Tinubu, His God Complex and The Hapless Victims

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Nigeria is in a very bad place right now. No thanks to nearly 10 years of monumentally incompetent governance by the All-Progressives Congress, APC, led by President Bola Tinubu.

Strip away the arcane verbiage and phantom figures thrown around regularly by government officials, what’s glaring is that the economy is in shambles. And the people are desperately hurting.

So is Tinubu’s government. It’s in a deep hole and widely unpopular. His “renewed hope” agenda has very quickly turned into a poisoned chalice for the people.

President Muhammadu Buhari was arguably ignorant, incompetent and aloof. But Tinubu has proven himself to be the same and more. He is feckless, aloof and arrogant. Like his immediate predecessor, his limitations have been exposed, and they disqualify him from being called a leader.

Tinubu’s acolytes and avid supporters have always celebrated him as the master of the game. That’s the game of organising to win elections in the peculiarly dodgy Nigerian way. Indeed, you have to give it to him that he’s the grandmaster of transactional politics. That’s why he’s the longest serving governor in Nigeria. Long after he left office in 2007 after eight years in office, he remains the de facto governor of Lagos State.

Now he’s president while still ruling Lagos through his proxy, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the third after Babatunde Fashola. As he’s reminded us, he has no godfather. He’s the ultimate godfather. And with his vast political war chest, coalitions of allies all across the country, many suborned by the irresistible allure of good cash, and a corps of dedicated loyalists, he’s sitting smugly in Aso Rock.

In 2022, he had declared with insufferable arrogance that it’s his turn (Emi lo kan) to be president. He vowed that he would succeed Buhari whether anybody liked it or not. He said he knew that power was never served a la carte. Meaning it isn’t given freely on desire or demand. “You grab it, snatch it and and run away with it.”, he said.

He literally walked his talk. Enabled by a disreputable national electoral commission and many politicians who were more concerned about their personal interests than the country’s, he won the election in a very controversial manner, realising his “lifelong ambition” to be president.

But today, he’s facing a reality check as he’s stuck in the vast void between winning a presidential election and running the country. So far, he’s driven the country into an economic blackhole through his ill-conceived and poorly implemented policy reforms. The country is in turmoil with poverty now widely democratised.

It’s Peter Drucker, the Austrian-American management expert, who said: “Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.” Tinubu is neither doing things right nor doing the right things. The result of such ineptitude is the economic chaos that’s enveloped the country.

His reforms are going badly wrong, and the people are paying a stiff price for it. Millions, including children, are going to bed hungry every day as stagflation has gripped the economy and made basic food items unaffordable. The naira is now notorious for being one of the world’s worst performing currencies.

One of the qualities of an effective leader is constructive flexibility. That’s simply the awareness and ability to know when policies, no matter how well-intentioned, need to be tweaked, changed or outrightly discarded. And begin afresh from ground zero. A rigid insistence on, and adherence to, positions and policies that’re manifestly defective either in conception or implementation or both, is a clear signal of detachment from reality.

A flight from reality leads to a retreat into a state of mental catalepsy. Imprisoned in that state, he’s developed the god complex, the one who knows what’s best for the country and does no wrong.

As the people bleed, he exhorts them to make sacrifices by bearing the pains of his ‘reforms’. A glorious end, he and his officials, say will justify the turmoil and hardship they have unleashed on the country.

But he’s exempted himself from the sacrifices he’s demanding of the public. And that’s the deepest rub. In the midst of the country’s cash crunch and many fiscal challenges, including debilitating debts, he’s freely indulged in investing huge amounts of money to secure his personal comfort both on the ground and in the air.

All the assurances of a good ending to the present chaos, fueled by his policies, coming from him and other members of his administration, are simply performative. And performative talks and actions by a leader amount to deception. This is especially so when he’s unsympathetic to the plight of the people because he lacks emotional intelligence.

It’s axiomatic that some emotional connection between a leader and the people is essential. Its absence creates and deepens the public angst against the government.

This explains the unpopularity of the Tinubu administration. Apart from the economic policies that have impoverished most Nigerians in record time, his aloofness, sense of entitlement and know-it-all attitude are instrumental to his growing unpopularity.

As Albert Schweitzer, the German-French physician and philosopher, opined, “example is leadership.” In other words, a leader earns his spurs of legitimacy and support from the people by leading by example. You don’t inflict hardship on the people while you insulate yourself from their plight and talk down to them from your imperial height.

The government has become so detached and insensitive that it’s unmoved by the terrible optics of scores of starving teenagers arraigned in an Abuja high court after months of detention for the outlandish charge of treason.

The boys were part of the nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that rocked the country in July. They were arrested in Kano and brought to Abuja and detained by the police.

A government that resorts to detaining teenagers for months for protesting the hardship ravaging the country and arraigning them for treason charges without qualms is, indeed, desperately unpopular. And the show trial of these young Nigerians is a poorly disguised attempt at intimidating the people.

This legal absurdity is the first of its kind in Nigeria. Such grotesque display of federal might against hapless citizens never happened under military regimes notorious for their brutality against the people when feeling threatened.

It seems that Tinubu’s god complex is getting in its way of embracing course correction even when the need for it is imperative and urgent. And when he reluctantly does, it’s purely performative, a sop to mollify the critics.

The president’s refusal to do the needful in cost-cutting was on display in the recent sham cabinet reshuffle. He dropped five ministers and replaced them with seven. Rather than shrinking his bloated cabinet – the largest federal cabinet ever – he expanded it. Let the critics be damned.

The bloated cabinet and large corps of other political appointees ab initio foreclosed the deliverance of effective and efficient governance. It’s really about Project 2027, the re-election of Tinubu. Period!

That’s the overarching objective of having a cabinet that’s unfit for the purpose of serious governance that can solve problems. The re-election project has been, and continues to be, prioritised over effective governance. The more stakeholders are recruited into the project, the better the chances of its success.

That also explains his endorsement of the proliferation of regional development commissions. There are now six, including the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, with every political zone having one. And to crown the madness behind the creation of these commissions, the Ministry of Niger Delta has been re-purposed as Regional Development Ministry.

Meanwhile, the executive and the recklessly indulgent National Assembly are yet to explain how these regional development commissions will be funded at a time the government is financially asphyxiated. Just like the president, the federal legislators are completely alienated from the people they’re purporting to serve. Creating more useless development commissions gives them a feeling of significant legislative accomplishment and something to use to seek their return to the Assembly in 2027.

After this most irresponsible expansion of the already amorphous federal bureaucracy, anyone who still subscribes to the idea that Tinubu is a good administrator should have his/her head examined. He’s without any doubt the master of transactional politics, where political I.O.Us are freely traded and redeemed for elections. An effective administrator? Definitely not.

All the noise about dusting up the file of the Steven Oronsaye report on shrinking the size of the federal government and reducing its running costs has completely died down. The committee the president set up early this year to produce an implementation plan within six weeks is comatose. It’s yet another performative act by the president to create the impression that it’s listening to the critics who called for a reduction of government spending.

A government that has deliberately put millions of Nigerians in serious financial jeopardy and pushed more millions below the poverty lines keeps spending money like drunken sailors. Having bastardised the naira by free-floating it, the federation account is getting swollen by trillions of virtually worthless money. And the government keeps borrowing through ways and means, treasury bills and foreign loans.

Very sadly but not all surprising to the discerning, eighteen months of Tinubu’s presidency has validated the aphorism that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Buhari promised change and produced the most venal, incompetent government the country has ever had. Tinubu promised to renew our hope. So far, he has delivered unrelenting hardship and despair and made Nigerians hapless victims of his reckless financial and economic engineering.

Email: nosaigiebor@tell.ng
Phone: 0807 629 0485 (WhatsApp & SMS only).