Why Tinubu has to learn from History and not Mistake

Why does Asiwaju Bola Tinubu want to learn from a mistake instead of learning from history? History does not repeat itself. Men repeat history and that is a mistake. How can Tinubu be so naive to expect that even if the All Progressives Congress gives him its ticket in 2023 (possible, but iffy) that Northerners will leave prominent Northerners in the Peoples Democratic Party, like Atiku Abubakar, Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, Aminu Tambuwal and Sule Lamido to vote for him?


If Tinubu thinks that what happened to the late chief MKO Abiola will happen to him, then he is allowing hubris blind his judgment. I recommend to him the biography of Shehu Musa Yar’adua, titled ‘A Life of Service’, and written by Miss Jacqueline Farris.

In that book, he will read that the late Chief MKO Abiola was a political sacrifice by the Northern political elite of the Social Democratic Party, led by the late Tafida of Katsina (Shehu Musa Yar’adua) who knew beforehand (from intuition, not conspiracy) that General Babangida was going to annul the June 12, 1993 elections and only decided to support Chief MKO Abiola so that they could use Babangida to destroy Abiola and use Abiola to destroy Babangida, leaving the coast clear for them.

As a matter of fact, when prominent politicians asked Shehu Yar’adua why he was supporting Chief Abiola, he responded by saying that if he supported a Northerner, the Northerner would win, but Babangida would annul the election and the North would accept it because they were both Northerners. But if he supported a Southerner, like Abiola, when Babangida annulled the election, the South would rise up against him and he (Shehu Yar’adua) and his movement, will support the South and in one fell swoop, they will be rid of both Babangida and Abiola.

Let us face the truth, the North is by far more politically sophisticated than the South of Nigeria. Only one Southerner, to my knowledge, has been able to outflank the North, and that is former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Bola Tinubu does not have what it takes. He is being led by the nose, hopefully, not to his doom, but to his disgrace.

Recently, Nasir El-Rufai was in Lagos at the behest of the Bridge Club, which put up a hastily arranged, and probably custom-designed occasion tagged, “An evening with His Excellency Mallam Nasir El-Rufai. It was a moment where El-Rufai delivered the general thinking of the Northern elite as regards Bola Tinubu.

At that event, El-Rufai, who had once knelt down for Tinubu, flippantly remarked “Godfatherism.

This is Lagos. Let me tell you something sir; you know, Kaduna State used to be like that. There were three or four politicians in Kaduna that you could not become anything unless you had them on your side. Those were the godfathers of Kaduna politics and you had to carry them along and you know, the three words, ‘carry them along’ mean paying them regularly. “But we chose a different path and the long and short of it now is that after this election in 2019, we have retired all of them; we had to.”
Mr. El-Rufai then went on to give Lagosians tutorials on how to defeat their own ‘godfather’.

Defeat, is what the North has planned for Bola Tinubu! And the problem with Bola Tinubu is that, unlike Obasanjo, he is a coward. The North knows that they have finished using Tinubu. After Buhari’s re-election, they see him as being as useful as a used sanitary pad. In their eye, he is only as relevant as the ‘p’ in psychology. They also know that he is too cowardly to stand up to them and so they are toying with him and disrobing him before his own people. They intend the complete and total demystification of the bullion van-loving lion of Bourdillon.

The drama between El-Rufai and Bola Tinubu just serves to expose the servile and bootlicking nature of Bola Tinubu. It is almost like an episode of Game of Thrones. In this episode, Nasir El-Rufai insulted Bola Tinubu. But rather than face his SLAVE MASTER, who insulted him, Bola Tinubu rather PROJECTED his anger in an UNPROVOKED attack on the Peoples Democratic Party, calling them all sorts of names.

This is what they call TRANSFERENCE in psychology, where a PSYCHOLOGICAL PATIENT transfers his aggression on another person because he is too COWARDLY to face the real object of his anger!

I urge the leaders of the Southwest to look at the man who parades himself as their leader. Surely, they cannot trust the fate of 40 million Yoruba to such an anodyne creature!

A man that can be insulted so irreverently by Nasir El-Rufai and just takes it. Say what you will about Olusegun Obasanjo, but this could never have happened to him.

Bola Tinubu once said this about Obasanjo in a March 25, 2012 interview with Vanguard newspapers:

“If you underestimate Obasanjo, it is at your own peril because he has the character, strategy and will to destabilize you and you are gone to the bush, you are gone to the rubble. Very deceitful.”

The above assessment is very correct. This is the type of leader the Southwest needs to plot their political ascendancy post 2019, not a servile bootlicker that can be toyed with by Nasir El-Rufai. Not at all.

Bola Tinubu is nothing but a Quisling. He is not fit to stand beside Olusegun Obasanjo, perhaps the greatest leader to have come out of Africa. It is just a pity, that it is the North that knows this man’s worth more than the South and more than his own people. But in an attempt to make them appreciate the blessing that God gave them, let me just talk a little about Obasanjo.

Before Olusegun Obasanjo became Nigeria’s military head of state in 1976, Nigeria had had four previous leaders. They were Prime Minister Abubakar Tarawa Balewa, Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, General Yakubu Gowon and General Murtala Mohammed.

Of the four, three were murdered. The one who was not murdered (Yakubu Gowon), was overthrown.
Olusegun Obasanjo is the first Nigerian leader to have had a natural tenure uninterrupted by coups, death or tragedy. Think about that. And then between 1979, when he handed power to President Shehu Shagari, and 1999, when he returned as a democratically elected President, Nigeria had six leaders. They are the late President Shehu Shagari, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, General Ibrahim Babangida, Chief Ernest Shonekan, General Sani Abacha and General Abdulsalami Abubakar.

Of these six leaders, four of them were removed either by a coup, civil unrest or with a gun pointed to their head. One of them died as a victim of a conspiracy whose plotters we still do not know. And the last one, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, hurriedly hashed over before the fate of his predecessors befell him. Olusegun Obasanjo, who returned as a democratically elected President on May 29, 1999, is the second Nigerian leader to have a natural tenure, uninterrupted by coups, death or tragedy. Think about that again.

He is the author of six books. Is an intellectual. Is able to speak truth to power and go to prison for doing so. This man was so courageous that when he was informed in Copenhagen by then US ambassador to Nigeria, Walter Carrington, that General Sani Abacha would arrest him if he returned home, he chose to return home. This is even where he had been offered asylum by the West.

But let us come back to reality. Let us face the present. All over Nigeria, and also in the Southwest, herdsmen of Fulani heritage have been killing Nigerians without the Buhari administration doing anything tangible to stop them or bring them to justice.

Almost everyone has been afraid to speak up and hold the Buhari government to account. That is until Obasanjo spoke on the matter on May 19, 2019 when he slammed the Buhari administration and said that the herdsmen and Boko Haram killings are “no longer an issue of lack of education and lack of employment for our youths in Nigeria which it began as, it is now West African fulanization, African Islamization”.

Four days later, Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, put aside his well-known animus for former President Olusegun Obasanjo, to agree with him on his comments on herdsmen and Boko Haram and their Islamisation agenda, and condemned the Buhari government.

That took courage! The type of courage that Bola Tinubu, sadly, does not have. What is Tinubu doing as herdsmen kill his people? He is licking the boots of the Grand Patron. Igbo man say tufiakwa!

ThisDay