First 100 Days: Tinubu Puts Inflated Rhetoric Above Credible Actions

 By Olu Fasan

For those who have not yet noticed it, here’s a major difference between Bola Tinubu and Muhammadu Buhari, his immediate predecessor as president. While Buhari was tongue-tied and taciturn, Tinubu is free-tongued and expressive. While Buhari kept most of his limited thoughts to himself, Tinubu has something to say on virtually every subject, except his personal life, and is more than willing to say it. Indeed, he’s been speaking!

*Tinubu

That, clearly, is a positive thing. For, as Professors Paul Collier and Tim Besley put it in their seminal report Escaping the fragility trap, “Leaders are first-and-foremost communicators.” They argued that “narratives” are a powerful tool that leaders can use to transform their nation: narratives about their vision for a better future, narratives about what must be done to achieve that future and narratives about how they intend to lead their country towards that better future. So, it’s a good thing that Tinubu is talking to Nigerians.

Tinubu’s Government: Where Is Nigeria’s Soul, Moral Compass?

 By Olu Fasan

Every great nation is built on a strong moral foundation. No nation succeeds without, as Plato put it, a “healthy soul”, where reason, passion and will drive leaders and citizens to defend their nation’s best interests. Equally, no nation succeeds without a moral compass, without a robust sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.

*Tinubu 
But Nigeria is a nation where might is right, where the powerful can get away with anything. Nothing has exposed the national soullessness and moral-vacuum more than the emergence of Bola Tinubu as Nigeria’s president and the indecorous manner in which he formed a “government”.

Tinubu And The Certificate Scandal That Refuses To Die

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

IF there is anything that the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, would want to die down at this critical moment, it is the certificate scandal that has dogged his political career for more than two decades. Though he survived the scandal when it first reared its ugly head in 1999 even as the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Salisu Buhari, accused of the same scam, lost his plum office, it has refused to go away.

*Tinubu 

Tinubu survived the scandal then because the same gladiators who forced Buhari to resign on July 22, 1999, exactly 49 days after he clinched the coveted seat of the House of Representatives Speaker, turned around to save his neck from the political guillotine. 

And what was the case against Tinubu? 

Like Salisu Buhari who claimed to have attended University of Toronto in Canada and graduated with a degree in Business Administration, when he did not, shortly after he was sworn in as governor of Lagos State on May 29, 1999, there were allegations that Tinubu had perjured and forged the credentials that qualified him to run for the governorship election.

The allegations were contained in a petition dated August 12, 1999, written by Alhaji Jameed Seriki and Dr. Waliu Balogun-Smith. They alleged a discrepancy in Tinubu’s age since the profile published during his inauguration stated that he was born in 1952 and the age on his transcript at the Chicago State University claimed that he was born in 1954.