Is Tinubu really running the show?

It is said that silence is golden. It is only so when the person concerned knows when and how to keep their peace. It’s less than 50 days since Muhammadu Buhari bade us farewell from Abuja. We all saw his plane take off for Daura and were told our former tormentor landed safely in his hometown’s helipad built, like everything new in Daura these days, with public funds.

Before his departure, Buhari had been telling us how much he had missed his cows. He explained how easy it is for a herdsman to corral his cows than it is for a politician to lead Nigeria. Buhari told us that if Daura, becomes too humid for his glowing skin, he would relocate to Niger Republic and be reunited with his cousins. Those who watched Buhari’s insouciance during his eight years in office wondered why a man who administered public office like a vacation was in such a hurry to keep vacationing.

Having a little weight and occupying the space called Aso Rock for eight years, Buhari earned his salary for life. His benefits come with mouth-watering perks that would cause post-traumatic stress disorder if the ordinary man were to dream of it. Most people were just too happy to see the back of him. 

Nigerians hope that Buhari would be the second and hopefully the last of Nigeria’s military rulers to be recycled for federal assignment. Our women and men in uniform are indeed great warriors even if they train for it by beating us black and blue. However, experience has shown that political leadership is well beyond their mental acuity. This is why most people pray that soldiers remain in their trenches and barracks translating the theories of brutality on the enemies of our nation. If they could do that for us, we’d hardly ask for more.

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As Buhari left Abuja and everyone wished him well, it was evident that the people of Daura would celebrate their son with more than a durbar. No leader anywhere else in Africa turned nepotism into an art as Buhari did in Daura. 

During his eight years in Abuja, Buhari managed to site nearly 20 federal projects in his hometown alone. In other climes, if his kinsfolks changed the name of their town in his honour, nobody would have blamed them. It would have been in line with the new national allure of making and breaking new Guinness World Records.  

While Buhari returned to a heroic welcome in Daura, he is so used to living or holidaying in London that he could not stay at home to celebrate his first post-retirement Eid there. Days before the carnival, news filtered that Buhari had left Nigeria for his favourite holiday destination – London, United Kingdom. The rest of Nigeria was too busy adjusting its psyche to the troubles that Buhari left for them – a broken economy, unprecedented insecurity and everything else associated with bad governance. 

In line with his promise, Bola Ahmed Tinubu accepted the baton of leadership with guns blazing. He had bought into the planned removal of what has come to be described as petroleum subsidy, although economists and political pundits have described it as a tax by the poor and downtrodden to subsidise wealthy marketers, top brass politicians and the juggernaut called corruption. As Tinubu endorsed it as law, life became harsh, brutish and unbearable. The last dregs of the middle class finally dropped down the ladder.

Coming just weeks to the feast of sacrifice of Eid-el Adha, social media pages broadcast tales of painful discontent in which the faithful made pilgrimages to ram markets to watch the rams they would not be able to buy to fulfil a basic tenet of their belief. As they groaned, their leaders enjoined them not to borrow usury loans just to fulfil their religious obligation. 

The counsel became necessary following hints that the prices of goods and services were doing press-up in preparation to hit the roofs. From the prices of basic foodstuffs to services, tuition fees to transportation costs, whenever government gets a brainwave the poor groan. Only a week ago, the government announced a new federal vehicle-licensing fee that their huge convoys would not have to pay. Nor would their titled chiefs such as first, second or fourth daughters and sons of the republic, first wife of the republic and friends of the first family, to mention a few.

While the poor were wondering where the shoe was pinching them, Buhari was in London picking his diastema. Boom Garba Shehu, obviously Buhari’s eternal spokesman, took to the Twitter they once banned to remind them that the pains they were attributed to their new overlord, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, were indeed among the last misanthropic lashes he was too weak to attribute to himself.

According to Buhari’s mouthpiece, his boss deliberately refused to add the phantom subsidy removal for fear of a voter backlash. Now that he has nothing to lose, Mai Gaskiya was happy to come clean on the subterfuge he used on the masses to get his surrogate endorsed at the polls. In other climes, this is enough to nullify an election or for a conscientious winner to resign especially as the electoral results are still the subject of a legal tussle. Thank heaven that does not happen in Nigeria.

We would all have been kept guessing except that Tinubu left his first official international assignment in Paris to pay a courtesy visit to Buhari in London – at public expense of course. The outcome of that ‘private visit’ were rumours that Buhari might have been blackmailing his successor over certain actions he has taken. They include the arrest of two officials of the Buhari regime – Godwin Emefiele, formerly chief of the nation’s Central Bank and Abdulrasheed Bawa, erstwhile EFCC chief. 

With those arrests and now illegal detention beyond hours authorised by our laws, people had started to point at other ex-Buhari protégés that they think should be in detention.

With Buhari’s confessions, there is only one interpretation – Tinubu is yet to start implementing his agenda even at a time his jingoistic ethnic supporters market him as the best thing to have come from the South West since Awolowo. If Buhari keeps interpreting government policies as his handing over notes, there is only one clear interpretation – Tinubu is not his own man.

As the emi lo kan of new politics, he would have to unfurl his own policies and market them without fear or inhibition. Nigeria cannot afford a Tinubu presidency shrouded in a Buhari regime nor must it have a scenario where Buhari is gone, long live Buhari’s shadows.