By Henry Akubuiro
Very few media practitioners in Nigeria have projected the Tinubu project like Sam Omatseye has done in the last two decades. Like a sturdy defender, he has covered every blade of grass to wade off adversaries, interpreting his visions to many Nigerians. In lucid prose, he has woven an episteme around the Tinubu persona and his messianic role, what he means and how he should be seen. Ploughing through a gallimaufry, Omatseye has found a fillet steak to offer all, including detractors, who sometimes find it hard to come to terms with his pillories.
Omatseye isn’t a Yoruba, lest we forget, and it takes an extraordinary sense of conviction to thread a path, which, most cases, in Nigeria, is the cozy field of paternal gadflies. For Omatseye, one doesn’t have to share a cultural bond with any Nigerian to buy into his visions. He has remained steadfast in this conviction. How enobling actors contribute to the grand narrative of statehood seems to be the gourmet that excites his appetite.
Enter Beating All Odds: Diaries and Essays on How Bola Tinubu Became President. For the first time in decades, Nigeria witnessed one of the most firecely contested presidential elections, which produced President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on May 29, 2024. The opposition candidates, the former Nigerian Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, and former Anambra State Governor, Peter Obi, made it an unprecedented epic battle.
In this book, Omatseye, a seasoned journalist, playwright, poet and playwright, unfurls the maelstrom of the 2022/2023 campaign via a weekly diary he wrote during the season, capturing the mood, intrigues, power play and political daliance of that period. Omatseye writes from the perspective of both a detached observer as a journalist and an active participant as a Tinubu loyalist. Outside the diaries, the book offers a glimpse into the political undercurrents and dynamics in the intervening period and how Tinubu overcame the spanners on the wheels of his presidential ambition.
Omatseye begins his updates on August 19, 2022 by capturing the crisis in the PDP, especially the spat between the Atiku camp and the Wike camp, which threatened the unity of the party. Omatseye’s diary captures the beginning of the presidential campaigns, the mischief against Tinubu over his state of health by enemies and the spirited attempt by Bayo Onanuga to counter the mischiefmakers, the Obidient rally in Lagos, the MC Oluomo rally in Lagos, the takeoff of the PDP campaign in Uyo, the APC campaigns across the country, the meeting of the Arewa Consultative Forum and Atiku’s assertion about northerners and the 2023 polls. Omatseye recalls: “His track is dangerous. He did not get enough condemnation from the north, and that should worry anyone. It may be a tacit acceptance that the polls are going to entrench an ethnic trend, and it behoves the critical stakeholders to fight it, or else it will be a bitter campaign in the months ahead” (p. 22).
Omatseye’s December 9, 2022 update recollects the Tinubu visit to Chattam House, London, and the catcalls by rival supporters. He also chronicles Obi’s visits to churches to shore up his support base. At that early stage, the chronicler says that Obi had emerged as the main contender of the PDP presidential ticket in the south and Atiku in the north. Wike’s Integrity Group or G-5, a fraction of disgruntled PDP governors, also appears in Omatseye’s diaries, with their publicised meetings. Obasanjo’s endorsement of Peter Obi is also captured in his weekly updates.
Reliving the tension in the land, in his last update on February 17, 2023, Omatseye writes: “The week before the election shaped out very tense, especially for the ruling party. It seems obvious that the worries that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu expressed about efforts to scuttle his path to victory have never been better revealed than when the president went on the television and defied the Supreme Court ruling… It baffles many why Buhari say he supports Tinubu while his policy alienates him…”(p.59).
Away from the updates, Omatseye, in the second part of the book, unveils more detailed essays he wrote previously on the state of the nation, going back to February 18, 2013, up to October 23, 2024, the last being “Healing the Nation”, on October 30, 2023, where he wrote: “The Supreme Court victory is no excuse to glost, to emote at the expense of the losers… It is time to bind the wounds, to transcend he anxiety of divisions and rebuild a nation. More than a nation, can community. More than a community, soul” (p.336). Characteristically, Omatseye distills issues with bravura and pyrotechnics.
In retrospect, Omatseye’s Beating All Odds: Diaries and Essays on How Bola Tinubu Became President has set a pace on campaign chronicles. A book like this offers seamless socio-political sequences and a stark reminder of how delicate a landscape the contemporary Nigerian political trajectory is. It offers us lens to see all the multifarious dots that define each era’s political chapters.