More than 100 days after he mounted the saddle as the President of Nigeria on May 29, 2023, Tinubu’s ‘’Renewed Hope’’ campaign mantra has rapidly degenerated into a renewed state of hopelessness for the Nigerian people he was elected to govern. After eight years of acute leadership failure and unprecedented levels of misrule by the outgone administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, which left Nigeria heavily indebted and its people one of the most impoverished, pauperised, traumatized and terrorized in the world, many Nigerians believed that their worst leadership nightmare was over. Such were consequences of the leadership failure of the Buhari administration as seen in heightened insecurity, monstrous corruption and debilitating economic malaise that Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) could not help but to run his campaign on the mantra of renewed hope on the eve of the 2023 presidential election as though in acknowledgement of the grim realities of Buhari’s Nigeria.
Unfortunately, Nigeria’s leadership nightmare does not only seem unending but has become dreadful, scary and frightening under the current administration of President Tinubu. The deterioration in the quality of welfare and security of the Nigerian people since the inception of the Tinubu administration has been fast and furious, with the majority of Nigerians barely existing and not living. The concomitant effect of supersonic inflation amid stagnant wages, high unemployment, high cost of existence and sustained insecurity has further plunged Nigerians into the abyss of economic hopelessness where they are further impoverished, pauperized, traumatized and terrorized in a manner never envisaged even by the most pessimistic pundits. In a little over 100 days in office, Tinubu has broken the eight-year record of Buhari in leadership failure and its consequences on the Nigerian people.
For a man who has been a central figure in the establishment politics of Nigeria with all the benefits, privileges and powers to decide who gets what, when and how from the public for more than three decades, having been a senator from Lagos State in the 3rd Republic [1991-1993], governor of Lagos [1999-2007] and has remained the undisputed godfather of Nigeria’s commercial capital by installing every governor after him and finally got elected President after supporting one President after another into power, Tinubu was expected to have seen it all enough to a firm decision to be a statesman in the administration of troubled country like Nigeria. It was expected of a man of Tinubu’s status to have come under the realization that, to preserve the privileges and powers of the establishment in Nigeria, he needed to commit class suicide in the self-enlightened interest of himself and other members of the ruling elite.
And in committing this much required class suicide, Tinubu was expected to substitute politics of state patronage to a privileged few with good governance to the many underprivileged Nigerians whose hopes he promised to renew, corruption with integrity, sectionalism with nationalism, impunity with rule of law and absolute fidelity to constitutionalism and above all putting Nigeria’s interest ahead of ethnic, religious, partisan or self-interest in the administration of a country in crisis. There comes a time in the life of a nation when the ruling class will have to make a decision to shed its privileges of corruption, misrule, racial, ethnic and religious advantages in order to enthrone socio-economic justice, good governance and economic prosperity to stabilize and reposition the state on the path of sustainable national development, peace and progress. The decision to end slavery in Europe and North America was taken by the members of the privileged White slave-owning class just as the decision to end segregation in America was at the instance of White Supreme Court justices that were appointed by White President Dwight David Eisenhower in the 1954 landmark judgment in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. Similarly, apartheid rule in South Africa did not come to an end only because of the struggles of Black victims like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Thambo and Govan Mbeki. It took the ultimate decision of President F.W. De Clarke, under international pressure from his White brethren of mostly Scandinavian countries, to commit class suicide by putting an end to White privilege in exchange for a rainbow South African nation, where racial equality, equity, justice and fairness reign.
In 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo, upon assumption of office as President, identified corruption among the ruling class to which he belonged and took a decision to end it by setting up the ICPC and EFCC and made examples of members of his cycle. Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, who was a beneficiary of electoral banditry in the 2007 presidential election, took the decision to reform the electoral management system to forestall a recurrence.
After 63 years of independence and 24 years of unbroken democracy, with neither yielding nationhood nor dividends in form of improved security and welfare for citizens, it is expected that those who have been the purveyors of misrule, just as they are the beneficiaries of the consequent corruption and spoils of government, should have realized that their current operating system is no longer sustainable, hence the need to commit class suicide. However, it is clear that Tinubu is unwilling to take this difficult decision to make life easier for the Nigerian people and has taken the easy decisions that have continued to make life difficult for Nigerians.
In taking the easy way out, Tinubu abdicated his core responsibility of providing energy security for the Nigerian people when he abruptly removed subsidy from petrol, Nigeria’s most important energy product, which drives the largest component of its productive economy, on inauguration day without sparing a thought for the concomitant effect on the people. This singular decision is slowly grinding the national economy to a halt, just as it has further depressed the living conditions of the people to mere existence.
To make matters worse, the Tinubu administration has no solution to the problem it has created. It carries on as though all is well, as long as the long convoys of exotic cars of the high and mighty in government are serviced at the expense of the public treasury in a manner that has left the hope of Nigerians thoroughly diminished in just 100 days.