Oyo kidnapping: Tinubu presidency as Ibiye’s goat

True, the Yoruba believe that those burdened by hunger pangs are unmoved by other issues around them. We can call them the tifun loran (belly only) clan. Do we then say that was the reading of the Oyo school mass kidnapping by the Bola Tinubu presidency, which offered grieving parents with toddlers in captivity rice and undisclosed (either paltry or a wad of money) sums of money, exactly two weeks after the dastardly act?

The presidential delegation to the raided community was supposed to deliver comfort and assurance to the traumatised residents with their loved ones in the kidnappers’ den, but ended up denigrating their humanity by reading them as tifun loran (For Food Only, FFF), as we used to call those who were always cooking, especially beans, in Ife.

President Bola Tinubu swore by the constitution at his inauguration to ensure the security of his country as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but when his backyard was raided and children that should be in the comfort of their mothers’ bosoms were taken away into the bush, it took him 15 days to respond and his real first act of empathy was sending the grieving, rice. How shameful!

When a situation confounds comprehension, the Yoruba will say “oropesi je” (no words/speechless) or “oro so sinilenu o bu iyosi” (perplexing contradiction). President Tinubu is supposed to be the master strategist, a thinker, an intelligent operator if not completely intellectually rooted.

I remember the height of his political orbit’s clash with the Nigerian Tribune years back when he was seen as being deliberately obtrusive around Awo’s legacies, to advance his own politics and the in-house columnists had to mount a dignified defence for the memory of the immortal Sage. His bards sang, using the avalanche of media platforms available to them, but the Tribune defence wasn’t only impregnable, its occasional offensive also hit with precision. At a point, the big masquerade peeped under the masked costume to quip “Tribune acts before it thinks”. Then the armistice and disarmament.

Should we also say the Villa acted before thinking of sending rice and cash (palliative diplomacy or what) to grieving parents who have three-year-olds in killers’ captivity? Is that route of comforting taken because the people involved are mostly poor, everyday Nigerians, who must have been battling with hunger, deprivation and a once-in-a-lifetime cost of living crisis ignited by the reforms of the president? Why was the “palliative” not brought before their children and loved ones were kidnapped? That means the administration has always known the depth of the existential crisis triggered by the so-called reforms and just assumed that those tough enough would survive and those unfortunate enough not to, would go in as the data needed to weigh the downside of the imperialist-crafted reforms, wholly embraced by the president who had always positioned himself as a pro-people welfarist while in opposition.

READ ALSO: Oyo kidnappings: Ohanaeze condemns attack, demands immediate action

Truly, no art to deconstruct the heart of man. A few weeks back I heard the president has long stopped sitting with the think-tank that used to be the nucleus of his political and governance drawing board for decades before he assumed the presidency. I’m sure he has his reasons, but you are likely acquiring new friends and advisers if you are discarding the old ones. The question is “who are the president’s new advisers?” I ask because recent missteps are becoming so fundamental one can’t but wonder if the infamous demons of the presidential villa, for which two presidential spokespersons briefly exchanged “friendly” fire years back, aren’t back at work and even busier than before, with the new schedule focusing solely on forcing unpardonable, schoolboy presidential errors. Jesus says demons always return with seven more powerful colleagues when forced out and a vacuum left behind. It would seem the returnees found their former fortress swept clean and empty! The part of Matthew 12 that frightens is the end of the inhabited fellow or space being worse than the beginning.

These days I receive regular taunts from my non-Yoruba friends. One will usually holler once I say hello on the phone “Asiwaju, parapo” in his accent-accentuated voice. I understand the jibe; my race had long postured as the one with governance mojo and the current Nigerian leader was supposed to represent the finest of the most gifted of the race, in human and resource management. Of the two individuals who have represented the Oduduwa race at the presidential zenith since the return of civil rule, Asiwaju was supposed to be the better half of the duo and the argument was always quick to be made, until now, that Olusegun Obasanjo wasn’t the choice of the race and couldn’t have represented its real essence. The conclusion would seem correct; he was pulled out of the gulag by the Northern political machine, cleaned up by the same Northern elite and packaged to the presidency by the same clique in his first term. The Yoruba completely rejected him, though the omoeni o sedibebere (identity politics) sentiment, came in, in his re-election dynamics and the race decided to own him, especially when the North which made his first term possible, began baying for blood and “our” power (à la Attahiru Bafarawa).

Tinubu, however, was Yoruba-Made (à la Yoruba lokan/emilokan). Even the cosmopolitan Lagos, which now has the indigenes as a minority, being lost to Peter Obi of the Labour Party in 2023, didn’t sit well with many of the Yoruba elite. Till date, many of them, especially those who see the Igbo community in the state as doing what the children of Israel did while in “captivity” in Egypt, deliberate expansionism, are not only very bitter but poised for landmark revenge. One told me recently that “everything” will go into the revenge plan, to hand a very humiliating defeat to Obi, now the presidential candidate of NDC, not only in Lagos but in the entire South-West in the January 2027 presidential contest.

Well, for good measure, the Yoruba elders also expect Asiwaju to be routed in the entire South East, despite the governors of the entire zone either being in APC or backing the president.

One of them asked me “why should you demand from me what you can’t give me?” to explain his visceral opposition to Obi doing electorally well in Lagos when Tinubu won’t receive up to 5% in any of the South-Eastern states. I told him the rest of Nigeria hasn’t been fair to Ndigbo, by locking a whole race out of the presidential villa since 1999 and if they see a path through Obi, you can’t blame them for mobilising and being desperate. None of us convinced the other.

But even for most of the pro-Tinubu Yoruba elite which stretches to Kogi and Kwara, the president has been dismal in the last three years and for those who think the verdict too harsh, they are holding out hope he would hold it down in his second term. I interact a lot with many of the Yoruba elite these days to see how their minds are working; they are mostly for the president and hopeful he would have even if a narrow win at the first ballot to secure re-election. Somehow, many of them believe he would still restructure the country and firmly believe he’s courageous enough to do so. The tax reform win for the president buoyed the confidence of those hopeful that a new Nigeria would emerge from his armpit in his second term.

I personally don’t think Asiwaju is more courageous than Obasanjo, even Yemi Osinbajo. But providence has placed him on the pedestal of history, to either do it or be damned.

Just like the South-East alone and splintered Igbo voters nationwide cannot elect Obi, Yoruba voters alone won’t re-elect the president. That fact is as notorious. Even Atiku Abubakar of ADC, despite being the lone presidential candidate from the North, won’t torpedo Tinubu with only Northern votes, though he’s poised to reap a windfall from his own. The line-up of frontrunners is pointing to a 2023 rematch and identity politics/religion will play huge roles, though the collective hunger would also be a hot button in the coming campaign.

Whether the Yoruba race likes it or not, 2027 is a referendum on the performance of its “begotten” son and it would be self-deceit, singing “hosanna” to the one who is coming. It would be delusional hoping the president can be re-elected on the strength of his performance so far. Yes, I have been told he got his “Emperor” nickname as Lagos governor because he abhorred being advised. The first of his several impeached deputies, MrsKofoBucknor-Akerele, alluded to this in an interview conducted by then-Nigerian Tribune Deputy Political Editor, Alhaji Bola Badmus, and published on September 21, 2024.

Quoting her when prodded to advise her former boss, “I don’t think the president would want my advice. I don’t think he is the kind of person that takes advice. After all, I was his deputy. I don’t believe he is the kind of person that takes advice. He seems to have the mindset that he knows it all”.

Going by titbits from his orbit, nothing has changed or it is even slightly worse than before. I learnt one could immediately lose access completely, by being truthful and factual with him. So everybody licks.

But genuine Yoruba leaders and elders can’t fold their arms. They need to save the president from himself. Whatever malady is making him jejune in decision-making and policy delivery as his re-election draws near, must be cured without delay. The elders of the Oduduwa race would have to speak the truth to him about how he’s thrashing what is left of our bragging rights as the Nigerian mint factory of the most sophisticated. There are things a well-bred Yoruba won’t touch. He won’t try to force-feed a grieving mother whose baby is missing under his watch. That Yoruba atata (true-born) would behave more like Makinde did, offering a shoulder and comforting, assuring words. Not rice. Not palliative. One major argument against Obi is that he would likely approach the national economy with Onitsha trader sensibility, which is a subtle way of knocking the whole Igbo race as not rising beyond the mentality of buying and selling in a modern world where economies are being driven more by ideas. That is race-shaming.

There is equally no way to divorce Tinubu from his Yorubaness (both racial values and vices) even if it sounds like dog-whistling. That is why he would have to project the best of the race every time to spare us, his Alajobi, constant blushing. Did his newspaper, The Nation, not run a highly contentious report on the suspected Igbo connection of Obasanjo, because the then-president was seen as not demonstrating enough of Yoruba values in conducting his national assignment? How then, can one who bid for the job on the strength of Yoruba’s turn, do below the Obasanjo bar? Yes, Obasanjo has openly shut traditional rulers up and even in the same Oyo State, long after he stopped being president, ordered them like school pupils to do “up, standing” for not showing enough regard to Makinde as the Constituted Authority of the state, but Asiwaju took it to a new low with his “goodwill”. And he is supposed to be the City Boy; the best, leading the rest. Wasn’t that the headline of his press statement bidding for Buhari’s deputy in 2014? And did he not project being the best of the race in 2022 with “niile Yoruba, emilokan” (it’s my turn in Yoruba land)?

The president has to buck the skid. He cannot afford any further slip. The country is unprecedentedly fraught.