By Adagbo Onoja
Intervention started its reportorial attention on the incipient Tinubu Presidency by forewarning the coming of a constructivist into power. Some deformed structuralists took it as endorsement of the then in-coming government even though putting the search light on the world outlook of any particular government or its leader has nothing to do with approval or disapproval of it.
I would say that so far, Intervention’s claim is being borne out. In fact, the claim was informed by what the credible elder such as Alhaji Tanko Yakassai said at a point about how, in spite of previous gestures to him by Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, he was endorsing Tinubu. His statement suggested the elaborate consultation at important centres of power that Tinubu had been up to across the country for quite some time. A country in which no political parties have conscientised the populace has left such a populace as a highly apolitical and largely ideologically vacuous citizenry that cannot appreciate the Carl Schmitt in Tinubu’s legworks in the media, business, politics and the judiciary.
Although appointments by the president has not reflected the dexterity of his constructivist imagination of the political, it is interesting that the regime has not collapsed on the weight of successful narrativisation of it in much of the Nigerian media as a product of aggravated rigging, judicial abracadabra and potentially explosive corruption. And this is surprising, given how the regime weakened itself with a fuel subsidy policy that only it could survive.
The foregone is the background in which Barrister Daniel Bwala, one of Nigeria ‘s most brilliant publicists is currently entangled and has not found the words with which to free himself. In other words, the Asiwaju imaginary has sighted Bwala on the radar and brought him with its radius. So, Bwala has to make a very difficult choice, the sort that many publicists have always had to.
In 2003, for instance, a colleague approached me to switch over from Sule Lamido to work for Atiku Abubakar under him. This colleague was someone ‘we’ respected because when he was made the GM, Corporate Affairs of a mega Federal Government industry, he went with two aides – one of them a Hausa/Fulani and another one an Igbo. We took note of that as a statement in leadership. Above all, the Germans who ran the show at the agency thought very highly of him in terms of competence and propriety.
Ideologically, however, it would create an image problem in the Kano-Zaria-Jos and the larger Nigerian radical circles for an Adagbo Onoja to move from a Sule Lamido to an Atiku Abubakar. Whatever anyone may say about Lamido, he remained within the NEPU-PRP, what Eskor Toyo called the foremost radical populist front in Nigeria. Atiku could be a nice guy but he didn’t have that protest background.
My resolution of the crisis of serving Atiku in deference to the colleague in question but without ditching Lamido was joining the Atiku side in fighting Obasanjo between 2003 and 2006.
Obasanjo had been a model of some sort for saying SAP ought to have a human face. Specifically, I was bewitched by his routine practice of walking through the presidential aircraft after take-off to see that everyone was okay. Sometimes, depending on what he saw, he would decongest the outer setting by inviting more VIPs into the president’s cubicle. Obasanjo did that impressively each time his very kind and considerate ADC, the late Brigadier-General Giwa Amu, made it possible for those of us from the ministerial delegation to join the presidential aircraft to return to Nigeria after a presidential mission. I never met such a thoughtful military man in my life. There was someone who was always saying there were no empty spaces on the aircraft. But the ADC would say there were and that we should bring our stuff. Flying back in the presidential aircraft meant a lot because, otherwise, a journey back to Nigeria from, say, Libya which is just about five hours could take us two days by commercial flight to return to Nigeria because it would most likely involve sleeping over in Malta, then get to London and then Abuja.
Above all, Obasanjo had presence in foreign policy that wherever he went, the ‘law’ about restricted number of members of delegation did not apply. In Sirte, Gadaffi’s village, the delegates were restricted to just three – president, foreign affairs minister and each country’s ambassador. As far as I can recall, almost all the members of both the presidential and ministerial delegation went to Sirte in September 1999, with some of us sleeping on the ship. Not only that, ‘we’ also ALL entered the hall by following Obasanjo. The only ones who were stopped were those wearing suit as opposed to babanriga or kaftan that most delegation members were wearing. Yet, that was the highly restricted hall where King Mandela was holding court, giving African solidarity to Gaddafi against Western sanctions. Obasanjo was always about high degree of presence, the climax of which must be Canberra in Australia in February 2002 when, according to an Australian “driver” attached to our delegation, it was Obasanjo and Mbeki on one side against UK, Canada, Australia on the other side on the issue of Zimbabwe. Well, if the “driver” was right, then Obasano/Mbeki won the contest.
I joined Atiku to fight Obasanjo in media terms when Obasanjo whom we held in that esteem could be associated with “third term” agenda. Without contesting Ambassador M K Ibrahim’s narrative of Gadaffi’s complicity in Obasanjo’s ‘third term’ bid, there were local champions as well. Instead of hearing that all those who were persuading him on that were in detention, one was hearing and seeing millions in bribe money to legislators. It was too much to bear although, in the end, the smarter of us was the minister who told both Obasanjo and Atiku that she met them as friends and wished they remained so. To the best of my knowledge, she remained so.
Barrister Daniel Bwala’s dilemma is higher than the examples of similar dilemmas I have cited but it is the same dilemma. He has been spokesperson for Tinubu, then shifted to Atiku and is now on the verge of falling prey to the Tinubu imaginary. It is teenage morality to judge Bwala on terms of ‘food is ready; politician but he will be lucky not to risk a low rating on the moral scales that Nigerians score political behaviour, most of the time without minding that no one ever has the complete information about anything at any point in time and that self-reversal is an ever present reality.
But there is a sense in which his departure sends a message to Atiku Abubakar and to Nigeria too: that the Tinubu imaginary could make Atiku and other opposition politicians to wither away before 2027. That’s a trend to watch except if there is much to what Bwala is saying about national interest as his reason for the tilting towards Tinubu. It would have been more interesting if it were all the leading politicians that Tinubu has brought together for the purpose of a united elite front against the travails humbling Nigeria.