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PRESIDENT Bola Tinubu is supposed to be a native of Osun. At least the governor, Ademola Adeleke, openly made the claim on August 16, while taking his re-election victory lap.

He said the president is a famous son of ‘the soil’, though the Nigerian leader has always identified with Lagos and has never publicly associated with the Living Spring.

He even governed Lagos.

When Adeleke made his claim, there was, and to date, still is no whimper of disavowal from the ever-talking president’s image launderers. Everywhere was and has remained quiet about the nativity question, though the president and his men heard the governor loud and clear.

It is either that silence in this instance is consent or that the president’s camp would not want to dampen the governor’s endorsement of the president for a second term with a rebuttal.

It’s called focusing on the bigger picture or being the bigger person.

But if what remains is the governor’s claim, would that not suggest a ‘settler’ ruled the most important state in Nigeria as the second civilian governor for eight years and boomed monstrously in its politics until three years ago, when a striking electoral defeat punctured, but not ruptured, his massive political influence in the space?

When the Yoruba say someone used their head to get to their birthplace, it means their umbilical cord is buried close by, meaning they are true-born.

But the Nigerian Constitution says legal nativity can also be achieved when you are eligible under the relevant laws to vie for office in your place of residence, which isn’t particularly your place of birth.

You can even vie where you don’t call home.

Even the world’s most consequential leader, Donald Trump, had to claim a different state from his birthplace to climb to the famous presidency.

But the omo onilu’s frustration can’t be wished away and their fightback dismissed.

Lagos natives have consistently kicked against what they termed a programmed and progressive discriminatory approach to governance in the state, which allegedly disadvantaged them, while accusing the president, who has headed the ruling establishment since 1999, of deliberately massing and empowering non-indigenes into the nucleus of administration, to the exclusion of those whose forefathers ‘entered the space with their heads’.

The angry Lagosians are believed to be part of the ‘coalition’ that delivered a stinging rebuke of defeat to then-candidate Tinubu in his ‘adopted’ backyard three years ago, and it’s doubtful their anger has been pacified.

Is someone close to the president doing anything about this, or is it still the usual case of assuming that the president is too electorally magical to fail twice in Lagos?

Well, I heard the ruling party’s gubernatorial ticket was a deliberate frame to factor the omo onilu (aborigines) aspirations into the next political leadership of the state.

May it not be a little too little.

Hopefully, the offering will count for something so that the natives do not metaphorically ‘sway’ their waists again.

After years of loud protestation and threats, they appear to have gone silent, operating stealthily.

That would be a reversal into the bo ri owo mi o rinu mi (the subterfuge of outward expression being completely different from inner conviction) phase in their supposed struggle for freedom. It is always the most lethal stage of freedom fighting. Trying to throw off a perceived yoke is a costly business for both the assumed oppressed and the fingered oppressor.

One can bed an enemy for years without realising it.

The ear, receiving all your secrets as a confidant, can be the most vicious in leaking them to the outside enemy.

My people will say biku ile o pani (internal collaborators make the enemy’s penetration easy).

Again, hopefully, someone somewhere is listening beyond the raucous noise of campaign promises no one is exactly listening to again.

Like Lagos ‘owners’, hiding true voting intentions is gradually becoming a fad as the countdown to the general election begins.

And incidentally, the president’s native land, if we take Governor Adeleke as not goofing, is becoming a rod in the hands of anti-Tinubu elements in Northern Nigeria to wage a vicious psychological campaign against his re-election.

The August 15 outlier gubernatorial poll in the state was a spectacle.

Voters who rejoicingly returned the incumbent were seen in many viral videos waving cash allegedly doled out to them by the president’s party, while they still voted for the governor and his Accord Party.

In fact, a towering political figure in the state called me the morning after the poll, his voice almost trembling; first for joy and second, for what he never thought possible again, at least in his lifetime, in Nigeria’s political arena.

He told me the governor, despite his rich big brother, was so cash-limited in the days leading up to the election that he couldn’t offer voters ‘pure water’, a euphemism for vote-buying.

Even his men on the field could only promise ‘to shake body’ after the poll.

Yet, he won staggeringly.

The political leader said the most humbling part for him was that after the election, when attempts were made to ‘thank’ the voters, especially in his own domain where Adeleke won handsomely, the voters who had been given tags to identify them returned them, but not for the cash.

They reportedly told the strongman that APC gave them enough to buy their votes and they simply used APC’s money to vote for Accord!

The voters were said to have claimed that what came from APC for their votes was substantial enough for them not to need Accord’s ‘kola’ again!

The political leader told me they left his home rejoicing, to his amazement.

The story was/is similar all over the state.

To date, APC, either at national or state level, hasn’t disputed the claim that a humongous N110 billion was burnt through in the failed Osun guber project.

That has now become a campaign weapon against the president in the North, among other rough tactics against him.

Viral videos now show communities across Northern Nigeria being sensitised on how to deal with APC and Mr President the Osun way: collect their money and vote ‘your conscience’, which simply translates to ‘collect their money and vote against them’.

My sources in the North, especially in the eastern zone, say the strategy is penetrating, going pari passu with other designs to deny the president the votes required to meet the constitutional spread threshold and secure the popular vote needed to win.

One of the messages I recently received from an older friend reads: ‘A massive anti-APC campaign is going on every day across the Northern states in mosques. That’s a fact. I don’t forward them to you because they are in Hausa (language).’

Hopefully, someone is noting and interpreting it correctly for those concerned!

The ongoing campaign in the North, using Osun’s alleged vote-buying scandal to castrate the ruling party, got me so interested that I begged a friend who loves the president and speaks Hausa as his mother tongue to interpret it for me.

The lady doing the explaining in Hausa was identified as the wife of the notorious ex-senator, Elisha Abbo, and you would expect her husband’s controversial public service record to seriously discount her message, but she sounded so persuasive and logical that her claim can hardly be faulted, even with my scattered Hausa.

The message is simple: Mr President and his party took N110 billion to his Osun state to win the governorship by doling out money, in some cases up to about N50,000, to individual voters. They still gave them rice and other things, but he was rejected in his own state, with the people collecting APC money and voting for Accord. Do the same in January.

Hausa will say shikena!

The campaigners aren’t even routing the message in what the Yoruba would term using the proverbial Abu’s money to entertain Abu. This is using Abu’s money to show Abu shege!

Make Abu simultaneously lose his deposit and capital, an expression regularly deployed to mock predictable electoral failure.

If this campaign gains national traction, the president and his party may be in a lot of understated trouble in January.

Learnt that a federal lawmaker who played a prominent role in the failed bid to buy votes in Osun is back to the same business for his own re-election to the National Assembly, but is now committing those who will receive his money to a blood oath.

Here I say, caveat emptor, to buyer and seller.

For the one committing voters to a very demonic fidelity process not to lose his ‘deposit’, may God have mercy on you because the Bible says there shall be no causeless curse (Proverbs 26:2).

If you have robbed Peter in anticipation of using it to pay Paul under a curse, being a thief in the first place has robbed you of any kind of justice if you are sold an ordinary stone as something precious in January.

If the fellow eventually loses his re-election, I will return to this page to publish his name and the blood oath he’s currently administering to hungry voters.

Nothing go happen, nothing dey happen.

Considering that the president’s southern solidarity project is now in peril, with the South-East governors’ opposition to Peter Obi of NDC further driving him into the hearts of his Igbo people everywhere, and Catholic brethren in the South-South appearing settled on settling the Onaiyekan/Villa beef in favour of their beloved priest, a hostile North can completely derail what is left of the president’s path to re-election.

But all is not doom for the president.

With a properly framed narrative of what went down in Osun, the disinformation (or is it misinformation?) can be rolled back before further damage is done.

This is beyond rebutting with polemic. It will require a persuasive approach to dissuade those already sold on the alleged profligate display during the Osun poll by the ruling party and its rejection by the citizens of the state.

Of the 10 highest vote-rich states released by INEC last week, the North and South halved them equally.

Of the five in the South, namely, Lagos, Oyo, Delta, Rivers and Ogun, only two can be said to be solidly safe for Mr President.

Of the five in Northern Nigeria, namely, Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Benue and Bauchi, only one can reasonably be in his safe column, with another being a toss-up.

If he wins re-election by losing the critical states as he did the last time, when he lost Lagos, Kaduna, Kano, Bauchi, Katsina, among others, on his way to the presidency, then he would have defied the bookmakers so thoroughly as to earn his idan (magician) sobriquet.

Some people are really born for the magical!

WHEN the Nigerian government announced a 30-day temporary fuel price intervention last Thursday, likes began to attract likes. In the government’s announcement, petrol will henceforth be on offer at N1,350 per litre at designated NNCL stations.

That announcement immediately resonated in the Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong›o’s debut novel, Weep Not, Child (1964). After all, life, so says Bob Marley, is a stream that will find its course. And, in the words of our elders, whilst the tortoise’s head bears striking resemblance with man’s big toe and the groundnut shell is a look-alike of the cocoon of the rat species called eliri, comparison is allowed.

As Njoroge – the book’s young protagonist – walks past the hot, newly tarred road of colonial Kenya, he suddenly sees far off what looks like a puddle of water. He is excited. It will quench his thirst, he thinks so. Gradually, as he moves towards it, Njoroge discovers to his sadness that the water is an optical illusion, a mirage. Ngugi calls the puddle ‘devil’s water’. The author wrote: ‘Further ahead, the road was trapped in the heat. It became a moving featureless line that shook with the rising waves of hot air. If you looked hard, you could see pools of water. But when you got there, the water had moved further ahead. Njoroge’s mother had told him that this was devil’s water, water that kept on retreating so that you could never reach it, however fast you ran.’

That is what Abuja offered last week – devil’s petrol. It brings Ngugi›s ghost into the dreary day of the Nigerian. When you dissect the Kenyan›s ‘devil’s water’ imagery, it gives you so many images. For me, it reminds me of my youth in Ikire, Osun State of today. As kids, in mere underpants, we used to rush to a place called Ori Eeru to watch a set of people called the Alalùpaidà and Pidanpidan. They were famously reputed with the power to make things vanish or change form, right before your eyes. If you remember ‘Ali and the Angel’ in the classic New Oxford English Course book, you would relate perfectly with how the devil’s water prices itself out of the reach of the famished.

The Alálùpàídà and the Pidánpidán were masters of trickery. They were illusionists, conjurers and magicians. As Nggi said, no matter how fast you ran, you could never sidestep these folks in their artifice. So also couldn’t you outwit illusionists. In Ikire, we lined to watch the tricksters bring out various wiles from their pouch of deceit. In the background, the bata drum, famous for its sharp, harsh, and commanding sound, wedged its dry and powerful rhythm into our ears. As it did so, the batá then invoked its ritual authority and spiritual presence on us.

The crowd was held spellbound. Right before us, encircled by the crowd that had gathered, a man was lying on a mat, covered with a white cloth.

There was an ensemble of singers beside the bàtá drummers. They had white loin cloths strapped round them, camwood decorating their faces. As they danced, they sang, ‘be careful, the world is not happy’ – ‘se pèlé-pèlé, inú nb’áráyé o..’.

Suddenly, a man folds the white cloth, like curtains opening a new scene in a cinema. Then we beheld, in place of the man we hitherto saw lying on the mat, a live crocodile. It flipped its huge mouth open and close intermittently. How this happened, you never could tell. It was like a chimera. The devil’s water.

Last Thursday, the life of an Alálùpàídà and Pidánpidán made sense to me. I was at the Adeleke University, Ede, Osun State. My friend of many years, Prof Adelaja Odukoya, was delivering this year’s Toyin Falola Annual Lecture.

In that lecture, Odukoya reminded us of Brazilian Marxist scholar, Paulo Freire and his famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). A book that critically engaged the relationship between teacher, student, and society, it also explored the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. I instantly remembered the oppression Nigerians go through under their leaders. Like a chimera, the devil’s water, Nigerian leaders lure their people with make-believe policies. Njoroge was lured, too. Nigerian leaders starve their people of water and lead them to the hot, asphalted road where a non-existent puddle of water appears to be what would quench their thirst.

I was just leaving Ede that Thursday when the news of Aso Rock’s most recent Alupaida stunt hit me. That day was Prof Toyin Falola’s day. At the Adeleke University, which holds an annual Falola Annual Lecture, it was another time to celebrate a man regarded as one of Africa›s most decorated and prolific historians. If you needed a modern day ebora who lived in the forest, the African mythological god of the academy – the deity, divinity or earthly spirit made popular by D. O. Fagunwa – Falola is he. Rather than the forest, Falola however lives in books.

If a man has been invited to speak in all the countries of the world, received over 30 to 40 lifetime achievement awards, numerous honourary doctorates that range from 16 to over 28, and high national honours such as the Member of the Order of Niger (MON), he surely is an ebora.

Falola also has an institutional legacy as Chair of the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker in the Humanities at the University of Texas, at Austin. He is credited with having authored or edited over 150 to 200 books on Africa, and has multiple annual conferences, prizes, and book awards named in his honour. It will be incongruous to name such a man as part of the ordinary human ensemble. He qualifies to be an ebora.

My friend of many years, Prof Laja Odukoya, of the University of Lagos, was the Distinguished Lecturer for this year. With his clinical dissection of the lecture topic entitled, ‘History, Power and Accumulation: Re-imagining Africa in the Globally Disorderly Order,’ I left the Adeleke University hall fired, only to be further ignited by the fire of Aso Rock’s Njoroge devil’s water – the 30-day illusion of presidential intervention.

That announcement of a N1,350 price ceiling on fuel to Nigerians provides a very sharp irony.

On one side is what appears as a temporary cushion for the long-suffering Nigerian people.

On another is an underline of how dramatically the goalposts have shifted. Before May 2023, same petrol sold for under #200 per litre. The Nigerian presidency has been waxing lyrical ever since about its economic wizardry stunts of bringing about a spike in macro-economic indicators. Yet, life is harshly unbearable for millions of our countrymen.

Like an Alálùpaídà bringing out the next stunt, FG has now framed its token reduction of petrol price by N60 as a Father Christmas ‘intervention.’ In actual fact, that ‘reduction’ is a transactional publicity stunt that comes tar too late, too little and which underscores the administration’s deep disdain for the Nigerian public. It is a trickery that appears interventionist but which would scarcely and barely be felt by the people. It is a paradox that a government which said, under it, things are looking up for the people, and their situation had improved, is giving out such tokenism and expects to be carried shoulder high. It exposes the magnitude of the economic shift citizens are navigating and the cruelty of their leaders. It also shows how Nigerians’ jugular is being fiddled with by our Alálùpàídà in power for whom everything is trickery. And our suffering, our deaths, make us guinea pigs for their morbid amusement.

Were this a humane government, since almost four years in power, as saner countries of the world have done to protect their people from inclement economies, they know mechanisms that can cushion the blow of ‘subsidy is gone.’ However, the Alálùpàídà have deliberately chosen not to protect us until now when it seems politically convenient. Government has thus elected to treat our fundamental human survival as a temporary promo or seasonal clearance sale. This reflects a leadership that views us the people not as stakeholders, but as desperate subjects easily pacified by breadcrumbs.

Why the N60 ‘intervention’ appears as morbid amusement is that, the characters behind this theatre know that Nigeria’s informal economy, where the poorest of the poor are trapped, relies heavily on petrol. If a Nigerian secures the kingdom of gasoline, all other things shall be added unto them. The Nigerian economy is held together basically by petrol. When pump prices hit exponentially as they have crazily been in years of this government, there is a skyrocket of food haulage costs. The poor are grilled to survive. Electricity grid is plagued by frequent collapses and heavens-high decimated bands’ electricity tariffs. Barbers’ pockets are shaved clean. Tailors are tailored to hell. Cold-room operators’ hearts become cold and deserted like a morgue. Transportation costs compete with the firmament. They are all dying due to the daily costs of keeping the lights on. It is even worse for micro-businesses. Daily fuel costs drill bitterly into their gross revenues, often turning self-employment into a loss-enterprise.

Today, Nigeria battles food inflation that has reached historically frightening highs. Real wages are like the stunts of the Alálùpàídà. Staple foods of middle-and low-income households like beans, bread, gari and rice have suddenly morphed from what they were – basic sustenance – into luxury items. Families become masters of dining table restructuring. They are daily trapped in a consumption and dietary compromise.

All efforts by the Tinubu government to make the crocodile look real have failed. Nigerians see them as Alalupaídà stunts. Simplicita. The upward revision of the national minimum wage to #70,000, though looks high, is killed by a stunted purchasing power which has been eroded completely when compared to pre-subsidy purchasing power. That #70,000 wage can hardly fill a modest family salary earner’s car tank.