The Bible is a manual for life and its many lessons are golden. Weeping it says, may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning. But many nights for weeping had gone by for my nation Nigeria, with hope dashed by incompetent leadership, she smiles in the midst of untold hardship, with a political class feasting, at the expense of the masses.
Her joyful morning seems delayed! Not by God, but by the people for they have entrusted leadership to a group of insensitive men and women whom we should better describe as clowns and their political party is better called Alawada People’s Congress!
Leadership is everything, and everything is leadership!
Ecclesiastes 10:16 (Voice Of His Word Version)
Trouble to you o nation, when your leaders are childish and your incompetent officials are living and partying like there is no tomorrow.
Maturity is one of the many lessons of the Bible for a would be leader, using a “child” paradoxically, a nation whose leaders are childish is in serious trouble! Contextualizing maturity, it is not limited to age, you can be old and immature. Leadership requires emotional maturity, communication maturity and relational maturity.
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu (BAT), may be scored average in emotional maturity, but he betrayed communication and relational maturity required from someone who will preside over a multi religious and tribal nation.
A 1/3 in this rating is a pointer to a post 2023 Presidency. He was in the week leading to the book launch of Bisi Akande reported in the news to have promised some Northern Elders not to worry about the entire Yoruba People of South West Nigeria! Tinubu told them, he knows how to handle the Yorubas! He is obviously not being flippant.
This of course is not the only statement made in the secret meeting. Tinubu’s statement about the Yorubas, as demeaning as it sounds, is very dignifying when put side by side with what he said about South East and South South.
If he will be bothered to handle the Yorubas of the South West, the 2 regions of South East, South South are so inconsequential in Tinubu’s political calculations that he is not prepared to loose a night’s sleep over them!
A Presidential Candidate that sees the need to engage Northerners who have an upper hand in the present Administration, while looking down at the most marginalized region of South East is one person the South East can’t afford to have as their President.
To blatantly disregard the feeling of the Yoruba people in the midst of terror that Fulani herders constitute to the farmers and farming communities of south west, promising he can handle them before the very region responsible for their travail, is the height of insensitivity!
His audience were converged by his long time friend and political associate. Since Tinubu’s claim was made public, the South East and South South have been reacting to a statement informed by facts. A simple consideration for statistics of past Elections since 1999 will prove him right. It is left to them to right the wrongs of their political apathy!
On Tinubu’s Muslim/Muslim Ticket, one would have expected a response from the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) which has been hell bent on their position about President Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim under whom CAN claims that her members in the country have suffered persecution, but they have so far remained silent! CAN is headed by a Yoruba man in person of Dr Samson Ayokunle.
Ayokunle’s silence is of course to me a proof of Tinubu’s capacity to handle the Yoruba people which includes our CAN President!
A section of CAN has recently been mooting the need for fairness and equity, as well as the need to allow a bloc in CAN, the Organisation of African Indigenous Churches, which comprises white garment Churches majorly, to produce the next President of CAN which if acceded to may see another Yoruba man becoming the CAN President, the possibility this will offer the SWAGA gang is that one of them, Odumbaku, a close associate of BAT may become CAN President or at best to keep eyes off him, someone not openly known to be partisan but who is loyal to Baba Eto may be the strategy with which the Yorubas will be handled.
“Eto” in Yoruba means arrangement, with Baba eto, 2023 seems to have been long arranged! The cards are only being pulled out for the game when it matters!
Tinubu has been so preoccupied with his ambition not to notice the cry from Dowen, nor the anguish of mothers in Badagry who lost 8 children to an avoidable circumstances. The kids were said to have locked themselves in an abandoned SUV!
If 8 was too small a figure to be bothered about, a few days later a utility vehicle said to be chased by one of the safety/security agencies ran over students, while many were said to have died on the spot, several others who sustained varying degrees of injury laid in the hospital recuperating. Not even the rise in figure of our children lost will make our leaders bat an eye lid!
Just days before the Ojodu incident to Badagry incident, had followed echoes of cries from mothers at Dowen, for which the people of Lagos have been mourning. In the midst of our gnashing of teeth, a party was called in Lagos by friends and associates of Chief Bisi Akande, 1st interim chairman of APC, APC his party and of course the “father” of Lagos, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his “son”, “Lagos”, represented by all men and women of means in the Administration of Lagos State ably led by His Excellency, Governor Babajide Sanwó-Olú!
If this meeting has been long fixed before the many sad occurrences from which Lagosians are yet to recover, one would have expected a change of venue to Osun State, the home State of Chief Bisi Akande or Oyo the unofficial political headquarters of Yoruba politics or at best to Abuja to save the President stress and Lagosians the agony of adding pepper to injury with the dance upon the death of innocent children!
Eminent Nigerians showed up in Lagos to rejoice with Chief Bisi Akande, yet not a single person amidst them commiserated with Lagos over any of the calamities! The Chief mourner in Lagos has changed his mourning clothes with dancing shoes to match.
A mention of those calamities and one minute silence would have betrayed the mood of the host and their careless audience. So, the event went on as if nothing had happened. As the saying goes, “he who wears the shoes knows where it pinches”. Mothers of “murdered” students on the state’s road at Ojodu are left with their shoes! May the good Lord comfort them!
Few insignificant reactions have been heard from the ever political saavy Yoruba people about Tinubu’s handling. Major voices are being expected to be heard on this, but if nothing followed, it will justify my position that the Yoruba agitation which Muric had alleged through its one man riot general, Prof Ishaq Akintola, as a christianization agenda is nothing but a part of a political script written from Lagos!
At this point the SWAGA man in the race for Presidency in 2023 is Bola Ahmed Tinubu. But he is unfortunately in it against Nigerians, as his interest is far from accomodating our interests!
I am at this point indifferent to what the religion or tribe of the new President would be, but my President must be one who respects all tribes and will not make such insensitive remarks about the South East and South South, nor a derogatory remark about his own people as if they are a flock of fulani herd, requiring just a rod to direct them.
Opa kan pere ni Fulani fi dari egbegberun malu! Meaning with just a rod a Fulani herder will control a million cows. It is left to the Yoruba people of South West Nigeria to prove that the claim made before Northern Elders is not a tale of a Fulani herder and his many cow!
To the Nigerian teens whose peers were crushed to death at Ojodu, the time is now for you to deploy your numerical strength to secure your future against such avoidable calamity. If all of you turning 18 will register and obtain your PVC and show up to vote for the President who values your life and treasures you as God’s heritage, as first time voters, you might well be the group the future belongs to and who will secure it with their votes. 18 teens go and register now!
Dr Bolaji O. Akinyemi is a strategic communicator, with focus of transformation, he speaks on revival and revolution. He can be reached via email: bolajiakinyemi66@gmail.com
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