How on earth did Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the man who today bears the title President of Nigeria, miss declaring Nnamdi Kanu a free man in his inauguration speech? To this day, I cannot wrap my head around the puzzle. That ought to be lowest of all low hanging fruits for a new leader after the tumultuous years of Muhammadu Buhari in relation to the Igbo nation.
Okay, the new president probably needed to be firmly on the seat before making the pronouncement that would have brought instant peace to the entire Eastern part of Nigeria. He would most certainly do it in the fashion of Olusegun Obasanjo who started the gale of forced retirements of the military top brass who had had a taste — any taste of political power – from the Ibrahim Babangida era to that of his immediate predecessor Abdulsalami Abubakar, as he was being chauffer-driven to the Aso villa. Right? Wrong. Dead wrong!
Tinubu had no such plans. Not on inauguration day and, if signs in the horizon are a guide, not in the foreseeable future. Kanu and the entire Igbo nation must be crushed, the new president and his handlers must be reasoning. It seems clear that to the current holders of the levers of power in Nigeria, the Lagos Boy must continue in the fashion of the hermit from Katsina whose ancestral home is in Niger Republic and who did everything in his power to blur the lines between his house in Nigeria and the home of his forefathers in the neighbouring country.
Buhari is lucky, he has two homes and never shied from making it public. So, he could be excused for being unconcerned that one home was sitting on a keg of gun powder with the unresolved Igbo nationality question. He has a second home in the Benin Republic, far away from the theater of war in Nigeria’s south east. But, other Nigerians south of the river, including Tinubu, have no such privilege. If the Lion of Bourdillon ever gets in the line of fire in his Lagos home – God forbid! – he has no separate ancestral home elsewhere outside Nigeria. Iragbiji, his rumoured ancestral home was still a part of Nigeria, the last time I checked.
So, if Buhari could be excused for refusing to solve the Kanu-Igbo conundrum before leaving office, Tinubu cannot be granted that privilege. It is a challenge that he ought to use his famed political sagacity to solve.
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Leaders across the globe would readily proclaim that no sacrifice is too heavy to pay for peace. Certainly, those in Nigeria do not share in that philosophy. Sixteen months on in office, Tinubu has continued to pick his teeth while the South East burns.
Pity.
Consider for a minute the peace that would most certainly have descended on the troubled Igbo nation, not to talk of the political capital that his administration would enjoy, if the new Aso Rock tenant had declared on inauguration day that no Nigerian would be unjustly incarcerated on his watch, let alone the one who has assumed martyrdom for demanding fairness for such a large swathe of ethnic sentiments like the Igbo.
As Nigeria’s Independence Day approaches on October 1, could the people who have the ears of the president tell him that he has so much to gain if Kanu is not detained a day further?
Relatedly, and to the utter surprise of all decent minds, the administration is currently prosecuting some citizens who participated in the recent rallies against mass hunger in the land for – wonder of all wonders! – treason.
Ebi n pa wa – we are hungry – in the Tinubu administration’s rule book is treasonous?
How did we get here? How did the grand patron of protest politics become so antagonistic to protests on assumption of power?
Again, I sincerely hope that the true friends of the current tenant in Aso Rock will sit him down for a frank talk: that power without compassion is tyranny; that the appropriate response to lamentation about hunger in the land is food subsidy as was done by the Lateef Jakande government in Lagos during the Second Republic — remove fuel subsidy if you will but put the money into the purchase of food items from farmers and sell at lower rates to the public; not mass arrest, detention and prosecution. Could they tell him that whatever we do today is tomorrow’s history; and that he cannot afford ignoring these two low hanging fruits for his administration to stand a chance of success?
If he is failing so spectacularly in steadying the ship of state with regards to the economy – in view of the astronomical rise in the prices of fuel, food and medication, as well as the bourgeoning insecurity in the land – can Tinubu at least look inwards and put an end to the misery of Nigerians on the political front?
