Tinubu: The power of ‘aforiti’

LOUIS ODION FROM PREMIUM TIMES

Indeed, a few days away, Tinubu will be crowned the 16th leader of the most populous black nation on earth.

Upon being declared winner of the 25 February polls by INEC, wherever he went or whomsoever of consequence he met, Jagaban formed the habit of flaunting his certificate of return as “my own World Cup”. But on account of his tortuous and thorny odyssey to Aso Rock in the past twenty-five years, that may as well pass for a testament in tenacity.

His bonhomie was unusually absent that night in 2009. He spoke little, his luminous eyes mostly staring at us intensely with an expression difficult to fathom. The “Governor of Example” (BRF) and I ended up being the last to leave the putative den of the “Lion of Bourdillon” in Lagos at past midnight.

Not until we were outside at the car park of our host’s Ikoyi home (sufficiently beyond his earshot), did the then Governor Babatunde Fashola (the one who had been Jagaban’s chief of staff for five years) share his observation: “Louis, I can tell Asiwaju is very, very depressed tonight.”

Drawing on an intimacy earned from working very closely with Asiwaju, BRF’s diagnosis could hardly be faulted. Lately, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) had suffered a series of reversals in courtrooms in Osun, Ekiti and Edo, in the pursuit of mandates “stolen” during the 2007 governorship polls, in what had become multiple convoluted legal tussles.

Having immersed himself as the chief inspiration and sole financier of the legal kerfuffle unfolding simultaneously on multiple fronts, Asiwaju was thus the one who often bore the burden more. So absorbed, so invested was he in those difficult moments that one could, in fact, be pardoned to imagine that even in his sleep, Jagaban probably still found himself mixing it up with the adversaries he earlier contended with all his waking moment. In the same vein heavyweight boxing champion “Smoking Joe” Frazier once admitted he sometimes found himself in dreams, engaged in ferocious fistic combat with eternal rival, Mohammed Ali, only to wake in the middle of the night covered in hot sweat.

Such was the exacting climate under which “stolen mandates” were recovered in Ondo, Edo, Ekiti and Osun States, after epic battles championed by Tinubu, the man young Nigerians (the millennials and Gen Z) do not seem to know or have been misled to hate and deny credits as arguably the biggest champion of multi-party democracy in the Fourth Republic.

The instinctive warrior never shy to insert himself in a battle for others, but often with eyes on the greater prize not easily perceived by the shortsighted.

The one who curbed Obasanjo’s imperial aspirations and excesses, particularly in Yorubaland, and who, from 2003, began to stitch, one thread after another fragile thread, what would blossom into the historic coalition that sensationally unhorsed a ruling party at the centre in 2015.

To be sure, the man from Lagos is no saint. True saints would only be found in heaven. However, there is something extraordinary about Jagaban. His agglomeration of laser focus, daring, Trojan stamina, improvisation, organisational acumen and mental acuity, has surely never been seen in any other politician in all of Nigeria’s recent history. It speaks to a forbearing virtue or what the Yoruba call “aforiti”, central to “iwa” (good character), which partly defines the Omoluabi ethos often invoked to describe the Yoruba identity and epistemology.

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