By Dominic Kidzu
Who said President Tinubu is not doing well? He is. In just one short week, last week, he was photographed with the Chinese premier and old Charlie, the king of England. That’s a premium company – top-notch. The leaders of the civilized world.
He flies one of the best turbo jets in the world, rides the Atlantic waves in one of the most expensive yachts on the blue water ocean and drives in chrome bulletproof automobiles. And you are sitting on that hard kitchen stool eating eba with the last soup in the house, mouthing rubbish about the Jagaban of Borgu. Una go talk tire, Asiwaju na your mate?
For 16 months, he has been all over the place trying to repair the economy Nigerian gossips say he helped old Mohammadu, his steel-toothed friend to destroy. And here is the thing, folks don’t seem to understand. To repair, you have to first disjoint and dismember.
Doesn’t a yam seedling first have to rot before it brings forth a new tendril? Get my drift? So what did our not-so-young president do? He received the microphone from the benighted master of ceremony and speaking coherently for the first time in a long time, picked up the economy and shattered it on the granite floor in his first day at the office. Only a genius will understand.
Is it because Asiwaju is a humane leader? Ask the Cameroonians what the colour of their market is. These dudes have been on a steady diet of plantain and dead fish for straight 32 years since old Paul made touched-down in Yaunde, and they are making no fuss about stuff.
Only the inconsequential Anglophones. Recall that at some point, Jagaban’s steel-toothed paddy man got so irritated. He grabbed a few Anglophone noise-makers in Abuja and handed them back to lovely old Paul in Yaunde.
Not a few French wine bottles were popped in the capital that night. Always assuming that old Paul can still raise a glass to his lips all by himself, while a presidential aide stands by wiping his mouth with kerchiefs throughout the ordeal.
Tinubu has been at the grind all life long, saving a pretty tidy war chest of premium currency for the enjoyment of his old age. Some may argue that he is still saving cash. The President should be popping champagne cocktails in Honolulu, or playing baccarat in Nevada’s Las Vegas or the Burj Al Arab resort.
He should be splashing it in a warm dacha in Leningrad seeping old Polish whiskey matured in oak casks. But he chose to serve his floundering country rather than rest his old bones. And folks just can’t appreciate and encourage him.
Instead, corn-chewing Nigerians sit idly all day long analysing what they cannot understand. What do you guys know about macroeconomics or neo-classical economics? IMF and World Bank na your mate?
Shakespeare, that old English fool tells us that “there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads unto victory”. We didn’t take the tide when it availed and now “all the voyage of our lives is bound in shallows and miseries”. Do we blame Tinubu for missing the tide? Tinubu this, Tinubu that, didn’t we see this coming?
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What about the governors, aren’t they responsible for anything? “Pray for our leaders,” says the pastor. “Power comes from God” Daddy GO reminds us, yet you won’t hear. You must lay it all on Baba Tinubu. If it is that easy, why don’t you go and be President? Lagos was not built in a day. Please!
Permit me to quote a lengthy passage from Bertrand Russell “I allow myself to hope that the world will emerge from its present troubles. That it will one day learn to give the direction of its affairs, not to cruel swindlers and scoundrels.
“But to men possessed of wisdom and courage, I see before me a shining vision: a world where none is hungry, where few are ill, where work is pleasant and not excessive, where kindly feeling is common. And where minds released from fear create delight for the eye, ear and heart.
“Do not say this is impossible. It is not impossible, not utopian either and we can do it with hard honest work and a clear vision of the good life”.
President Tinubu wanted this job so badly, he resorted to vernacular and blackmail. He must, therefore, have prepared for its tasks and the nuances of the people. Oscar Wilde said “If you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything”.
But what do I know? Men of power never believe that we know a thing. Listen to Voltaire, “It is dangerous to be right in matters about which established authorities are wrong”. And so the economy continues to swing around, like a yoyo, this way and that way, in rhythm perhaps.
This is with the pulsations of our distraught hearts and the empty sacks that used to be our stomachs. The only good thing is, that was the prescription from the Bretton Woods Institutions.
Presidents and leaders of countries travel the world, mingle with the universal high and mighty and sit at the head of the table. When they die, the world bows in their honour and grand places are named after them.
Tinubu is the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. At last, that was his dream, his ambition. Now all that is fulfilled, the good Lord has been kind to him. Even the late sage, Obafemi Awolowo didn’t become president.
That done, now what? Or will it end as George Bernard Shaw postulated, that “there are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it”.
Kidzu, former SA on Information to the Governor of Cross River State, writes from Calabar
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