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!