In a paraphrase of a well-known passage, we can say that there are two kinds of political leaders for every country: those who come to fulfill the law and those who want to change it. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been in office barely three weeks today, but he has given sufficient indication that he has arrived not to dance around Nigeria’s major problems but to confront them directly and straightforwardly.
Now, first steps are neither a good measure of ambition or achievement in political leadership, nor even of staying power, but they can change the mood of the country or the tone of conversations around the leader by the followership. More than that, a leader’s first few steps can point in the direction of which they wish to travel with the rest of the country. What can Tinubu’s inaugural three weeks tell us about his presidency over the next four (and potentially eight) years?
Even though it is still very early days, I can already see a Tinubu government built on four pillars. One, this government will be engaging frontally with some of the most difficult questions of policy and governance in our country over the past six decades. Two, the dominant approach for engaging those difficult questions will be ‘shock and awe’ in the strictly military sense of the term. Third, the shock and awe will be complemented with sophisticated political communications designed to manufacture consent or numb dissent. And finally, Tinubu’s government will still be a mainstream Yoruba government, in the sense I defined the term earlier on these pages.
Let us begin with the last. The emergence of President Tinubu in the February 25 election was a truly national collective effort, in terms of both the spread of regional and sub-regional voting blocs that delivered it, and the individual politicians who helped to mastermind it. As a result of this, many politicians have felt a sense of ownership and entitlement to the new government, and thus tried to flex their muscles in the media or other spaces like the National Assembly by drawing attention to their (regional or sub-regional) contributions during the election to demand immediate political rewards for themselves or their supposed region or sub-region.
That none of it materialised for anyone but the anointed is enough indication that the man on the saddle also has the reins. Nevertheless, the effort resulted from a serious misreading of the situation. The roots of Tinubu’s victory lay not just in the electoral permutations of 2023 but in the original strategic alliance that first delivered for the APC in 2015. The core of that alliance was between Buhari and his 12 million northern masses in the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and about two-thirds of mainstream Yoruba politicians and voters led by Tinubu in the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).
That alliance had only one common agenda: rub my back today and I will rub yours tomorrow. It is good grace that enough politicians in the northern flank of the party and around Buhari remained to uphold the unwritten accord. But all their contributions in 2023 amount to nothing other than payback time for 2015. Northern politicians who contributed to Tinubu’s victory must therefore realise that they are, in fact, paying back a debt, not being owed one.
Without Tinubu’s support that made Buhari’s presidency possible for eight years, many would have been on the wrong side of power by now. This is how Tinubu and the men and women around him see things. And it is what they mean by both “Emilokan” in the singular, and “Awalokan. No one in the Tinubu camp challenged or interfered with Buhari’s eight years. And today, they will expect or even brook no interference from anyone too. In other words, the key posts in Tinubu’s government will be in the hands of his most trusted men and women, and many of whom would be Yoruba, and naturally so. Perhaps we should all be calm in our expectations about when this becomes clearer than it already is so far.
Secondly, we should expect the government to be defined by its frontal attack on some of the most difficult issues in the Nigerian government. They have already started; fuel subsidy, unification of foreign exchange markets, tuition fees in the universities and other tertiary institutions of learning, earn as you work salary scheme in the federal civil service and perhaps for the rest of the country, the credit system as a way of fighting corruption, rather than the mantra of “lock them up” that rarely works anywhere. Each of these measures addresses some of the thorniest issues in Nigeria’s governance over the past six decades. We should expect more of the same.
Moreover, that the government has already made policy pronouncements or taken action on several of these is an indication of how much political capital it aims to expend on them. Whether the specific policy prescriptions are the right ones or whether their implementation will deliver the desired objectives for the government and the country are different questions that will take some time to manifest. My own sense, for now, however, is that the government’s policy priorities and prescriptions so far deeply reflect the social location of its promoters in the formal and professional sectors of the economy and society, and is likely to benefit them the most at the expense of others.
Third, the government is taking on too much at once. But that is not something anyone should wish to advise against because it appears to me a deliberate strategy for getting things done in this government. The shock and awe strategy works well in war as in politics and government. To defeat the enemy in war, it is often necessary to go out full force on all fronts, giving the enemy no time at all to recover. Likewise, to change the Nigerian society, you really need to roll out all the reforms in different sectors all at once, so that Nigerians with their typical sentimentalism rather than rationalism would not even know which one to resist.
This is already in effect. If you were NLC or ASUU or NANS (the students’ union), or the media or civil society, or simply EndSARS youths in Nigeria today, which of the policies so far will you protest against? Is it fuel subsidy removal or tuition fee hike, or the several similar policies on the way? If you find yourself unable to do much by way of resistance even when you feel you disagree, you should know it is part of the design.
Finally, over the next four years, I suspect that this government will be using carefully selected political and policy terminologies to manufacture consent or numb dissent around its agenda. They have shown enough indication for this already. Fuel subsidy removal is a bitter pill of the Buhari government, not theirs. But it is their policy. The Buhari government did not implement subsidy removal and this government does not have to go along with it even if it did. Introduction of tuition fees in the universities is not that but student loans to help poor students. Devaluation of the naira is not so but unification of the exchange rates. Expect more.
And if the point is still not clear enough, I will be reminding you again soon enough.
