Naturally no Nigerian should be caught dead buying a cinema ticket. We are not just the black world’s repository of incredible scenes in theatres of the absurd; our beloved country is a revolving drama of unimaginable ending. Our political kind of drama is the stuff of legends.
Mario Puzo’s classic – The Godfather is only a prologue in Nigeria’s political soap opera. Political apprenticeship tickets lead to graduations culminating in the total annihilation of the mentor. In rustic wrestling style, the winner pours sand in the mouth of the loser as sign of eternal humiliation demonstrating who the boss is.
Apprentices come with the cunningness of the legendary Anansewa. They have to snatch freedom from the baron to free themselves from eternal servitude. Relegation is a cold dish no politician wants to taste or share with the household. Just like in the wild where every lion knows it is reigning on borrowed time, the Nigerian patron lives under constant fear of the emergence of a stronger challenger that would take its crown and send it into painful political oblivion.
Those who think this is taking inference too far should ask Kwarans about their bromance with the Sàràkí Dynasty. They had to embrace the Afonja-style ó to gẹ rebellion to shake off the yoke one piper dictating the political tune. And that only happened when the patriarch died. Kwara was not an isolation. Kano and Lagos are studies in political survival.
Obasanjo laid the foundation demanding 120 per cent loyalty from his mentees. Bola Tinubu bought the script recording the highest number of deputies in eight years as governor. It was the strategy that cemented Lagos in his grip. Tinubu had no plan of becoming the rejected king of the pride. His signet ring are stamped on Lagos politics of succession.
Akinwunmi Ambode thought he had the Emir of Bourdillon by the balls, attempting to secure a second term based on qualification, vision and performance alone. A gross mistake that landed him in the effluent of political oblivion. Only recently did he dare to show his face in any political gathering, and that, only after the King had pointed the sceptre of exemption towards him.
King Tinubu does not pet ingrates and a confirmation of this is found in a viral video clip in which Tinubu chastised a hireling accused of growing wings. In that clip, the master threatened to withdraw kindness eternally. Hair raising but needed by the man who has spent over three decades plotting his graph to the highest position in the land. A Tinubu foe stands the same chance of surviving as the grass stomped upon by a charging elephant.
Ambode and other discarded deputy governors are not the only casualties of the Lagos turf wars. Yemi Osinbajo, aka Baba Kékeré, a professor of law and a Tinubu protégé suffered the same fate. After daring to contest the primaries with his mentor, he lost out in the power game and has retired to what role fate has for him.
Political gambits played out in Kano between current APC Chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje and his former boss, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. Ganduje fell out with his boss who then left the party and formed a new group, the New Nigeria Peoples Party, NNPP. Ganduje quickly pitched tents with the Tinubu camp and got ‘appointment’ as party chairman. The courts handed his party the guber seat NNPP wrestled from it during the polls. He currently holds the four aces and Kwankwaso would have to fight for political relevance at home and in the greater Nigeria.
In Ondo and Edo states, Lucky Aiyedatiwa and Philip Shaibu are proving to be formidable political surrogates. Literally the other day, Arákùnrin Rotimi Akeredolu was walking cheek by jowl with Aiyedatiwa. Aiyedatiwa eyes the big seat and when an opportunity presented itself with Arakunrin’s absence due to illness he did not wait for the bell. His enemies allege that he tried to serve Akeredolu a cold dish by exhuming Akeredolu’s recommendation to ailing Umaru Musa Yar’Adua to resign and concentrate on fixing his failing health.
It has not advanced what Aiyedatiwa’s natural progression outside the infamous doctrine of necessity. Akeredolu’s loyalists refused to put their master on the chopping board for a mesh of his deputy’s instant noodles. Instead, they attempted to push him under the bus with an impeachment threat.
Aiyedatiwa is acting governor today not by natural selection but par the intervention of the ruling party’s supreme leader, Bọlá Tinubu.
In Edo, Shaibu is vilely locked in a battle of supremacy with his principal, Godwin Obaseki. Pre-re-election, Obaseki and Shuaibu were a match made in political heaven. Today, their turf war is legendary with Obaseki quarantining Shuaibu as far from Government House as one would an Ebola patient. Shaibu hangs on the dangling rope of faith that providence is on his side.
By far the most melodramatic scene in the political theatre today is the battle between erstwhile Rivers’ governor Nyesom Wike and his protégé, Siminalaye Fubara. Since the election of Peter Odili, every succeeding Governor has walked the road starting from the grassroots and walking up to Government House with the litmus test of complete loyalty.
In Rivers polispeak once a successor has consolidated his hold on power, he is able to sever the umbilical cord of his erstwhile master. Rotimi Amaechi practically retired Odili from relevance in state and national politics. His mentee, Nyesom Wike would not only retire Amaechi, he scorched the earth so much his predecessor proceeded on involuntary exile from the state until Wike’s last reign in Port Harcourt.
Like angry godfathers, Wike ruined the chance for his party in Rivers in a move some have termed a grand betrayal. From that betrayal’, he has become an immovable rock in his party and earned a ministerial position as the crowned Mayor of Abuja, a position he vaunts is as good if not better than being governor.
Wike’s enemies say he laid enough booby traps for a naive but fast-learning Fubara who would set out to excavate Wike’s political foundations in the state. He must have acted too quickly because the plan began to boomerang almost immediately before he has consolidated his hold on power, a rookie slip-up. The mysterious fire at the state assembly complex slowed down an impeachment process that could have beaten Balarabe Musa’s record in second republic Kaduna State.
Fubara might be a rookie, but he is a fighter who moved to pull down what remained of the assembly fire rather than paper over the cracks. That action reverberated like an aftershock with over 20 Wike boys crossing the floor of the state assembly leaving Fubara with five. Not to be outsmarted, Fubara presented the state budget to them after a court declared the decampees political orphans.
The four-man-assembly passed the budget on the same day, beating the record set by Ayodele Fayose in Ekiti. Six Wike commissioner-loyalists followed with resignation from cabinet but their actions have yet to impact governance.
These shameful scripts are well beyond the imagination of Hollywood and Nollywood writers as it unfolds before a stunned universe wondering what type of democracy is practiced here. This is an unknown anecdote to any political gimmick existing before it. One that should send Mario Puzo back to the writer’s coven.