Bola Ahmed Tinubu: The most consequential president, By Jibrin Ibrahim

This morning, we are at the public presentation of the book – Tinubu: From Renewed Hope to Despair; written by Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, Aliyu Sanusi, Alkasum Abba and Massoud Omar. The event was supposed to have taken place yesterday at Arewa House, Kaduna, a research institute run by Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Due to “pressures from above”, the university cancelled the booking. The organisers then went around other hotels in Kaduna but they shut their doors claiming they had been warned. That is the state of our democracy today as civic space is closed down. Undaunted, the organisers decided to “bombard the headquarters”. As they closed doors in the provinces, they opted to go to the headquarters and have the event in Yar’Adua Centre. They have an important story to tell about our President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu is in a keen contest with Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) in the race as the most consequential president in Nigeria’s post-independence history. He is in a keen contrast with his predecessor Muhammadu Buhari, the General that lived in Aso Rock for eight years but did not even try to govern the country. As I said on many occasions under the Buhari Presidency, when the president refuses to govern, others govern in his name because as we all know, there is no vacuum in politics. IBB had a profound effect on the culture of politics and statecraft in Nigeria but I doubt that his impact could have been as deep and profound as Tinubu’s. Do not take me up on my words, read the book that is being presented to the Nigerian public today and as the saying goes, one reading will convince you.

Tinubu’s claim, (and please don’t ask me the justification), is that it was his turn to govern Nigeria and many people assumed that he wanted to enjoy the excellent cuisine and soothing spirits of Aso Rock. I am an Ahmadu Bello University trained materialist in my methodology training so I know nothing about the world of sprits. For more on this matter of spirits, ask my good friend Dr Rueben Abati. Nigerians erroneously assumed he was there to enjoy his turn. What the country is realising today is that he came to change Nigeria by dismantling its democracy, disbanding federalism and establishing one-man rule. He did not start the process but he is working very hard to complete the job.

The Fourth Republic has been in place since 1999. Over that period, the country’s democratic process has been emptied of its essence. One way of understanding what happened to our democracy is to review how reckless political cabals have created a situation in which Nigeria faces a grave threat to its foundational constitutional principle of the separation of powers. Checks and balances between the branches of government have been imperilled. The separation of powers divides government responsibilities into three distinct branches—legislative (makes laws), executive (enforces laws), and judicial (interprets laws). This constitutional framework ensures a system of “checks and balances” that prevents tyranny, preserves individual liberties, and promotes governmental accountability.

Under President Tinubu, the legislative branch has been placed under near total control of the executive branch. The judiciary has lost both its independence and its integrity. The checks on the powers of the executive have been dismantled and he runs the government as he pleases without accountability or respect for the people’s welfare. Institutions have been compromised, weakened, and subordinated to the interests of the executive arm of government. This erosion of institutional independence has fuelled public distrust to its highest level in our history creating a crisis of political exclusion and impunity that is pushing violent extremism, organized crime, and communal conflict to a tipping point.

As Tinubu struggles to secure a second term to conclude his agenda of deepening the transition from “Hope to Despair”, it is important to understand his assets and skill set. While presidents from Shagari to Buhari had to rely on financiers and godfathers to finance their campaigns, Tinubu had the resources to fully fund his 2023 campaign himself and therefore had no stakeholders with voice in the system. Now that he owns the treasury, there is no cabal to bring some diversity and multiple voices to the table. There are only people who work for him at his pleasure. Our arrogance as democracy defenders that even the military dictatorships of Babangida and Abacha were stopped in their tracks of seeking to establish one-man rule is shattered by the reality of the iron-grip of the Tinubu control. I had written numerous articles in the past on how the National Assembly successfully fought off and gained its independence from the attempt to control them. Today, we have a National Assembly that is proud that it does not even discuss executive bills, it simply passes them without debate. Its only expectation is that it is well compensated financially.

The situation with the judiciary is worse. It has been undermined through corruption and for matters of no political relevance, the highest bidder wins automatically. When however, there is a political stake in a matter, the government position is the automatic winner. The Judiciary is complicit in dismantling the democratic process by its disregard for the rule of law. The Nigerian Bar Association that has a solid history in defending human rights and the rule of law has today lost its voice and raison d’etre.

The most serious problem confronting Nigerian democracy today is the active way the Tinubu Administration is using the powers of incumbency to ensure that there is no level playing ground for political parties. President Tinubu knows something about how opposition parties can come together, overcome their differences, create synergy around a single candidate, mobilise and defeat an incumbent president. He was a key player between 2013 and 2015, when opposition parties came together, negotiated, agreed on how the candidate would emerge and then went ahead to agree on a consensus candidate. The outcome of the consensus position that emerged was that for the first time in the history of this country, a sitting President was defeated at the polls and handed over power peacefully in 2015. Precisely because he knows the script, he has decided he is not going to sit and allow what he had done to another person be done to him.

The Tinubu political strategy since 2023 has been to apply slash-and-absorb tactics to opposition parties by actively encouraging factional crises within them and enticing key members to abandon ship and join the ruling party. This was not a sustainable tactic because there were limited positions within the ruling party, and giving the new entrants many goodies would mean depriving those within the party of these, which would become a crisis generating mechanism for the ruling party itself. This was indeed the context that encouraged opposition parties to strategize towards the establishment of a unified mega opposition platform to face the APC in the 2027 elections, the African Democratic Congress (ADC). By making opposition parties ungovernable, the ruling party assumes it can maintain its control until the elections. This cannot be guaranteed because there is a campaign and Tinubu is discovering today that there are too many negatives in his governance record so selling a second term might be impossible for the people who might abandon their leaders who had sold out.

The consequential impact of Tinubu rule is not only on our democracy. The book on Tinubu: From Renewed Hope to Despair provides detailed empirical analysis on destruction of our federal arrangement, national cohesion, lopsided infrastructural development, economic crisis and deepening poverty. Reading the book produces a constant chilling effect that there are no positives in Tinubu’s governing narratives, there are only negatives. Insecurity around the country has been spreading and deepening and the government’s only perspective seems to be to beg the Americans to come and solve our problems of insecurity. As security deteriorates, what is on offer is lopsided development. I had always been indignant at Buhari’s clannish approach to rule and ethnic favouritism.

The authors provide statistics showing federal appointments have today become the most lopsided in our country’s history. It does not stop there. Infrastructural projects are today concentrated in Lagos and the South West. Federal institutions are transferring key aspects of their organisational work to Lagos. The official policy appears to be to tear Nigeria at the seams. Meanwhile, Nigeria’s debt burden has been built to an unmanageable level. The numbers they provide tells the sad story of the policy reform that has multiplied levels of poverty and malnutrition in the country. While the government speaks of successful policy reform, what the people experience is the highest level of the development of misery. The authors draw attention to credible data sources that show universal policy reform failures.

Another consequence of Tinubu’s rule is the complete subordination of Nigeria’s interests to American hegemony. Since his inauguration, the President has been actively soliciting close ties and collaboration with the Americans. He has taken the option of succumbing to American imperialism at a historical moment when that crumbling hegemon is declining, indeed collapsing before our very eyes. We are becoming close friends with a country that recently acted as a brigand, sending a military force to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife. Why are we so close to a country that decided to completely wipe out the leadership of Iran to impose regime change only to find out that the Iranians do not tolerate hegemons but give them a sound beating.

A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.