TRIBUNE ONLINE NG
IT takes a special kind of partisan bullheadedness— or an acute amnesia of the immediate past— to fail to acknowledge that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has, in the last few weeks, enlivened governance, shown praiseworthy sensitivity to public opinion, and has exerted unaccustomed social, symbolic, and political presence in the country.
But it also requires a severely blind partisan loyalty to not admit that Tinubu’s firing of a corrupt minister caught red handed with her hand in the cookie jar, his responsiveness to legitimate public outcries, and his obvious interest in actual governance have not moved the needle in the real living conditions of the majority of Nigerians who are squirming in profound existential hurt as a direct consequence of the unprecedented economic crunch that the removal of subsidies on petrol has activated. I’ll return to this point later.
I am never shy to publicly admit it when I am wrong. Since January 2022 when it became apparent to me that Tinubu would be president, I was distressed. In a January 12, 2022, social media update, I ventilated this distress when I wrote: “No nation can survive a transition from Buhari’s corrupt, do-nothing, geriatric, and dementia-plagued presidency to a drunken, narcotized, geriatric, and potentially corrupt Tinubu presidency.”
I am not ashamed to concede that I am probably wrong and that the people who insisted that Tinubu would be different from Buhari are right—at least for now. By my training and disposition, I am parsimonious with expressions of commendation for people in positions of power. It’s because I know that the privileges and pressures of power can make people unpredictable or change in a fraction of a moment’s notice. But there is no harm in acknowledging demonstrations of good-faith efforts by people in power.
The swift, no-nonsense suspension of Betta Edu as Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation after irrefutable evidentiary proof of her corruption emerged and public outcry for her ouster grew— and the summoning of the Internal Affairs Minister to explain how a company he is associated with benefitted from Edu’s corruption— has scored the Tinubu administration its most visible reputational mileage in governance yet and has caused many critics to thaw their frigidity toward the administration.
It doesn’t mean there are no other corrupt government officials who are fleecing the nation, but this is the first time an APC administration has fired a minister for corruption. All past examples of ministers who lost their jobs because of corruption have been during PDP administrations. Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Musa Yar’adua, and even Goodluck Jonathan have records of firing ministers who were credibly accused of corrupt enrichment.
