Twice in the last two and a half years, it appeared that Bola Tinubu would be denied the object of his political labours. The first time was in October 2020, when some #EndSARS protesters in Lagos took out their rage on investments and properties believed to be owned by Tinubu, including Television Continental (TVC), The Nation newspaper, and the Lagos Oriental Hotel on Victoria Island. Because of the ferocity of the attacks—and the ostensible damage to Tinubu’s reputation—there appeared to be no way back to widespread public acceptance for him, let alone a credible presidential challenge. In retrospect, the #EndSARS-inspired attacks were a foreshadowing of the outcome of the Lagos presidential election, though there were clearly other factors at play. The second time was during the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential primary last year when Tinubu faced a shadowy coalition within his own party that seemed hell-bent on denying him the nomination.
That Tinubu has survived all of this, including some of the most scathing portrayals of any Nigerian political leader in recent memory during the campaign season, speaks to his tenacity and durability. Tenacity and durability, however, do not guarantee political success, and in Tinubu’s case, they had to be combined with foresight and strategic thinking, which had always meant making “investments” in people and communities that made little or no sense to an observer. This is what Tinubu was referring to when he made his now-famous “It is my turn” declaration in June 2022, stating that he had paid his dues—to persons, entities, and various ethnic and sociocultural communities across the country—and it was time to cash in. This “I have done well by you, now it is your turn to do well by me” mercantilist conception of politics, and the sense of entitlement that comes with it, is precisely the problem, according to his critics.
Tinubu enters the saddle at a time of deep social strife and widening political schism in the country, in part because of this. If the majority of the younger generation finds his very idea repugnant, it is because, rightly or wrongly, they see him as the personification of the debasement of the nation’s moral currency, as well as a continuation of the disastrous Buhari administration. According to this logic, the fact that Buhari owed his ascension to the presidency to the Tinubu political machine makes Tinubu equally responsible for the Buhari disaster and, as a result, engraves his image as an amoral horse-trader.
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However, Tinubu’s detractors do not come solely from the younger generation. Tinubu’s decision to select a Muslim running mate was the height of contempt for the part of the Christian community that feels aggrieved at the perceived disregard for the community’s safety and interests during the Buhari years, and the “Not My President” refrain steadily coming out of this constituency is a reflection of both its lingering annoyance at its perceived marginalisation and the yet to be proven belief that Tinubu acted in cahoots with both the federal
Tinubu also cannot afford to relax in his Yoruba ethnic home base, where his election as APC candidate splintered and pitted him against one faction of Afenifere, the Yoruba sociocultural group. Furthermore, there is no love lost between Tinubu and former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who clashed with Tinubu when he was president and the latter was Lagos State Governor (1999-2007), and made a late, perplexing move to halt the count when early results from across the country pointed to Tinubu’s victory.
Finally, the Igbo are understandably resentful of another failed presidential bid, and the international community, which was understandably sympathetic to Peter Obi’s candidature but remains sceptical of Tinubu, is caught somewhere between nonchalance and low wattage hostility.
Tinubu will have to find a way to reach out to these constituencies while balancing his outreach with the need to repay outstanding political debts to his allies and groups in the core northern region and parts of the lower Middle Belt where concentrated support got him elected. Nothing but a conscious and genuine effort on the part of the Tinubu administration to expand opportunity, increase social mobility, and deepen popular faith in the Nigerian enterprise will suffice for the younger generation, many of whom are understandably sceptical about their immediate and long-term prospects in the country. This constituency, already entrenched on social media and wielding tremendous power within Nigeria’s increasingly influential infotainment industry, will play a critical role in how the public, and especially the international media, perceive Tinubu and his administration in the coming years.
Simultaneously, Tinubu will have to go out of his way to convince the Christian community that its fears of political marginalisation and social inferiority are unfounded. Beyond symbolic politics, he must act quickly to prevent attacks on Christian communities and places of worship by suspected Fulani herdsmen, particularly in the Middle Belt, but also throughout the country. According to the Anambra-based International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety), at least 5,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria in 2022, with over 1,000 killed in the first three months of 2023 alone.
However, as daunting as the preceding political challenges appear to be, they pale in comparison to Tinubu’s economic situation, in which an impending debt overhang, reliance on oil revenue, industrial restlessness, rising unemployment, and a chronic culture of waste continue to frustrate ordinary Nigerians’ entrepreneurial spirit and undermine the expectations of the country’s friends and allies. While there is no need for extrasensory perception to see what needs to be done—diversify the economy, embrace fiscal discipline, invest in infrastructure, ensure transparency, curb public waste, and unchain the private sector—the fact that it continues to elude successive generations of political leaders is one of the more perplexing aspects of the Nigerian condition.
Insofar as Tinubu is willing to address these issues, and while he must master the momentum of unexpected events in order to avoid being engulfed by it, one thing is painfully obvious to every Nigerian student: he has little chance of success unless he first confronts the scourge of corruption. While every leader in recent memory has tried and failed—an outcome explained in part by the fact that corruption in Nigeria, being normative, is not amenable to unilateral correction, no matter how earnest—Tinubu faces a greater challenge in that, given the torrent of recent allegations of graft against him, he must persuade a rightly sceptical public that he is above board and sincere in his promise to “change our mindset” and “kill corruption in our society.” Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Tinubu’s 37-year-old son, Oluwaseyi, had purchased a London mansion that the Federal Government intended to seize “over an alleged $1.6 billion fraud.” If the public believes that his reason for being is to continue doing business as usual while enriching his immediate family, his administration’s tenuous moral legitimacy will crumble quickly.
Beyond the immediate horizon of corruption, but roughly under the same normative rubric, is the problem of everyday lawlessness and civility collapse. It would be an understatement to say that civility is in short supply in modern Nigeria, where jumpy citizens and reckless police administer instance justice. This is due, among other things, to widespread distrust of state institutions, particularly law enforcement and the judiciary, which are viewed as obnoxious at best and pernicious at worst by many Nigerians. In light of this, it is critical that the new administration works to restore the legitimacy of the Nigerian state and its constituent institutions. This is especially true because, as the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once said, “Without a minimum of good manners, society has never been able to exist, whether as a people, a tribe, or a nation.” In other words, the coarsening of mores in Nigeria threatens the foundation of social order.
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While the request is significant, Tinubu, a well-known delegate, has a formidable pedigree. Clearly, and as he demonstrated as Lagos State Governor, he has what it takes to govern (including critical connections to international business) and is astute enough to recognise that the coalition that brought him political victory may not be the one required for governing. Where Buhari has been decidedly tame, such as in foreign policy, he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being more assertive and assuming the diplomatic mantle that the rest of Africa and the world see as Nigeria’s destiny.
Tinubu’s most sincere wish (as is the wish of every Yoruba leader) is to be elevated to the same pantheon in the Yoruba political imagination as the late philosopher-statesman Obafemi Awolowo. However, lacking Awolowo’s ideological discipline and personal austerity (granted, Awolowo may have been a tad too monastic), Tinubu must be content with being given an opportunity that Awolowo, for all his sagacity, never got.
Tinubu has had plenty of time to prepare for the presidency, having been planning for it since his governorship ended in 2007. Now he must show that he has spent an equal amount of time considering how to govern.
