Opinion
Tinubu’s seven wonders in seven weeks
VILLA BEAT with Abdulaziz Abdulaziz
Tinubu’s seven wonders in seven weeks
That President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has ramped up the engine of governance in Nigeria and hit the waves immediately he was sworn in on May 29, 2023, is not news anymore. From Abuja to Zurich, the story is the same: a new sheriff is in town and he is in a haste to give the giant of Africa a new lease of life.
In the seven weeks he has been on the saddle at the Presidential Villa, President Tinubu has made those who stuck out their necks for him proud. He has also put to shame those who wanted anyone but him. Those who sold a grotesque caricature of the man in a bid to stop him are embarrassed. Doubters and naysayers who were either skeptical or outrightly opposed to a Tinubu presidency are being converted not by propaganda but by the weight of the man’s actions.
Just as I was settling down to work on this piece a cerebral friend, who I know as not generous with praises, called me to confess how he was “happily disappointed” by President Tinubu’s leadership skills. He has now been converted to be a BAT cheerleader.
For my friend and many others, there are myriad of things that President Tinubu has done or traits he has exhibited in the past seven weeks that they never thought he could do. Some of us are not entirely surprised having had the opportunity to see the President at close quarters.
In the run-off to the election, the opposition threw spanners in the works, pulling the wool over the eyes of many Nigerians. But with President Tinubu now at the centre stage, at a vantage position for all to see the stuff he is made up, most Nigerians are now wiser.
In public and in small group chitchats, the talk now is how the President has been performing wonders to the surprise of many. Here I curate a few of the talking points on the lips of many Nigerians.
1. ENERGY, SHEER ENERGY: One of the first wonders for many people who were brainwashed into believing candidate Tinubu was some walking-dead person was the energy they now see him exude effortlessly. Some of us who were in the campaign had seen the real Asíwájú on the hustings, different from the insinuations and fake news they peddled out there. In a piece just before the election, I wrote that Candidate Tinubu worked more than any other candidate. It was no exaggeration. The man visited all states, some of them more than once. He never rested. In fact, some times, he would have to be begged, cajoled or even compelled to take a rest as he worked even into the morning hours of the next day.
Nigerians began to see this energy from the inauguration day where President Tinubu stood through the long inauguration ceremony. Immediately afterwards, he moved to the State House for another long ritual of standing to receive the retinue of world leaders for pleasantries and photo opportunity. From that moment, governance began and it’s no stopping. For many State House staff it was strange that the President would be in the office everyday of the week till late hours. Often very late. Many would have to quickly adjust to the extended schedule of the new Sheriff.
2. DECISIVENESS: In the weeks since coming on board, President Tinubu has demonstrated that important attribute of a leader: Decisiveness. It was the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who said while a leader should always target the right thing in moments of decision, the worst thing to do is to do nothing.
Like all great leaders in history, President Tinubu has demonstrated that he is no fence-sitter in the business of governance. With him, there is no beating about the bush or procrastination in matters that require expeditious attention. Thus far, the President has left no one in doubt that he is fully in charge and responsible for decisions taken by his administration. No shadow president somewhere or some clearing houses outside of the precincts of the President’s office.
With uncommon courage, President Tinubu has taken a number of decisions, which surprised many observers. Some of these decisions were on mattees hitherto considered too hot to handle. The gist in town is the feeling that the country is not on autopilot. One may disagree with the direction he goes but no one will accuse him of taking no decision at all. Yet, in taking these decisions President Tinubu has proven to be an inclusive leader who consults widely and falls for the wisest of counsel. His mantra is “open door policy”.
Among other many voices home and abroad, the Oba of Benin, Omon’Oba N’Edo Uku Akpolokpolo Ewuare II, expressed awe at the President’s energy and decisiveness when he visited him last week. “We’ve predicted that you will hit the ground running and you have done so, even faster than we thought,” the monarch said, wondering where the President tremendous energy comes from.
3. KILLING THE SUBSIDY LEECHES: It was a shock to many when on May 29 President Tinubu pronounced the subsidy leech dead. It was one decision that generated a lot of positive reactions home and abroad. Yes, it comes with some pains in form of inflationary trends but it is a concensus that it is the least pain to bear compared with the crumbling effect of continuous payment of subsidy on the Premium Motor Spirit (PMS).
In later speeches, President Tinubu would liken the current situation to the pains of labour and the happiness that comes with childbirth. We are currently experiencing labour pains but in the end, Nigerians would smile, like a mother who is comforted the sight of a new baby.
The wisdom is already glaring. Two videos hit the social media since that decision. One was of a group of young people in one of the neighbouring countries lamenting the subsidy removal in Nigeria. The latest I watched showed a large number of fuel kegs and drums at a village along the border that have been rendered fallow by the subsidy removal. The village bristled with Nigeria’s smuggled fuel until May 29.
The magic reflected in the numbers as well. The regulator reported daily fuel consumption figures falling by a whooping 35 percent.
4. SAVING THE NAIRA FROM THE RENT-SEEKERS: For years, experts and economists have warned that the hitherto way of managing our forex was unsustainable. Buoyed by permissible Central Bank management, rent-seekers had taken over, cashing out at the expense of our collective misery. While it was increasingly difficult for ordinary Nigerian to get a few thousands of dollars to meet essential needs, a few people got huge allocations at unrealistic rates from the source. They then round trip it to the parallel market where they cash out bigly with no sweat!
Speaking at a civic reception in his honour at the Lagos House, Marina, during the Eid break, President Tinubu told the audience that the arrangement he met was tempting that he could choose to keep it and benefit from it. The multiple forex window had for a while served as an avenue of dispensing favours to family members and friends. His own family and associates could have been smiling to the banks, but “God forbid!” he said.
The decision has since restored confidence in the Nigerian economy with the Nigerian Stocks recording all time highs, and investors betting on our market.
5. HALTING A LOOMING STRIKE: The atmosphere was charged as the organised labour charged at the government for President Tinubu’s bold decision to stop the fuel subsidy hemorrhage. Typical of its default mode, organised labour saw the decision as an affront on the poor. They wanted the decision reversed and issued a notice of strike. It was President Tinubu’s first leadership test.
The skillful manager of men and materials he is, the President immediately swung into action inviting the labour leaders to negotiation table. Using facts and figures, he made them see the reason for the decision.
6. GETTING NIGERIA’S MOJO BACK ON THE GLOBAL STAGE: There is no gainsaying Nigeria’s respect and leadership role in the subregion and beyond are renewed. At his first outing with ECOWAS, President Tinubu was unanimously elected by his colleagues as the new chairman of the regional body. He has since gone on to demonstrate leadership at that level as well as evidenced by his inaugural speech after taking over. “Nigeria is back” he roared. The dignifying address was reminiscent of Murtala Muhammed’s January 1976 address in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Like General Muhammed, President Tinubu is a pan-Africanist who believes in the continent’s ability to tackle its own challenges and equal treatment at the global stage.
Beyond the West Africa and the larger continent, President Tinubu is coveted by all. Recall the warmth and affectionate welcome by President Macron?
7. BRILLIANT OFF-THE-CUFF SPEECHES: President Tinubu has been regailing his audience with off-the-cuff straight-from-the-heart speeches. For a man with original ideas and clarity of vision he needed no cosmetic scripting. This has enabled the President to speak from the heart and connect more intimately with his audience. The brilliance of these speeches did not only draw applause, though claps can be for eye service, their deeper meanings also excite much after. The speeches change opinions about the President and turn the heart and minds. They draw respect.
A Labour Party lawmaker from Abia State, Hon. Amobi Oga, is one such person mesmerized by the President’s hearty address when he met lawmakers-elect on June 8, ahead of the National Assembly inauguration.
“Today is my best day. Today, I’m so happy that I’m an elected member seeing my President talking. In fact, I’ve never known that this man is so intelligent,” Oga told reporters at the end of the close door session. “I never knew that this man is so prepared to serve this country. I saw the love, character, and charisma — the belief that Nigeria can be a better nation.”
Indeed with the demonstrated leadership of President Tinubu “Nigeria can be better again”, to borrow the phrase of Rep Oga.
Abdulaziz, a presidential media aide, writes from Abuja
Opinion
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Opinion
𝐊𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐰𝐚𝐬𝐨’𝐬 𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐲𝐚𝐥
Aliyu Isa Aliyu, Ph.D
During my time as the financial secretary of NNPP in Kano state and other political engagements, I saw clearly how many of the so-called fake Kwankwasiyya loyalists behaved. They always came with sweet promises, showing deep respect for Kwankwaso’s leadership and pretending to be his strongest disciples. They claimed they would defend the party’s ideology even with their lives. But the moment they got what they wanted, whether it was an election victory, recognition, or political favour, they slowly pulled away. Their loyalty was never to the Kwankwasiyya movement, but only to their own ambitions. Personally, I never regarded their loyalty, never praised them, and never wasted my time writing about them.
What surprised me most was Kwankwaso’s ability to take all of this without holding any grudges. Time and again, he welcomed them back whenever they were politically stranded. Instead of shutting them out, he gave them another chance, teaching us that leadership is not about revenge but about building bridges, even with those who once betrayed you. Many of us in the party leadership found it hard to understand this level of patience, but over time, I came to see it as part of what makes him a rare politician in Nigeria.
This same cycle has repeated itself in every election season. Politicians who abandoned kwankwasiyya the most critical times would always return in desperation, and Kwankwaso would open the doors again. For him, the bigger picture has always been the growth of the movement and the empowerment of the masses, not the small politics of exclusion. But from my own experience, I have seen both the strength and weakness of this approach. The strength is Kwankwaso’s unmatched generosity and forgiveness, but the weakness is the opportunism of those who treat leadership as a shortcut to power. In 2024, some of them worked tirelessly with all kinds of deceit just to secure tickets for their boys as local government chairmen, but thankfully Madugu Kwankwaso was firm and did not fall into their trap.
Now the time has come for our leader, Senator Kwankwaso, to reflect on his political generosity and take the right stand. It is better to lose an election with true loyalists than to win with those sabbatical politicians who only come for their selfish gains. Nobody can deny that they contributed to NNPP’s growth in Kano, but the truth is that the sacrifices Kwankwaso made for them are far greater than what they have done for him or the movement. Before their defection to NNPP in 2022, there were committed people already vying for those positions, but they were pleaded to step down and hand over the tickets for free. You cannot build a political movement with people who carry two faces. In politics, you are either here or there; there is no middle ground. Kwankwasiyya is not only about winning elections, it is also about discipline and sacrifice. We won clearly in 2019 before the election was declared inconclusive, and we still won in 2023 despite the odds. If Almighty Allah has destined our victory in 2027, no betrayal can stop it, no matter who leaves Kwankwasiyya.
– Aliyu Isa Aliyu, Ph.D
Opinion
A reply to Dan’uwa Rano’s from makafi to awakai: the display of blind plotics and political idolatry
Ibrahim Bello-Kano
I’ve read Danuwa Rano’s post as a trained and professional critic of prose works, both fictional and non-fictional (the kind of writing in which the writer and the narrator are the same person, and in which there is a direct mode of address to the purported reader of the writing, the text). Thus, my response to this post, shared on this platform, is three-fold.
1. The writer, Danuwa Rano, is a well-known member or sympathiser of the APC in Kano and a supporter of an aspiring APC candidate for the position of the Gov. of Kano State, despite his critical yet digressive comment on the Gov of Jigawa, Namadi, Abubakar Rimi, and Aminu Kano, to cite just those three. In my academic field, we train our students in the literary criticism of non-fictional texts to look for the writer’s MOTIVE for writing. Usually, in this kind of writing, the writer does not reveal his motive (which is usually hidden) for writing directly but takes detours, digressions, and other textual strategies of establishing some nuggets of “authenticity”. Just a ploy to deceive the unsuspecting or the gullible reeader, to say the least. If and where the writer is well known, we also seek to read his previous works, including his podcasts, interviews, or open attitudinal-ideological stance in relation to public discourse.
2. We also probe the text for its linguistic “unsaids” or “non-saids”, namely its TONE and the perspectival presentation of events and people (we call this reading or interpretive strategy “symptomatic reading”). It’s interesting that the writer himself reveals that his text was inspired by a previous one critical of Kwankwaso and the Kwankwasiyya movement, written by Auwal Anwar.
3. After a thinly veiled ideological bad faith on the part of Danuwa Rano, he delves into a moralistic discourse, namely that God/Allah has created human beings with dignity and with self-worth, higher than those of the animals such as “goats”; and much more integrative than the blind (“makafi”). But Danuwa Rano is clearly not very educated in how language, in this case Hausa and English, work. In language, in Hausa, we call or regard someone that is a maestro, a highly gifted person, in any vocation or an endeavor, as, or by describing him as “shege” or “maye” in or about something that we admire or value (masterly). Why is that? Language has both DENOTATION and CONNOTATION. In any Hausa dictionary, the denotation of “Shege” would be “bastard” (illegitimate within the marriage-kinship and cultural system). But when used in the context of connotation, “Shege” describes someone with admirable skills, in appreciation of his or her skills, mastery, and distinguished capacities. Alas, this is what Danuwa Rano has missed. So, in every linguistic comminity, symbolism, figuration, and emblematic descriptions are never far away from the symbolic sphere of experience. Here’s another example from the English language. Expressions such as “evil genius” and the Latinate “maestro” exist because symbolisation or figural descriptions are creative, a way of coming into the undecidable space of appreciation and appropriation, including the anxiety about what we denote in the cultural-linguistic game, and in our unconscious.
4. Rather bizarrely and crudely, perhaps even maliciously, Danuwa Rano fails to see, blinded by his ideological moralism, that whenever the Kwankwasiyya people call themselves “makafi” and “awaki” they are, in fact, ENGAGING IN the SYMBOLIC PARODY of their opponents, that is, those who criticise them for being resolute and committed political agents in a certain way. To borrow a metaphor from Michel Foucault, it is the Kwankwasiyya people’s way of “self-presentation” in the political and democratic arena. Indeed, it was the same process at work when the British Workers called themselves “Chartists” (based on their Charter of Demands). But we know that a group of human beings cannot be a List or a Charter. Rather, in language, any group can identify with a colour (“Red” for communists and Marxists; Green for Muslims; or with emblems (the Crescent Moon, The Cross, or the Hammer and Sickle, or just an Effigy; a country’s or a state’s “coat of arms”). Should we assume, then, that the Kwankwasiyya followers are physically, intellectually, or ideologically blind? But if they were, they would not work for someone, Senator Kwankwaso (RMK), that they couldn’t have literally “seen”.
5. Danuwa Rano is such a poor writer, such a poorly educated person on how language and symbolisation actually work, that he mistook a figural statement as intransitively real and factual. What a pity! In fact, I am tempted here to cite the famous argument of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, that language as such is only a doxa (opinion) rather than (a) truth (episteme). In this view, language is a kind of rhetoric and thus inherently rhetorical. For example, in the Hausa “Kirari” system, any one can call themselves a lion, a mouse, an elephant, or even a fox, or even, indeed, a “merciless killer”, one who does not and would not spare his enemies. I recall, in my youth, my father admiringly calling my mother “uwar garke” (“the mother of the herd”, his herd) but does that mean she was a cow, the female head of a herd of cows? Certainly not!
6. It is a mark of Danuwa Rano’s ideological project that he mistakes linguistic and symbolic parody for the literal thing. Hence, his weak, unconvincing, and flat moralistic attacks on RMK and the Kwankwasiyya people. The latter are saying that they are deeply committed to their political projects, that they are not the typical political opportunists, fortune chasers, and the “fair weather people” that one finds in the Kano APC. In addition, the Kwankwasiyya “Makafi” are also saying that they see clearly where their principled allegiance lies.
7. If Danuwa Rano were a careful, perceptive thinker or writer of political innuendo, he would have seen something prevalent in the history of Kano since the 18th century, namely the tradition of following religious, sectoral leaders, as seen in the mass of committed followers in Kano of the Tariqa, the Shia, and the Izala, to mention just those three. It’s hard not to find a Kano man or woman that is not openly oriented to those three groups.
8. It is, without a doubt, the same temperament that one still finds in the secular political sphere in Kano. Expecting otherwise in the political sphere of the community is either short-sighted or willful blindness or sheer ignorance, all all three. Or, one might ignore all this in furtherance of his un-stated ideological-political agenda.
9. Let me reiterate a point that I have always argued in public: Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso is, without a doubt, a veritable political leader for many reasons. There is not one politician in Kano today who has the deep and wide charisma as to draw a huge crowd of enthusiastic supporters, with the charm and grace that can score, or in fact has scored, over one million votes in Kano State in the elections. His party’s candidate for Governor scored well over a million votes in the 2023 elections. Even Tinubu lost in Lagos in the 2023 elections (only scored anout 600, 000 votes). For that reason and many others (RMK’s cosmic patience, personal Promesean and Sysipusian endurance, his political sagacity and capacity for brilliant and moving political oratory— the “Ma-a-ha chant”), he is the target of disgruntled enemies, the object of deep malice but that is obscured or hidden as “objective analysis”.
10. But hate him or love him, despite Kwankwasiyya movement or not, one must accept that RMK is simply the modern expression of the new politics that is gripping the imagination of young people and that of perceptive, politically committed intellectuals, those who know what is at stake in the political future of Kano State and Nigeria as a whole.
11. Imagine a political leader, the one whose previously opportunistic followers had deserted when he left office, the man who stayed out of power and elective office for eight years, the man who founded a political party within eight months to the national elections, and yet him and his party swept the board, won virtually all the elective offices, including the Govenorship. I daresay such a man, RMK, is naturally the target of malice, envy, and bruised political egos. Danuwa Rano’s virtuperations on RMK and the Kwankwasiyya movement is one more example of crudely malicious, badly conceived, poorly written attacks on modern Kano’s most successful person and his movement.
Ibrahim Bello-Kano.
