Tinubu And The Troubled House Of Lugard

 By Sola Ebiseni

Football tournaments should be held every day, continuously, ad infinitum; it is one surest opium by which the poor and needy are sweetly distracted from their life’s agony and anguish. Ensure that the Eagles, whether Golden Eaglets, Flying, Falcons or Super are involved, showing predatory capacities and see the Nigerian hoi polloi willingly sedated by a large dose of the round-leather tranquilliser.

So it was with this season’s AFCON which momentarily shifted attention from the common effects of the sloppy Naira and galloping fuel to the boys in Cote d’Ivoire. While the fiesta and its razzmatazz lasted, no one cared about the tribes of our young ambassadors on the field.

They simply all were Nigerians, same as the sea of heads in green jersey massing and slow-marching the major streets of the Ivorian capital on their way to the stadium for the final match of the tournament squaring Nigeria and the host country, Ivory Coast. A Yoruba adage says tears from the eyes of a weeping man do not prevent him from seeing, a euphemism that no one should shy away from reality notwithstanding temporary pains or even gains.

Not so with football. It is such a narcotics that made a man throw his wife down from the window of a high-rise building for not allowing him concentrate watching a live football match on television; just like Escobar, a Colombian player was shot on return to his country for scoring an own goal which prevented Columbia from advancing beyond the quarter finals in USA ’94 World Cup.

Not less than five Nigerians were among those reported to have lost their lives to cardiac arrest when South Africa cancelled the narrow one goal lead towards the end of their semi final encounter which Nigeria eventually won on penalties. Nonetheless, Nigerians, including our leaders who thronged the stadium in the wishful hopes of snatching, grabbing and running away with victory over the host, were shocked by the Ivorian Elephants who ironically proved swifter than the Eagles with the final ending 2-1.

The soccer stupor is now wiped as we can see quite clearly that we are back to the reality of a rapid descent to the nasty, brutish and short life of the state of nature. In the midst of the AFCON euphoria, terrorists brazenly stormed Yoruba land from Kwara, Kogi and Ekiti. How worse could a people be dared and their sensibilities insulted than killing their kings.

In Yoruba land, the Oba is first among the deities; he is àdìmúlà, the one to whom you run or cling to for safety and life in all ramifications. He is òjìmàmà whose mouth is never seen eating; the immortal being who only ascends into the àjà to dwell with the gods and ancestors after the completion of the assignments for which he was sent.

The pain in this annoying occurrence is not the eternal loss; that is felt by his family, associates and community. The pangs and indelibly reminding scar rest in the bosom of a race which existential beliefs have been rubbished by the sights, on social media, of bodies of our immortal beings, fallen by the lethal weapons of ragged terrorists, being hauled into vehicles on our road, in our territory.

The terrorists know that education is our area of comparative advantage and to stop us in that direction, they went kidnapping our children in school buses and in scores. Which parent will not be scared by this devilish development? While the Naira slides uncontrollably the economic woes are further compounded by the collapse of agriculture as farmers are chased away from their farms by armed terrorist herders relentlessly all over the country.

The ember of this strange phenomenon in our clime was fanned by the Buhari administration either by mute indifference or undisguised complicity. No part of the federation is sparred the wanton killings of Nigerians. It is more pronounced even in Northern Nigeria, particularly in the Middle Belt, where large scale ethnic cleansing and land grabbing are hypocritically termed herders/farmers clash by the Buhari government.

In effect, the federation had become undeniably ungovernable under Buhari in all respects and Nigerians were only tolerating the administration till the end. When during the electioneering campaigns the present President said he would continue where Buhari stopped, it was of course seen by many as the natural course of events.

There were those who felt it was only a gimmick to woo Buhari as the incumbent President, a strategy of managing a bull which stormed into a glass shop as it was inconceivable that anyone would honestly see anything to emulate and preserve in the Buhari administration. In its ninth month, it appears that the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration might really have decided to toe the steps of the Buhari administration.

Though the “subsidy is gone” critical policy pronouncement was rather made by President Tinubu on the spur- of -the – moment, it was in tandem with the policy of his predecessor who would probably not have continued with the petroleum products subsidy having not budgeted for it beyond end of May 2023 and the inauguration of the new government.

The floating of the Naira policy appears the only exclusive policy of the Tinubu government. In terms of revisiting the structure of the federation as an overall policy with salutary effects on governance modules, security and the economy, Tinubu’s government is yet to see nothing wrong with the structure of the federation and thus at home with carrying on as Buhari. Of course, Tinubu is the same and not different from the man who, as Governor of Lagos State, fought the Federal Government, by action and through the courts, on several violations of principles of federalism.

The difference, as some have now suggested, is the attraction of the unprecedented powers vested in the Federal Government by our quasi federal Constitution which, as interpreted by some, makes the Nigerian President comparatively the strongest in the world. The President should face the reality that the honeymoon, if any, is over and that it is time he squarely, immediately and urgently faced the task of national redemption.

The starting point is a critical and determined review of the unitary superstructure foisted by military rulers on the federal foundation erected by our founding fathers on the British/Lugardian amalgamation architecture. Buhari first told Nigerians that “restructuring” had nebulous connotations and his government would have nothing to do with a concept it hardly could decipher. Nigerians reminded him of the federal arrangement that was negotiated by the founding fathers but which he and his military colleagues/ politicians torpedoed.

In particular, Buhari ordered that the report of the 2014 National Conference be kept in the national archives. His APC party, then under Chief John Oyegun, in deference to public pressure, in 2018, set up the Committee on Federalism and made Mallam El-Rufai, then Governor of Kaduna State, the Chairman. On arrival from his medical treatment overseas, Buhari dismissed the report which in contents and for all intents and purposes was on all four with the Confab report.

*Ebiseni is Secretary General, Afenifere