ballot or not. He knows a lot of political giants of this dispensation, particularly of his ruling party. It would seem being the national secretary of the ruling party for just one year and three months enriched his political network even much more than when he was the chair of Senate Appropriations Committee, considered as one of the most powerful legislative positions anyone could attain outside of the core principal offices.

As the national scribe for the 15 months, the ruling party’s secretariat he headed coordinated the nomination process for thousands of aspirants and the eventual hundreds of candidates for all elective posts for the 2023 general elections, including the emergence of today’s president, who has now done him what the libidinous minstrel, Tuface, would call “strong things”, twice.

He first kicked the Ife strongman out of the party secretariat, then blocked him from contesting the party’s ticket for yesterday’s Osun election. God forbid the party would need his “supplementary” help this time.

In Ecclesiastes 3, Solomon spoke of times and seasons of life. He contrasted issues of life in polar formula. Time to laugh, time to weep.

Otunba, who has maintained a studied silence since the obvious coordinated efforts to silence him in Osun politics, says to me, it is now story time.

If Solomon were to include the emerging moment, it would sound like; time to be silent and time to talk.

The somewhat-unsung engineer is set for his memoir and mentioned my likely participation in what I foresee would be a collegial arrangement. The publishers he mentioned to me, clinging to his neck for it, are big-timers. But the 6th Assembly lawmaker seemed settled on how to proceed, being a multiple-book author himself.

He then whetted my appetite with some stories of political nocturnalism involving him and many A-listers in the political space.

Of course, the president came up. I will leave the substantial part of the gist for the memoir and I’m only mentioning it here because he already said the narrations would be included in the package.

Of course, the Bola Ige controversy is a sure staple. But readers may be in for a shocker trying to predict how the saga would be presented from the writer’s perspective. I assure movie producers some of the told stories would be box office blockbusters, if adapted and screened at theatres.

Was the president aware of the plot to disqualify and jail him ahead of his participation in APC’s presidential primaries in 2022?

If yes, did he know how he was let off the hook and the personalities who intervened for him? Was he aware of someone in his predecessor’s cabinet whose memos the then president hardly vetted and the disposition of the fellow towards him (Tinubu) and his presidential project?

Was the president aware the fellow was almost done with the dismantle-Tinubu project before a desperate plea from someone the president is “punishing” today, saved the day?

Let me pause before I end up writing the memoir here before its actual package by the owner of the story.

But even with the little I heard from Otunba, his planned memoir is going to be on the front row of the most controversial in Nigeria’s contemporary history. I will place it side-by-side with El-Rufai and IBB’s.

And I’m sure he’s gutsy enough for the expected fallout. One thing that hasn’t come to be associated with him is serially lying in the matters of material facts. Beyond politics, I’m yet to read a call-out, tagging him a revisionist. But if he makes good on his promise to spill so much with names and places, he should expect a lot of fightbacks that may want to cast his claims, maybe not as outright falsehood, but more like alternative facts.

Politics and his plenty grey hair aside, Otunba is already an elder. A month from today, he would be 69. By next year, he would be 70.

23 years ago, when he turned 70, the Biafran hero, now-late Odumegwu Ojukwu, joked that one of the perks of old age is the society giving worrying behaviours of the elderly a pass, as a mark of respect for the wisdom that comes with advancing age.

Yes, Otunba is still likely eyeing another shot at the Abere Government House (though he insists that engineering is his primary focus now) and writing a memoir dripping with politics, better-kept stories and named personalities, may be considered not in the best interest of his long-standing and long-running aspiration, but an elder, according to a Yoruba proverb, has a way of keeping what he is combining to eat agidi (cold, wrapped pap), under the layers of the wrapping leaves.

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There is nothing I will be writing here as assumptive political consequences of writing the memoir, even when in a self-imposed political hiatus, that he would not have considered; like the president still the leader of his party and his boys, still controlling the party structure in Osogbo, regardless of yesterday’s results.

But I’m excited for the project. If Otunba is truly documenting the political happenings he mentioned, especially the shenanigans that preceded the making of the Tinubu presidency, the public will no doubt be served a bombshell and our national politics should benefit from it.

I really look forward to it.

Same way I look forward to a copy of “BOLA TINUBU: Road to Government House”, written by Femi Babafemi, who, of course, needs no introduction. He’s arguably the best-performing public relations manager in Nigeria today.

The book is 27 years old and not currently on any bookshelf; physical or digital. But personal arrangement is on to get the 1999 book, detailing the bruising campaign that got today’s president into Alausa office as Lagos governor. My interest in it is its prophetic nature. Maybe the one we call FB will one day wear the cassock. Who knows.

Consider this: “Having said this, it is equally important to say that Senator Tinubu has to bear in mind that it is yet no time to rest, every stage of human endeavours represents fresh, and sometimes tougher challenges, tasks and temptations. If eventually he remains committed to his and his party’s populist programmes, the man, who is today addressed as governor and first citizen of Lagos State, may in the nearest future become the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”

That was the writer in 1999. He saw today.