Is the North withdrawing support for Tinubu?

Just after thinking that the February 25 presidential election would be a mere walkover for him, APC’s presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has joined the wailing wailers. With apologies to Bob Marley’s initial group; it is becoming evident that there are cogs in the wheel of Tinubu’s electoral train. Things went awry in Abeokuta last […]

Just after thinking that the February 25 presidential election would be a mere walkover for him, APC’s presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has joined the wailing wailers. With apologies to Bob Marley’s initial group; it is becoming evident that there are cogs in the wheel of Tinubu’s electoral train. Things went awry in Abeokuta last week where Tinubu accused his colleagues in the ruining clique of sabotage.

It must have appeared to the APC flagbearer that from the dumpster called Lagos that he claimed to have rebuilt, to the new Dubai of Kano or Kaduna, disenchanted Nigerians were queuing for things they ought to take for granted.

The optics of the petrol queues could not have been lost on an aspirant looking from a helicopter hovering at 4,500 feet above sea level. The pain was visible on the faces of most Nigerians. The N185 a litre price of petrol rose to N250 and N450. One social media activist painfully relayed his frustration as he announced that those who shunted into the front of the queues did so after bribing the guards to hop over those who spent the night in unmoving queues all night hoping to reach the pump before the supply is stanched. 

For those without fuel issues, a second lineup was waiting – the queue for the exchange of their old currency notes into new ones to beat tomorrow’s initial deadline. Those lines were as long and as chaotic as the first one, but perhaps even more important.

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Most Nigerians would crawl, trek, hike or bike to their destinations if they had money in their pockets to do essential things. The old rigid deadline rendered the prospects impossible, forcing them to complain bitterly. While Tinubu had confessed to no longer following social media trolls because their insults increased his blood pressure, he would probably gauge the barometer of national disillusionment from his aides.

The third wedge could be less important to anyone enduring the first two, but not for a man desperately hoping to get the numbers to authenticate his illusory mandate. The queue for the distribution and collection of voter cards is so important that most states closed down to ‘enable civil servants to collect their permanent voters’ cards, PVCs.’ 

Other nations get by with lower voter turnout, but to a man eager to prove his popularity with a desired foreign endorsement, the presumed ballots of dogs, cats, chickens, stones and trees is not as important as the optics of a full voter’s queue to authenticate Nigeria’s historic landslide victories.  If fuel and cash queues prevent people from obtaining their cards to vote, then the exercise fails the barometer of populist democracies.

Faced with these challenges, Tinubu complained loudly that his party’s top hierarchy was trying to scuttle his assumed victory at the polls. This amounted to the cry of a desperado crying wolf where there was none. 

Weeks before the long fuel queues, Tinubu had boasted at another event that no matter the level of opposition to the full withdrawal of the phantom fuel subsidy that oils the sleaze of Nigeria’s fuel conundrum, he supports subsidy removal in spite of public opposition to it. Faced with the imminent wrath of voters, Tinubu had to cry out like a child whose candy was being withdrawn before they could grab it.

His major opponents at the Peoples Democratic Party and Labour Party, quickly lashed back at him reminding him that he was a part of the conundrum. They jeered at him for feeling the pinch of the effects of the monster he happily admitted to having helped install. 

The next day, as Tinubu moved to Nasarawa, he quickly lapped at his own vomit by blaming his gaffe on the media! One thing that Nigerians could count on as surely as the sun shines is that the press is everybody’s whipping boy.

Before anybody tags Tinubu an enemy of the press, they need to remember that he is a media business owner. From suffering from the power of an independent press as governor of Lagos State, Tinubu moved to invest in the media, grabbing a licence to operate a newspaper business and then establishing a television arm. While other politically backed media outfits struggle to make it, Tinubu’s media empire is up, running and amplifying its master’s voice.

In the last couple of weeks, Tinubu has balanced the scales of his media team by hiring two of this publication’s best – editorialist, Mahmud Jega and investigative reporter, Abdulaziz Abdulaziz – as media aides. Both men have since hit the ground running.

Unfortunately, Jega, one of northern Nigeria’s acclaimed humorists, wrote himself into a political storm reacting to the pull out of Naja’atu Mohammed from the Tinubu presidential campaign council. Naja’atu, a stormy petrel abandoned the Tinubu camp and jumped into the encampment of the opponent – Atiku Abubakar. Not one to go gently, Naja’atu’s exit elicited the interest of the media who offered her the needed platform to adduce her reasons. She described her story, as expected, in unpalatable terms meant to appeal to the rethink of the average northerner. 

Naja’atu claimed that Tinubu had no specific agenda for the North or an impetus to develop one. This would be an unpardonable offence in Arewaland, especially for the political class. She similarly lent credence to a conjecture already in the public domain about the APC flagbearer’s health – saying from her interaction, she found Tinubu to be incoherent, somnolent and amnesic.

In saddling Jega with the responsibility of tackling her, Tinubu used a well-oiled arsenal from the old war book – let the northerners hit at each other. A fire from fiery Bayo Onanuga who leads the communication team might overshoot the political runway and play straight into the hands of Tinubu’s political enemies.

Jega did not disappoint his new boss even if in the process he might have ruptured the nerve of a friend and kinswoman.

The brickbats notwithstanding, Naja’atu’s resignation and the reasons she adduced for them are helping Atiku’s campaigns pick up in his home base where a quondam aide and rejection from the Niger Delta were his worst troubles. This is leading people to ask if the North was finally withdrawing its support for Buhari’s uncrowned khalifa. Things fired up, as Buhari; initially taciturn in joining Tinubu’s campaign train, subsequently withdrew after his benefactor’s uncanny accusations. 

As members of the party’s top hierarchy, Tinubu ought to have discussed any issues he had with government policy with his benefactor. It was more damaging because this second accusation was made in the same Abeokuta where he once derisively gloated about using his political arsenal to help Buhari win, demanding reciprocity now that it was his ‘turn’. 

These disses coming from Tinubu and uttered in public among his kinsmen might not go down well with Buhari who is now believed to have withdrawn from the campaign train. Until he ‘wins’ the elections, it is foolhardy for Tinubu to undermine Buhari’s influence in his home base.

If, as Naja’atu has revealed, Tinubu does not have a special or specific blueprint for northern interest, these gaffes could seal his fate and present Atiku as a visible northern alternative.