Tinubu’s baffling Northern exclusion strategy

THE late Muhammadu Buhari wrested power from upset of an incumbent in Nigeria precisely because of the northern establishment’s strategic coalition with the Southwest political establishment led by Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And Tinubu is president today because of the North’s requital, sort of, for Tinubu’s gesture.

I qualify the requital with “sort of” because Muhammadu Buhari, the chief beneficiary of the coalition, along with a significant number of the cabal that puppeteered him, didn’t want Tinubu to be president. That was the spark for Tinubu’s famously impassioned “Emi lokan” speech in Abeokuta.

However, northern governors collective, full-throated, unambiguous support for Tinubu and denunciation of Buhari and his cabal with the slogan “The North remembers” compensated for Buhari’s treachery. Plus, 63.6 percent of Tinubu’s 8,805,420 votes came from the North.

That is now beside the point. Since becoming president, Tinubu has governed as if only the Southwest voted him into power, or as if the 25.9 percent of the votes he got from there is more significant than the 63.6 percent he got from the North.

I have pointed out in several past columns that Tinubu hasn’t been able to transcend his Lagos-centric and Yoruba provincialism.

That’s why he still rules as if he were the governor of Lagos and not the president of Nigeria.

Tinubu is, in many ways, worse than Muhammadu Buhari, who held the record as the most narrow-minded and provincial president Nigeria ever had. In spite of Buhari’s manifest preference for northern Muslims across different ethnic groups, which I characterized in past columns as “undisguised Arewacentricity,” he ceded some power to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and left control of the economy to the Southwest.

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Buhari formally transferred presidential powers to Osinbajo at least five times in his first term, if we count every Section 145 handover in which Osinbajo was to perform presidential functions or serve in an acting capacity while Buhari was outside Nigeria.

I am aware that some people count only three because they focus on the longer or more politically consequential acting presidency periods, especially June 2016, January-March 2017 and May-August 2017, but the wider point is that Buhari trusted a Yoruba man enough to transfer power to him on many occasions.

By contrast, Vice President Kashim Shettima appears to have been marginalized in Tinubu’s presidency. Despite Tinubu’s frequent health-related trips to France, he has never transferred power to Shettima, even for a day. Instead, he seems to time his returns to Nigeria just early enough to avoid the constitutional requirement to hand over power, only to leave for France again a few days later.

Major economic and financial levers of government were held by southern figures, including Southwesterners. Osinbajo coordinated the economic team, Godwin Emefiele controlled monetary policy, Kemi Adeosun headed Finance until she resigned over the NYSC certificate forgery scandal, Babatunde Fowler ran FIRS, Udo Udoma led Budget and National Planning, Okechukwu Enelamah ran Trade and Investment and Ben Akabueze ran the Budget Office.

By contrast, under Tinubu, even the constitutionally recognized economic role of the vice president appears to have been hollowed out. Kashim Shettima may chair the National Economic Council on paper, but the commanding heights of economic policy are firmly in the hands of Tinubu’s Southwestern circle, leading to the increasingly plausible joke that Nigeria’s economic fate can now be decided entirely in Yoruba.

It used to be said that the only truly powerful and influential northerner in Tinubu’s administration was National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu. He appeared to enjoy Tinubu’s confidence to a degree that went beyond the normal.

But with the duplicative appointment of retired Major General Adeyinka Famadewa, from Osun State, as Special Adviser to the President on Home Security, there is a widespread feeling in the North that Tinubu has finally purged the last vestige of northern influence in his government.

There are many reasons for this perception. First, home security is a subset of national security, and no past government has ever seen the need to establish a separate office for a Special Adviser on Home Security.

In any case, the National Security Adviser is a constitutionally recognized office in the presidency and is part of the National Security Council, which advises the president on public security and agencies created for the security of the federation. It is responsible for the “leadership, management and capacity development” of Nigeria’s security architecture.

It’s hard to justify the creation of the office of SA on Home Security to focus on terrorism inside Nigeria, banditry, border vulnerabilities, intelligence coordination, critical infrastructure protection and inter-agency response when Nigeria already has the NSA, the Ministry of Interior, the DSS, the police, the military, the NSCDC, the Immigration Service and the National CounterTerrorism Centre under ONSA.

The Ministry of Interior’s own mandate includes internal security and related services, while the NCTC is already housed in ONSA to coordinate counterterrorism efforts.

Second, Famadewa worked as the principal general staff officer to the NSA during the Buhari administration from 2015 to 2021, where he established the Intelligence Fusion Centre. The skills, experience and associational capital he is bringing to his new job as SA on Home Security are all derived from ONSA.

In other words, without being clearly subordinate to, or carefully coordinated with, the NSA and limited to domestic-security implementation, he is merely a Yoruba NSA. At least that’s what it comes across as.

Third, Famadewa is said to be a Hausa-speaking Yoruba man, and this fact is being read as a signal that Tinubu wants a Yoruba ear in the detense sector headed by northerners, which demonstrates a deep distrust of the people from the region he put there.

These speculations may have no basis in fact. For one, Ribadu is still the international face of the Tinubu administration. You don’t send someone you distrust to negotiate on your behalf with a government as crucial as the United States government.

Vice President Shettima also seems to get along just fine with Tinubu in spite of what seems to us outsiders like the diminished influence of the office of the vice president, especially in comparison with the outsized influence of Osinbajo in Buhari’s first term.

It is also possible that what comes across as Tinubu’s inexplicable animosity toward a region that gave him more than 60 percent of his electoral mandate actually comes not from him but from his ethnocentric kitchen cabinet that people have called his greedy, ignorant, shortsighted “Lagos boys.”

But it doesn’t matter. The buck stops at his desk. His studied representational exclusion of the Southeast is already well established. Apart from Nyesom Wike, there is no other notable southern minority in a key position in his government. Yes, he has made noteworthy symbolic overtures to northern Christians, particularly through his wife, Remi.

Nonetheless, for a president seeking a second term, he has an awfully perplexing electoral tactic. To dispense with a region that gave you more than 60 percent of your vote, you need several emblematic motions. First, don’t be seen to be undermining, relegating or ignoring your vice president from the region. It may not be true, but perception is the currency of reality in politics.

Second, don’t be seen to be calculatedly surveilling the second most important appointment given to the region, that is, the office of the NSA, by appointing a kinsman from your natal state, no less, to reduplicate his position.

If you have decided to initiate a political divorce with the region, which is perfectly legitimate even if it is treacherous, at least have a sensible alternative regional coalitional strategy.

As I have repeatedly pointed out in my columns, the Muslim North isn’t politically invincible. Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan have shown that convincingly. But to defeat it, you need to galvanize the entire South, the Christian North and a sprinkling of the margins of the Muslim North.

Tinubu is incapable of executing this strategy. Most of the Southeast won’t warm up to him in 2027 both because of his systematic exclusion of the region and because of the region’s enthusiastic embrace of its son, Peter Obi, who will most likely run again in 2027. Given Obi’s popularity among southern minorities, the best scenario for Tinubu would be that he would divide southern minority votes with Obi.

Votes from the Southwest, northern Christians, many of whom seem to have thawed their initial ice-cold hostility toward him on account of his choice of a Muslim as his running mate, and a plurality of southern minorities will never be sufficient to compensate for his active, self-created loss of northern Muslim votes.

And that causes me to wonder what Tinubu’s 2027 electoral game plan is. Whatever it is, it can’t be a legitimate electoral victory. But my biggest worry, more than electoral calculations, is the extreme, unexampled, in-your-tace ethnocentric capture of the country by Tinubu, which sets an even worse precedent for his successor than Buhari set for him.

Nigeria needs a Nigerian president, not a sectional overlord who is Nigerian only in name.