Tinubu: A Presidential Disaster Waiting to Happen?
Farooq A. Kperogi
Saturday, April 10, 2021
Tinubu: A Presidential Disaster Waiting to Happen?
By Farooq A. Kperogi
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Anyone who has watched Bola Ahmed Tinubu closely and dispassionately can’t help but notice that the man is not well. He is a walking psychedelic calamity. His endless verbal miscues and nonverbal cues constantly conspire to construct the profile of a man who is battling a troubling internal turmoil, who is held hostage by disablingly malefic inner demons.
He appears to revel in his own self-created alternate universe that is always lightyears away from ours. When he speaks and walks, he strikes the observer as a man in a daze, in a cripplingly drunken or narcotic stupor. He slurs his words, slacks his attention, blanks out, has awkward gaits (which caused him to trip at Arewa House in Kaduna recently), and seems impervious to the world around him. That, for me, is the outward manifestation of an inner turbulence.
For instance, during a speech on April 8 in Abuja on the occasion of the launch of Aisha Buhari’s biography titled “Aisha Buhari: Being different,” Tinubu misidentified Dolapo Osinbajo, wife of Yemi Osinbajo, as the “wife of the president.”
“Your Excellency President Muhammadu Buhari, ably represented by the chief of staff; His Excellency the vice president, Yemi Osinbajo; Her Excellency first lady Dr. Mrs. Aisha Muhammadu Buhari; Your Excellency wife of the president, Dolapo Osinbajo,” he said
The slip-up was cringeworthy not just because Tinubu was reading from a prepared speech but because even after an awkward pause and a dazed gaze, he failed to correct himself. That was not the picture of a man who was in control of his mental or sensory faculty.
Ten days earlier, on March 29, he betrayed an even more disturbing dissociation from quotidian reality during a speech in Kano on the occasion of his 69th birthday celebration. He suggested that an effective way to fight unemployment in the country and demobilize bandits in the North was to employ 50 million youths into the military.
“To recruit from the youths who are unemployed—33 percent are unemployed?” he said followed yet again by an uncomfortably stuporous 12-second silence. “Recruit 50 million youths into the army and errr [indistinct]. Take away from their [i.e. the bandits’] recruitment source. What they will eat— cassava, errr, agbagdo, errr, corn, yam in the afternoon… it is grown here. You create demand and consumption for over five million army of boot camps.”
Although his press aides later issued a statement saying he meant “5 million youths,” not “50 million youths,” this was another wild, public performance of hyperaroused dissociation from reality. The clumsily uneasy silence, the dazed gaze, the inelegant repetition (egbado and corn refer to the same thing, but they are different in Tinubu’s alternative world), and the illogic that punctuated Tinubu’s speech appear to be only symptoms of a more insidious inner struggle.
This suspicion shows up every time Tinubu departs from the professionally dexterous mediation of his inventively resourceful media team.
For another recent example, go back and watch the incoherent and illogical video of his October 2020 response to the Lekki Massacre. As I pointed out on social media at the time, he appeared to be either in a bacchanalian daze or a somnific trance—or both.
Tinubu has one of the, if not the, most sophisticated propagandists and mind managers in Nigeria, but he sometimes overrules his media minders and rants in public while in an unflattering mental state. A proverb says, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” The inverse is true for Tinubu. Through expert media manipulation by ingenious spin doctors, we have come to associate Tinubu with political and cognitive sophistication and admirable intellectual heft.
If he had remained silent, he would have nourished and sustained this myth, but his unceasingly scatterbrained and unhinged public performances show us a man who is incapable of a basic presence of mind or a coherent thought-process for a sustained period.
We now know his only strength is that he has excellent speech writers, artful PR professionals, and an army of well-paid, overzealous social media and traditional media battering rams. Not all wealthy people hire the best, so he deserves credit for that.
Now Tinubu is expending every imaginable financial, political, social, and symbolic resource at his disposal to become president. With Abba Kyari out of the way, he just might sleepwalk his way into the presidency while the rest of the country laughs at his gaucheries.
In previous columns, I wrote with cocksure certainty that Tinubu would never be president. For instance, in a September 21, 2019 column titled “Why Bola Tinubu Can Never Be Nigeria’s President,” I pointed out, among other things, that “the most important reason Tinubu can never be present is that the people who currently wield political power, to whom he is a witlessly obsequious bootlicker, won’t hand over power to him—or to anybody—in 2023.”
I also revealed that “Before the 2019 election, a friend of mine who is close to Abba Kyari confided in me that after the election they would ‘deal with Tinubu and his people.’ He bragged that by the time they are done with him and his underlings, he would be so damaged that he won’t even be an option for the 2023 presidency. It’s already starting.”
Well, Kyari died and the old cabal no longer exists. Abubakar Malami, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, is now the head of a reconfigured Aso Rock cabal who takes presidential decisions. Although he is as determined as Kyari was to stop Tinubu’s presidential ambition dead in its tracks, he isn’t nearly as ruthlessly shrewd as Kyari.
For one, INEC’s purchasable chairman isn’t as indebted to Malami as he was to Kyari since Kyari singlehandedly put him in his position and dictated his every move. Tinubu can deploy his enormous war chest to buy up INEC.
For another, Malami has no control over APC’s fissiparous factions. Although he controls the dominant faction of the party, he is challenged by the Fayemi/El-Rufai faction and by the Tinubu faction. But he doesn’t have the sobriety to realize that being a surrogate president who hires and fires people while the man who pretends to be president withers away in silence isn’t enough.
Most importantly, though, although Malami and Tinubu are Nigeria’s fiercest political enemies today, they are actually more alike than unlike. Like Tinubu, Malami lives in his own little world. I have watched videos of his media interviews and noticed that his eyes are almost always bloodshot, his body shakes uncontrollably, and his limbs whirl involuntarily. These are telltale signs of something more profound. No surprisingly, like Tinubu, he also lives in an alternate universe.
I am now prepared to be open to the possibility that Tinubu can become president if no one outsmarts him. But it would be a tragic presidency.
After eight years of Buhari's vacant, dementia-plagued presidency, the last thing Nigeria would need is even a single day of another presidency that is ensconced in an alternate universe and that would be conducted through press releases and public opinion manipulation by devious mind managers.
If Nigeria is to have a chance at survival, it shouldn’t make the mistake of replacing a dementia-ravaged Buhari with an emotionally and mentally troubled Tinubu. At the minimum, we need a sober, self-aware, cosmopolitan person who respects and shows sensitivity to our diversity
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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Cornelius Hamelberg
A “disturbing dissociation from quotidian reality” indeed.
Whenever I hear the name “Tinubu, I think, “The Kingmaker’s Yoruba vote will be crucial, critical!”
Thesis and antithesis, uncritical acceptance of the bombastically opinionated and its critical rejection. This is just a (one) reaction, hopefully, a legitimate, not a criminal reaction written by vermin and merely laced with libel, disdain, disgust and slander, said to be equally in the public interest.
In this instance, there’s the chasm known as the Atlantic Ocean distancing the hunter from his prey. The clumsy or “the clumsily uneasy silence” should normally be preferable to the toothless gaping silence being shattered by the tortuous, strident, unpleasant, tremulous piping of an irate reporter stationed more than three thousand miles away (the way the crow flies) from the scene of the crimes of misdemeanour being reported, as if the reporter was himself anywhere close to being near where the object of his derision and his scorn is stationed, i. e. Lagos, he nevertheless gives some eye-witness accounts. True, just ask a good attorney and he or she will tell you,” the witness could be lying”. The possibility offered by modern communications only diminishes the distance if it actually transports you to the scene of the crime, such as the video that recorded the murder of George Floyd, from that particular angle for the whole wide world to see. And no amount of highfalutin verbiage can serve as an adequate substitute for the filmed sequence that testifies that “a picture is worth a thousand words"
“...bacchanalian daze or a somnific trance—or both “ - it doesn't get simpler or less preposterous, even assuming that’s what the viewer sees. Indeed, it’s better to stay silent that to put your foot in your mouth.
What an unflattering portrait! Surely, the Honourable Bola Ahmed Tinubu has shown his mettle and can hold his own, oblivious of and unconcerned with the verbose, noisy, exaggerated hack journalese of those who may be purported to be weakly or weekly paid to take their knives out on Brother Bola Ahmed Tinubu, aided or unaided by any outer or “disablingly malefic inner demons”?
And, surely, there are and have always been many a “sober, self-aware, cosmopolitan person who respects and shows sensitivity to our diversity”?
My late friend and mentor Harvey Cropper defined a cosmopolitan thus: “When I see another human being, I see one of us”
One would have presumed that Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo is one such person and that he would be a wonderful natural for the job which (according to the expert Nigerian media at home and abroad) he has done so stunningly well as a stand-in for President Buhari, when President Buhari has been away for long periods in London, receiving adequate medical attention there.
Because of so many references to Hon. Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s largesse on behalf of promoting his favoured self image and his political ambition (“excellent speech writers, artful PR professionals, and an army of well-paid, overzealous social media and traditional media battering rams. Not all wealthy people hire the best, so he deserves credit for that.”) this outstanding question remains: The 2023 Nigerian Presidency which is up for grabs, will it be won by the one who has the biggest campaign war chest? In other words is the presidency for sale? What about the professorship, can it be bought or sold or, like the presidency, also won by the highest bidder? My own assumption is that In some cases the assurance of student recruitment to the profit-motivated university must be as important as the harvesting votes ( even buying them?) to win the presidency?
Salimonu Kadiri
Sent: 10 April 2021 06:48
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tinubu: A Presidential Disaster Waiting to Happen?
Mobolaji Aluko
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Cornelius Hamelberg
May the Almighty save us all from arrogance.
Our friend delights in criticizing others, especially those in authority and those he feels are unfortunately below him or beneath his dignity and not worth his wasting his precious time giving any of his attention.
But how does he himself respond to criticism? Correction?
According to some interpretations there is a surah/ chapter in the Quran - Surah Abasa in which the Prophet of Islam, salallahu alaihi wa salaam, is criticized. Reprimanded: He Frowned (the incident is self-explanatory) As for Moshe Rabbeinu, “ the humblest man that ever trod this earth”, well, he got angry and this is what he said before he hit the rock:
7. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
8 “Take the staff and assemble the congregation, you and your brother Aaron, and speak to the rock in their presence so that it will give forth its water. You shall bring forth water for them from the rock and give the congregation and their livestock to drink."
9.Moses took the staff from before the Lord as He had commanded him.
10. Moses and Aaron assembled the congregation in front of the rock, and he said to them, "Now listen, you rebels, can we draw water for you from this rock?"
11. Moses raised his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice, when an abundance of water gushed forth, and the congregation and their livestock drank.
12. The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, "Since you did not have faith in Me to sanctify Me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly to the Land which I have given them.”
Personally, the most humble person that I have ever met so far, is Abul-Wafa al-Taftazani (a very subjective assessment, especially considering all the silent encounters where not a single word has entered with some great Tibetan Buddhist Masters, Hindu Satgurus, great Sufi Masters such as Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, His Holiness Hajj Soltan Hossein Tabandeh Reza Ali Shah, rabbis, chief rabbis, others I cannot mention.
Am I better than him? Are you? Are we?
Like my medicine man I am also an amateur psychologist. Aren’t we all, more or less? What’s not so easy to understand is where does all the conceit, disdain, and what may otherwise pass off as arrogance, but in reality has all the characteristics of what’s known as a superiority complex in disguise, where does it all come from? From humble beginnings? Is this what colonialism or some baptist missionary school has done to some Nigeria, now despising his president because of some alleged lapse in “English grammar”? “ English orthography”, what about Persian Calligraphy? Does Kperogi think that the President of China or the PhD students that my Better half taught Swedish at KTH, care about your big grammar?
Apart from certain famous characters in Dickens, the Naipauls, Paul Theroux among others, in many ways, the specimen under the microscope is reminiscent of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday. The introduction to J. M. Coetzee’s Nobel Lecture sums it up, the evidence is plentiful and if requested to do so, as an English Language analyst I could summon hundreds of examples, some tortuous, many, many amusing examples of the wilfully intended and the sometimes unintended mishandling of the English Language, all the examples readily available in Notes From Atlanta!
It is only out of respect for Professor Toyin Falola and dear Femi Segun that Kperogi is getting away with some of the things that he has been saying. Out of respect for the aforementioned and out of love for Kperogi’s children who lost their mother not too long ago in a ghastly accident – otherwise I would have dealt with him in ways that he cannot even imagine is within the realm of possibility for vermin like me. Vermin that can make you look into trousers only to discover that the blokus has completely disappeared and only penance and apology will bring it back again. But all things come at a price and there’s a price that I am not willing to pay even to an oyibo who addresses me as “vermin”, after all people of the same ilk said worse things to the Prophet of Islam, salallahu alaihi wa salaam, even threw rubbish at him and who is any of us here among us or over there who is better than him? Because some professor of everything believes that he speaks better English than the Hebrew Prophets and the historical Jesus spoke?
As to the perverse effect Soyinka continues to have on some of his wannabe disciples, they should do a lot better if they realised that they are NOT Soyinka . Soyinka is Soyinka, the one and only Soyinka. He does what he does, marvellously and I cannot find fault with him. Soyinka does not do THAT. Not that there’s anything wring with imitating as an exercise in learning - I imitate Dally Kimoko, Diblo Dibala, Nene Tchakou, Caen Madoka, without being schizophrenic or thinking that I am any of them because, of course, I am myself.
Here (very funny) T.S. Eliot says, “I began I think about the age of fourteen, under the inspiration of Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam, to write a number of very gloomy and atheistical and despairing quatrains in the same style, which fortunately I suppressed completely—so completely that they”
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Cornelius Hamelberg
I met an African-looking man at the Cairo post-office, asked him where he was from, he said “Jamaica”, in turn he asked me the same and I told him, “Sierra Leone”. (I’m really from “Israeleone” according to my slightly anti-Zionist friend from Morocco. That's what the Egyptian psychiatrist I met in Alexandria would have told me too if he met me today, because in the middle of our last discussion he suddenly jumped up and started shouting, “I swear, I would like to eat the liver of Yitzhak Shamir! Just bring him here to me right now!” Of course eating your enemy’s liver is pre-Islamic, it should be understood as a genuinely figurative turn of expression and should not be taken literally. Cannibalism is not halal and therefore has no place in Islamic culture or life style.)
But, back in Cairo, 1991, a few minutes later I thought I was being accosted by the Brother from Jamaica that I had just met at the post office, but no, he only wanted to tell me that he was also really from Sierra Leone. He said that he was an English teacher and that he had to tell his employers that he was from Jamaica otherwise they wouldn’t have employed him to teach English in Egypt. He was actually the person who saw me off at the airport.
Ditto, Samba the first African I met in Sweden, and this was on a ferry from Kalmar to Borgholm, he told me that he was from Jamaica and seconds later, after I told him that I was from Sierra Leone, he confessed with a smile, that he was also from ditto. In his case, maybe he was also an English teacher, in the South of Sweden where he lives and these days, in addition to his improbable origin from one of the parishes in Jamaica I suppose he would have to go the extra mile or two to impress upon his employers that he was fiercely anti-terrorism, anti Islamic fun-da-mentalism, anti-Hijab, anti-female genital-mutilation, and anti-homophobia, just to be on the safe side, because these days, there are all kinds of pressures on the Muslim brethren to the extent that even when the dastardly Lars Vilks did his obscene portrait I was one of the few vociferously protesting, in my blog, since many are currently afraid of being accused of “ Islamic extremism”.
Over the years, I have learned to distrust the honeyed words of the hypocritical oyibo who begins his spiel with, “Cornelius, you are not like, them” etc., absolute anathema to my ears, or, “Cornelius remember you are a Swede, you left the jungle, over half a century ago.” I still don’t know who the hell told them that I ever loft the jungle.
Today, I’m grateful to Baba Kadiri explaining the probable Yoruba etymology of my name “ Corn “, so that someone doesn’t make the mistake that it is derived from “ Cor -ona”. Cultural literacy is very important. Therefore thanks for so easily clearing up the mess, by showing us the correct punctuation of the quoted excerpt attributed to Hon. Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
With respect to the 50 million, the average English scholar / prafessar of whatever obviously underestimates the meaning of hyperbole , although he himself is a walkie-talkie, walking-talking head, that often personifies the jester, becomes a caricature of his unintended effects when – no sense of humour, he takes himself far too seriously. Dickens uses inflated language for comic effect. Sadly, the genre that is most conspicuously absent in the serious Naija media is the powerful tool known as SATIRE . But alas, the miscreant is usually more interested in palming himself off to us ignoramuses, as one of the supremely ” learned”, best in his class at Kano, just like Chomsky - but see how straightforwardly Chomsky writes and reconsider Orwell’s essay, Politics and The English Language which he wrote before I was born...
A journalist type without a smattering of “literary background “or what passes as “cultural literacy” through “the classics”, in this case acquiring something like a feel for the language by spending a lifetime with the so called “English Classics “and acquiring a feel through the ear and not the mouth for some of the diverse sounds, the brogue accent (nobody more loquacious than an Irishman or Margaret (an Irishwoman) or an Irish priest or like word-drunk Dylan Thomas, a Welshman, it’s scattered all around (it’s not all the great poets – like Pope that are or were “Professors” even of poetry, nor does one have to be a professor of this or that to listen to and to hear the onomatopoeia, to enjoy the sibilants in “So slender Sohrab seem'd, so softly rear'd”, to look and to see when Horatio says, “But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill”
Sure, everybody has both divine and human rights to his own personal style, that’s what Beniko Popolipo is all about, which doesn’t mean that I should not take offence when somebody wants to ram it down my throat (thinking of the torture scene in A Clockwork Orange) nor does it mean that somebody has to be so heavy that it becomes claustrophobic and that’s how Bruno Schulz is one of the greatest, so is Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Balzac...
On the most serious note of all, the worsening situation in Nigeria, demands serious coverage and opinion building. We the readers cannot afford to be deliberately misled by falsifications, distortions, malicious lies and wanton exaggeration, when truth is even stranger than fiction, it’s the truth that should contribute to giving us a more accurate picture so that such truths help set us free ( from the liars) . Today I wrote to Chidi about the effect his Thought for Today had on me:
Chidi,
Many Thanks.
I'm literally moved to tears by your Thoughts for Today.
Sometimes it takes tears to make us feel like a human being, once again.
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tunde jaiyeoba
Cornelius Hamelberg
Before he sits at his keyboard, just to send a simple telegram to some literati who he wants to impress, or to a fellow illiterate like me who knows no better, I’d recommend that he takes some of this advice to heart: George Orwell's Six Rules for Writing
Having ploughed through these Great Nigerian Speeches, I’m curious and would like to see, hear, read, review a few specimens of the speeches that the former so called “speech writer”for President Olusegun Obasanjo wrote for his president. I can imagine Dr Speech Writer / would be Professor Spin Doctor aiming for what he imagines to be lofty, sabi buk well well ; I can imagine him waxing Churchillian, designing Soyinkan or Shakespearean stanzas and some special home-grown baga-baga proverbs to be delivered through the lips of a mesmerised Olu Obasanjo. I’m sure that they were not pretty speeches. He must have really messed up Mr. President well well , with Mr. President saying things that could not have possibly come from his own heart or military mind. Surely Brer Obasanjo could have done better? Indeed, Kp must have messed up Mr. President properly, deliberately, but to give Kp the benefit of the doubt, maybe, he only messed up his boss, not as a fifth column adventist, but inadvertently.
At least Kperogi & the devil were not the author of Bra Obasanjo saying, “God will never forgive me if I support Atiku “
Re- Kperogi’s long catastrophic idea that begins, “If Nigeria is to have a chance at survival, it shouldn’t make the mistake…” etc. The rest of that sentence is so loaded with deceit , it would need some extended commentary to do justice to it, maybe later
For now, this is where I’m coming from and going to: In my heart, I think of Israel as "she” and that partly explains why I say that when the former, so called “speech writer” now turned prophet of doom refers to his (we are to assume) beloved motherland Nigeria as “it” – “it”, just like an inanimate, robotic monster or mobster, you begin to wonder whether or not he and his country are supposed to have a heart…
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ugwuanyi Lawrence
ugwuanyi Lawrence
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 6:09 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tinubu: A Presidential Disaster Waiting to Happen?