Contrary to what many Nigerians believe, the man known as Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not and was never a tribalist. He is something else. Just read along.
I first knew this man in late 1998 through Okwadike Dr. Chukwuemeka Ezeife, the former Governor of Anambra State, at the beginning of the transition to democracy from military rule. My associate (actually my brother) in Nigeria had not long before at my behest paid for and acquired the application form to register a political party, a youth-driven revolutionary party, designed to change Nigeria. But the time given was too short for me and my associates to meet all the requirements needed by the then National Electoral Commission. Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar’s regime was working on an uber-accelerated schedule to transfer power to civilians. Even the late Chief Bola Ige later disclosed that the founders of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) barely made it by the deadline. The whole military to civilian transition took just six months! I basically wasted the money.
So, I segued to supporting Chief Olu Falae, the Yale University-trained economist, former Minister and former SGF. It was in this connection that I began a long-distance association with the man known as Tinubu. Though along the line he called on me to return to Nigeria as the campaigns got underway, I didn’t or couldn’t. He told me during one conversation: “Hector, come back.”
When he commenced his landmark infrastructural redevelopment of Lagos, one of new Governor Tinubu’s first projects was in the traditional main Igbo transportation corridor of Itire, Lawanson through Ojuelegba Road to Western Avenue. When later his government was granting highly valuable land plots on VI and in Lekki, he included top Igbo business executives in the land allocations. Nobody heard that the Tinubu of that period was discriminating against Igbo residents of Lagos.
Igbos voted massively for Tinubu in his governorship race in 1999, ditto for Chief Falae in the presidential race. Igbos, with Tinubu’s NADECO efforts still fresh in their minds, stood by him. They rooted for him when as Lagos State Governor he took on the overbearing President Olusegun Obasanjo over the matter of local government area funding for the State. The Igbos for the most part always voted against Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, for the main reason that as head of the Nigerian 3rd Marine Commando Division during the final months of the Civil War soldiers under his command committed heinous war crimes, mostly rape and sexual slavery (aside from looting) against thousands of Igbo women and girls, and got away with it.
Obasanjo only won the presidential election of 1999 because Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar massively rigged the 1999 presidential election for him. And even prior to that presidential election of 1999 when he contested against Dr. Olu Falae, the two generals Babangida and Abdulsalami called the PDP co-founder and frontrunner Dr. Alex Ekwueme (who had the support of former President Shehu Shagari and allied Hausa-Fulani civilian oligarchs) to a private meeting in Abuja and basically ordered him to stand down from the contest, warning him that they would never allow him to be president. And in 2003, as the incumbent president, Obasanjo co-opted INEC Chairman Abel Guobadia to outrageously rig the presidential election to his benefit, largely by misappropriating Chief Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s Igbo votes..
As much as Ashiwaju Tinubu may disagree, Democracy is what we are supposed to have in Nigeria. People in the vast array of democratic nations around the world vote on the basis of multiple reasons. It could be race, religion, ethnicity, income class, political ideology, etc. The majority of whites in the U.S. for a long period in its history opposed the idea of a member of the Catholic Church becoming president, for fear that he would be following orders given to him by the Pope in Rome. It took 184 years after her independence from Great Britain for the U.S. to elect its first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. White racists, alarmed that white people are gradually and inexorably becoming a minority in America, seem determined to vote for former President Donald J. Trump, regardless of how disgusting they find aspects of his personal behavior.
Even though Tinubu had in no way singled out Igbos for maltreatment in Lagos during his first term in office as governor, many Igbos were preparing to turn away from the man called Tinubu to Mr. Funsho Williams in the gubernatorial election cycle of 2003. And when 2007 came around it was clear that many Igbos in Lagos were beginning to abandon the Tinubu-led party. For one, Mr. Williams was a Catholic, sharing the same Christian denomination with most Igbos and, secondly, his wife reportedly had Igbo roots. Tinubu is a Muslim.
That was the origin of the political break between the Tinubu political machine and local Igbos that culminated in 2015. In 2007, many Igbos, including me, voted for Jimmy Agbaje against Bola Tinubu’s hand-picked successor, Babatunde Fashola. But my vote easily went to Jimmy Agbaje solely because he was my old schoolmate and friend of my brother. Otherwise I might have voted for Fashola, another Muslim (albeit with a Christian wife), because most of the two contenders’ contemporaries considered him the more humble. In that 2007, I would have leaned to voting for Funsho Williams had he not been assassinated before the vote. And for the same reason that he was an old boy of my school. This unrealized choice had nothing to do with whether Tinubu had done well in his two terms in office or not. Many people make their electoral choices with similar considerations.
The man we all know as Ashiwaju Bola Tinubu is a political strategist of no mean order. He is also a man of vaulting ambition— Thoroughly Machiavellian in personal philosophy and practice.
One who will use phony ethnic sentiments to whip up maltreatment and brutalization of Igbos in Lagos. For him, it’s like: I need a university degree as one cannot get ahead in Nigeria without a degree, so get it by any means. Or, I need lots of money, as one cannot reach the heights in Nigeria, so grab money by hook or crook. And, I need to be president of Nigeria, so grab it, snatch it and run with it. As Jesus Christ said [in the Christian Bible], Mark Chapter 8, Verse 36, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?”
God created man, and He can make any man or woman to do His will. But God doesn’t do that. He has allowed every human being a free will. The Tinubu we know today should not usurp, suppress, abrogate, undercut people’s right to their free will. The great majority of the people in Lagos — Yorubas, Igbos, Hausas, Edo, Itshekiri, Urhobo, Efik, Ijaw, Tiv, Ibibio, etc., chose Peter Obi for President, and not unexpectedly Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour for Lagos Governor.
Brazenly and violently going against their will portends great danger for Nigeria. For over 100 years Yorubas and Igbos have lived peaceably side by side in Lagos, and never fought each other in ethnic clashes. In February 2002, some Yorubas (reportedly OPC militants) fought Hausas in Idi-Araba, and Mushin areas of Lagos in pitched battles that took many lives. Let Tinubu and his misguided cohorts not set off a conflagration in Nigeria that they cannot put out.
♦ Hector-Roosevelt Ukegbu, an Economist, Financial Consultant and Business Analyst, is based in the United States.
- Anambra 2025: The APC’s Ticket Conundrum - May 17, 2024
- CP Itam Assumes Duty As The 34th Commissioner Of Police in Anambra - May 13, 2024
- Fubara vs Wike: Fist-fighting in Troubled Rivers Over Public Money - May 11, 2024
