MAY 29 marked two years of the Tinubu administration. It also reminds me of the politics surrounding the June 12, 1993 presidential election.
I can never forget my encounter with the then Bauchi State Deputy Governor, Dahiru Mohammed Deba, around June 14, 1993. I had been sent to Bauchi to cover the June 12, 1993, presidential election for The Nigerian Economist (magazine) where I worked.
There were just the three of us journalists from Lagos: Victor Ifijeh for Concord, Gbemiga Ogunleye for The Guardian, and me.
As expected, it was an eerie political climate that was bound to scare the most stoic of souls. Bauchi State was not only known to be religiously volatile, but it was also politically conservative. It was not surprising that the National Republican Convention held sway in the state.
But there were a few politicians on the ground working for the Social Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Moshood Abiola. The late Dr Ibrahim Tahir, an eloquent politician with a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, led the pack.
I interviewed Tahir and other SDP stalwarts as part of the materials for my report. For balancing, I needed to get a few NRC stalwarts as well. And that was where Dahiru Deba came in. By the time he was ready for the interview, the presidential election figures had been known unofficially, with Abiola in an embarrassingly clear lead over Bashir Tofa, the NRC candidate.
By the time I met Deba, the NRC camp all over the country was in a mourning mood. The Deba I had met earlier was no longer the same person. A throng of crowd around him was menacingly hostile to me; perhaps waiting for an order to start the killing and maiming and burning in the Bauchi notorious manner.
Politely, Deba assured me that what he was about to say was not for me, but for my people, the Yoruba. He started by condemning the hysterical jubilations in Lagos and other places over Abiola’s presumed victory.
From there, he launched into a no-holds-barred tirade on the Yoruba’s arrogance in politics and why they were unfit to rule Nigeria. He went further to acknowledge the Yoruba’s outstanding academic prowess but claimed that they should not be confused with the innate capacity to govern.
He tutored me or reminded me about the administrative exploits of Uthman dan Fodio, Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa. For the first time in my journalistic career, I lost my voice.
A whimper from me could have been an instant jungle justice! And the clincher came: Deba declared arrogantly that since his people had given the Yoruba the opportunity to rule, they would be waiting to see what Abiola would do with power.
Pointedly, he warned that they would not blink to take it back from him by any means if he messed up. Abiola was not allowed to govern for a day. Even Tahir, who had been jubilating over Abiola’s victory at the polls, changed his countenance and his narrative with us, Ifijeh, Ogunleye and me, about the election on his return from Arewa House, Kaduna, where he had attended the Northern leaders’ meeting.
The Nigerian Economist’s June 12 election reports were never published! I narrated this story given the unfolding politics of 2027.
There is no iota of doubt that many northern politicians are very uncomfortable with President Bola Tinubu’s style of administration. Rightly or wrongly, his government’s radical reforms are seen as anti-North.
And the arrowhead of the northern opposition, Nasir el-Rufai, like Deba, is firing on all cylinders. He said the main goal of the coalition he was putting together was to send Tinubu packing back to Lagos in 2027. Will they succeed?
Tinubu, like Abiola, has a bulldozer-like personality. Like Abiola, a section of the northern political establishment never wanted him to be president. But unlike Abiola, his 2023 mandate could not be truncated because 2023 was not 1993.
Even at that, they almost had their way before Tinubu’s Abeokuta “Emi L’okan” declaration. It was a bold, courageous, and strategic speech that sent an unambiguous message to the northern power brokers around the then-President Muhammadu Buhari, that Tinubu was ready for the worst-case scenario if the mafia political manipulation succeeded.
Perhaps, fearing the June 12 ugly consequences, Buhari whipped the mafia into line. Between then and now, a lot of things have changed for the worse.
Nigeria, from North to South, has been turned into a single belt of hunger, misery and want. For different reasons, the Tinubu magic has lost its allure even for those who were ready to swear by Tinubu’s name in 2023. El-Rufai, for example.
Let’s face it, today, anyone who is carried away by the gale of defections from PDP to Tinubu’s APC does not understand northern politics and its peculiarities.
The late Mallam Adamu Ciroma once brilliantly explained the power formula of the northern political establishment to me. He said any time the North forged a political alliance with any other parts of the country except the Yoruba West, the arrangements never lasted.
For him, the best guarantee of Nigeria’s political stability was when the North and the West mainstream leaders worked together. I think that played out for President Olusegun Obasanjo’s eight-year rule.
It also worked for President Buhari’s eight-year reign. The permutation was that it would work out remarkably well with Tinubu.
Today, virtually all Buhari’s right-hand men are fiercely opposed to Tinubu. It will be a grand deception for the Tinubu camp to think that it has the mainstream northern politicians in its kitty.
Given his scorecard in office, I can’t bet that the Yoruba West will also be ready to go blindly to any political war with Tinubu as it was in 2023.
Nigeria, on Tinubu’s watch, is in an economic mess. Yet, Tinubu dances on. But there is a political lesson in a story by my father. There was this man called Sakesake. He had a very thin and fragile waist, which made him so dexterous in dancing.
Sakesake exploited this trait in dancing by winning all the dancing competitions in villages and towns around him. But it came one tragic day when Sakesake thought he had become undefeatable and thought another dancing competition was going to be a walkover.
His drummers extolled his dancing steps and urged him to go on. He danced and danced and danced until his thin waist broke! “Sakesake dadi,” my father narrated. Sakesake lost and went back home in ignominy.
There is a lesson for Tinubu in all this: Political power and authority are best managed by the humble and the visionary. So far, Tinubu is neither a humble politician nor a visionary leader. The “Ides of March” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar refers to March 15, the day Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of assumed loyal senators who feared his growing power. It was a grand day of betrayal.
June 24, 1993, was Abiola’s “Ides of March”. Will Tinubu’s day of reckoning, too, come in 2027? Will the political manipulations by a few not coincide with the economic misery of the majority? What will be the aftermath?
Three factors essentially define Nigerian presidential politics: personality, ethnicity, and religiosity. They all worked for him in 2023. Will these matter in 2027?
As a one-time United Kingdom Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, famously said, “A week is a long time in politics”, the June 12 debacle taught me that in the politics of the North of Nigeria, a day is a long time in politics.
Tinubu should beware of the Ides of March in 2027. It has grave implications for Nigeria and its politics. He should not end like Sakesake.
Mr Adediran, a former Chairman of the Editorial Board of The PUNCH, writes from Ogun State
