AKIN OSUNTOKUN FROM THISDAY
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”-Winston Churchill- commending the bravery of the British people (especially the youths) during the second world war.“Everyone should lose a battle in his youth, so that he does not lose a war when he is old”- George Martin
The debt of tribute I owe the younger generation in Nigeria has accumulated since the martyrdom of Leah Sharibu. It is late in coming but God knows my appreciation of her supreme sacrifice resides in my heart since the beginning of her captivity. She stared terrorism in the face and rejected her captors’s offer of conditional freedom. In the circumstances, it was not really a demanding coercion. Just momentarily renounce Christianity for Islam and we will set you free. If there was ever a good bargain, this was it. Yet she rejected the offer. Remember she was even a child. As a matter of fact, the Islamic doctrine of taqqiya has a priori absolved her of culpability in specifically the kind of situation she found herself in. Faced with a similar burden, did the founder of christianity, Saint Peter, not deny Jesus Christ, thrice before cock crow at dawn?
I have been privileged by fate to be at the centre stage where her peers have decided to pick up the gauntlet for the political salvation of Nigeria. They call themselves the obidients movement, so christened as a rally for the personification of their ideal choice for the political leadership of Nigeria, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Mr Peter Obi.
Not too uncommon, at the latter part of middle age, I have been experiencing intermittent weariness of spirit on the sacrifices of the political choice I have made and the probability of Nigeria getting it right. If I will not succumb, the credit goes to the pact I have intrinsically made with this Nigerian demographic. I urged them on, all through the campaign, with the challenge and exhortation of Frantz Fanon, that, “out of relative obscurity, every generation must discover its destiny, to fulfil or betray it”. As the 2023 presidential election goes, they fulfilled their part of the bargain but their dream has been abbreviated by the depravity of the political status quo.
As a student of Nigerian politics, it would be remiss of me to give the impression that I did not anticipate all that has happened in the interim. But we human beings are a creature of hope. How could I have imagined that a Muhammadu Buhari presidency would, in repudiation of its soul and spirit, birth a new dawn for Nigerian politics? Wasn’t I the one who earlier spoke of the theory of social reproduction in which tendency, a regime reproduces itself, in form and character. So, welcome to the neo Buhari ideological dispensation where we are confronted with its manifestation in the weaponization of ethno religious bigotry and polarisation, not to talk of the intimate commonality of the physical and mental fragility of the man on whose desk the buck stops. An apple, they say, does not fall from the tree.
There is the aspect of furtive Yoruba triumphalism, or, to be more precise, the Yoruba of Senator Ahmed Bola Tinubu’s persuasion. It is the difference between the legitimacy of the Ayo Adebanjo’s Afenifere and the illegitimacy of the contrived Reuben Fasonranti’s faction. So to say, the ‘election’ of Tinubu is inherently a tragedy for all concerned, beginning with the man of the moment himself. I cannot recall a precedent in modern world history where an incoming president arrives in office with the liability and illegitimacy of a most disreputable pedigree. Not even the infamous Donald Trump, matches him in this regard. At least Trump won his election, free and fair.
