I confess that early in November 2023, when I wrote “How to Buy ‘Air Force One”, I did not know that this day would come.
But last week, President Bola Tinubu seemed to explain it as he cleared his throat and reintroduced himself.
As an adult, he had not really been far from public notice; he spent 8 years as Governor of Lagos State, and then 10 years as a Senator.
He led the Alliance for Democracy before becoming the National Leader of the All Progressives Congress.
That is to say, he has been quite visible. However, political visibility often means that people want to know even more about an individual. This is why old questions about who Mr Tinubu really is, surfaced as last year’s presidential elections approached.
Among them – given that there was no record of him before he appeared on the streets of the United States, who was he at birth in Nigeria, and where was he born? Where did he go to school?
Remember that without identifying his elementary school, he had listed Government College Ibadan, as the site of his secondary education.
When information emerged that he had never been a student at GCI, he then replaced that claim with Government College, Lagos.
The only problem is that GCL was pure fiction, leading one of his supporters to ‘explain’ that Tinubu had not needed such schools: he was so “bright” that he was “home-schooled.”
It appeared, then, that Chicago State University accepted “home-school” diplomas as basic admission credentials.
Remember that this was the point at which Mr Tinubu re-entered international attention, with Atiku Abubakar’s determined efforts in the Chicago Courts questioning whether the former Lagos governor had forged the CSU diploma that he submitted to INEC to run for president in Nigeria.
His first international entry had been his involvement with the law in Chicago in the early 1990s, where a court said it believed that large sums in his bank accounts were being used to launder money for a heroin distribution network.
According to plainsite.org, Tinubu committed at least six federal crimes, and although he was not charged, about $1.95m was seized from his global bank accounts.
“Of that $1.95m, about $1.5m was returned to him while $460,000 was seized and then destroyed. While working for Mobil Oil Company in Nigeria, Tinubu used a variety of shell companies to move the money around, including Compass Finance & Investment Co., incorporated in Washington, D.C., as well as a separate Compass entity incorporated in Nigeria,” it stated.
Beyond those international scandals, Tinubu’s desire to become president of Nigeria meant that he remained closely watched in the country.
His election victory was disputed, as was the verdict of the courts.
But none of these has compromised the legitimacy of the Tinubu presidency as much as his interpretation of the job itself.
As bad as previous occupiers of the presidency have been, none of them so blatantly represented and misrepresented it as self-advertisement and self-aggrandizement.
None has treated it as if it is a chieftaincy position, where the concept of co-equal branches of government means nothing.
And nobody has ignored the public interest as much as he has in his 15 months in Aso Rock.
In this one-quarter of his term, he has managed to relegate both commitment and competence to the lowest of levels, and to demonstrate astonishing levels of political insensitivity, resulting in this month’s nationwide #EndBadGovernance rejection of his government.
In his supplementary budget in November, his priorities included a yacht.
About N28bn was required for long lines of new luxury vehicles and superfluous “renovations” of the homes and annexes of the president and the vice-president in Abuja and Lagos.
This was despite the fact that the presidential villa was renovated just weeks before he took office, including a N21bn makeover of the State House Medical Centre, and his predecessor spending N37bn on maintenance during his tenure.
In the 2023 budget, N14.8bn was provided for such items as internet access, stationery, and telephone chargers.
The point here is that in the past two decades, Mr Tinubu has been no secret to the public, whether he was in a government or merely in its premises.
His assorted controversies mean that he has been heavily documented.
So, what did he do last week in his ‘self-introduction’? Remember the new international embarrassment I mentioned last Sunday involving Nigeria’s presidential jets being seized in France?
The court prohibited them from being moved or released until Zhongshan was paid its $74.5m.
It turned out that one of the seized jets was the “new” one purchased by Mr Tinubu, without authorisation by the National Assembly, just like the 700km Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway that he inaugurated in May.
“Today is my day to boast,” he said on that occasion. “The deal is done. The dream is realisable. The determination to build a nation of prosperity is possible. We said we would build this road, and we are determined to do it.”
The same determination seemed to apply to the Airbus 330 aircraft, now known to be a repossessed jet that had been recovered from an indebted oil sheikh, according to Premium Times.
At a time of considerable economic distress and hunger in the country, Tinubu acquired a twice-renowned 15-year-old aircraft to replace a 19-year-old one.
Little wonder he is reluctant to say what he paid for it. The Financial Times stated, “Nigeria’s worst economic crisis since the 1990s has heaped further misery on millions of people, with inflation at a near-three-decade high and the naira down about 70 per cent of its value against the US dollar in the past year following two devaluations.”
Determined to have his way, and underlining his focus—or lack thereof—the Nigerian leader splashed out on the machine, which brought the presidential fleet to a ridiculous 11 aircraft. Beyond the cost of the jet, it is unclear what he paid to Zhongshan, which was owed $74.5m.
Somehow, the jet arrived in Nigeria late on Sunday. And somehow—hours later—Tinubu was aboard and heading to France on a fourth visit in just over one year. An aide described it as a “brief work stay,” as if he cannot work-stay in Calabar or Maiduguri.
This is Tinubu affirming who he is. Coming in the same month as the public protests, he appears to be asserting that Nigerians must be clear as to what is important and that what he wants is for them to listen to the sound of his voice but not accept the evidence of their eyes.
In February 2017, I described the fall of the APC. It had been in power for less than two years. Five years later, Tinubu tried to rebrand it in colours of smoke and mirrors: ‘Renewed Hope.’
But what the APC is teaching is the colour of bloodlessness or falsehood. If you don’t know what hope is, how can you renew it?
If you don’t know what a character is, how can you describe it? Why do Nigerian leaders stand in Nigeria’s way?
