Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s futile quest for immortality

By UGO ONUOHA HE will never get it. But that should not stop those who consider him a stain and an aberration on the presidency of this country. He will spend his four years or eight years or any number of years at the helm of our ruling structure seeking validation and genuine acceptance. He won’t get it. Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, will spend the rest of his life attempting to fill holes that he has created in his pilgrimage thus far on this side of eternity. He has lived for over 70 years. Officially. Even the seven decades we have benchmarked with are riddled with controversies. His controversies are serial and debilitating. That’s the life of the man. He is like no other Nigerian. That ordinarily should be a compliment. But here, it is not. He is unique but for all that’s repulsive and atrocious and abominable. We will illustrate. Former president (1999-2007), Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, and Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka are from Ogun state, and they are generally regarded as childhood mates. Soyinka has a generally accepted and recognised birth record which shows that he is currently about 90 years old. Obasanjo does not have such and so has consistently admitted that he doesn’t know his birth date. At the last check Obasanjo is reportedly slightly younger than Soyinka, though in some quarters there’s a joke that in their younger days, Soyinka and others in their playgroup used to defer to Obasanjo as their senior. But somehow along the way, Soyinka overtook Obasanjo and became his (Obasanjo’s) elder brother on record. Elder brother or not, at least Nigerians have a fairly good idea of how old Obasanjo is. More importantly, he has not fought shy of saying that he doesn’t know when precisely he was born. There’s little or no controversy hovering over his person on this issue. That’s not the same with Tinubu. He has no settled state of origin even though his ‘traducers’ award Osun state to him. He does not have publicly or privately known brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, father or mother. He had no agemates and playmates from Osun state. He claims to be from Lagos state. Here also he had no agemates and no playmates either. If he were to be like Obasanjo or Soyinka, Nigerians would have used his mates in the mosque where he worshiped as a child or a young adult or the school which he attended, and who have birth records to determine the age group he could be assigned to. With Tinubu there are no such benchmarks. It’s one of the gaping holes in his life which needs to be filled. We are, however, minded to treat this matter as a minor issue though in the character count of every man nothing should be overlooked. Often, the building of character flaws start from the insignificant, from the little, until it becomes a full blown fraud. Tinubu is Nigeria’s president but he’s a haunted and troubled man. Look beyond the bravado and the strongman posturing. He is weak. He is vulnerable. He is constantly looking back. When you have holes in your life as he surely does, you will never stop to seek for things that would serve as veneers to cover up the yawning gaps. So those who take umbrage at Tinubu’s obsession with seeking validation and the company of decent people and society and immortality are gravely mistaken. In a sense Tinubu can be likened to some of us who are obsessed with titles. Part of the obsession is that we feel at every point that there’s something missing in our lives. And we believe that prefixes and/or suffixes will fill the void. Yes, those who have walked the straight and narrow path for almost all their lives have good reasons to treat Tinubu and his co-travellers with scorn and disdain, the offices they occupy notwithstanding. But they should also be treated with understanding. In the realm of conjecture, there’s a possibility that given another chance some of these monstrous transgressors and human scums may opt for a different path in their next incarnation. But we will never know. It’s the emptiness and the fear of ultimately amounting to nothing in spite of being created as the president of Nigeria that drives Tinubu in his cravings for moments, memorials, and monuments in his name. He lives behind a facade, if not outright lies, through and through for much of the 70 years or even 80 years of his life. He had to battle through multiple fronts to attain the presidency – in Nigeria and abroad – over the schools he allegedly attended, his national youth service corps certificate, the diplomas he was alleged to have been awarded, monetary forfeiture in the United States in connection with a suspected drug trafficking ring in Chicago, US, alleged identity theft, litigations in Nigeria and the US, and sundry odiums. The man still lives under a cloud of whether or not he has an adverse and incriminating record with the Intel (Intelligence) Community of America while he lived there in the 1970s. He is also perennially under the weight of his cover being fully blown as an asset of the US. It’s neither inconceivable nor unique but it should be concerning that the ruler of the biggest black country on earth might just be a mere agent or pawn of a foreign power, available to be manipulated, used and dumped. Former president of Panama, Manuel Noriega, once lived under that shadow. He was an asset of the US even while he was the president of his country. Later, the same US toppled him, moved him to America, tried and jailed him for drug trafficking. It takes courage to go to bed every night and wake up every morning with this knowledge playing in the back of his mind. It is not for nothing that Tinubu is unlike any president before him since the independence of this country