PUNCH
ABIMBOLA ADELAKUN
In July, the wife of President Mrs Oluremi Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Initiative launched a “smart farming” project to boost food production. According to her, if everyone takes up farming, the problem of hunger can be ameliorated. To lead by example, Mrs Tinubu had to show herself at work. A sanctioned television crew and a few hangers-on who would say the right things were about the only witnesses to the landmark event of a woman—who likely cannot distinguish between ewédu and lemon grass seeds—farm in the backyard of the presidential residence. It was just right that no serious media house was invited to witness the occasion. Imagine how disruptive of that grandiose charade it would be if any of them who still had their heads screwed right asked irritating questions like, “So how many aides will help to water these vegetables when you would have forgotten all about their existence?
Given that first ladies typically use their symbolic power for social advocacy, it was not out of order for Mrs Tinubu to have launched an initiative around urban farming. Under a different set of circumstances, it would be a good idea. What ruins her advocacy is the gaslighting and the insincerity that underwrites the whole project. First, asking women to get involved in farming to boost national food production is out of touch. Women already farm. If she had done some homework before starting her pet initiative, she would have realised that a significant percentage of farming in Nigeria is done by women. What does Mrs Tinubu think women in rural areas do for a living?
Second, when she claimed that the proceeds from her garden would feed her family and she would be giving some to her staff members, you saw a woman who lies like a child. Even the most dimwitted among us know that that little thing you are doing in that garden has no impact whatsoever on the Aso Rock food budget. Why insult the public by pretending there is anything more to the project than the mere symbolism of it all? The ‘Every Home a Garden’ project is inorganic and so unrelated to the reality of life in Nigeria that she knew the idea would hardly catch on. Typical of the Tinubus to throw money at issues, she offered a N25m prize to farmers just to stimulate some interest.
Third—and this point is crucial, is the fact that much of the present food crisis is a fallout of her husband’s ill-conceived policies. Yes, there has always been hunger in Nigeria, but under their administration, food costs shot up astronomically. At the time Mrs Tinubu was launching her garden in July, food prices had increased by more than 200 percent compared to last year. The inflation is about structural problems that can only be addressed through providing the right infrastructure. It was disingenuous of Mrs Tinubu to pretend that the matter is simple, and resolvable if women would just grow food crops inside a bucket in their houses. She says the farming initiative is for all of us to contribute solutions. But why solicit corporate support when the problem was not caused by the collective? It was you—the Tinubu administration—that caused the problem. It should also be you solving it, not deflecting responsibility.
When they launched the regional initiative in Jos, Mrs Tinubu was represented by Salamatu Gbajabiamila, wife of the chief of staff to the president, who announced their donation of N500,000 to 20 women in each of the north-central states. Mrs Gbajabiamila said they were confident that their efforts would boost women in agriculture, transform the lives of the beneficiaries of their stipend, and even contribute to food sufficiency in the region. There you go! Thanks to Mrs Tinubu and her right-hand women, all the complex problems rural women face—from insecurity to poverty, lack of storage facilities and food processing infrastructure, and poor access to capital—will be resolved by throwing a pittance at a few actors, the money that might not even reach their hands.
These people have not made genuine efforts to understand the problem, but they are expecting their pet project to be transformative. To even simulate the magical results they wanted, Mrs Tinubu’s vegetables were harvested a mere 23 days after she allegedly planted them.
Now Mrs Tinubu is on to another joke: a fabric to promote national unity. According to her, she was inspired to create a national fabric after a trip to Zimbabwe last year. She called for a national competition with another N25m prize for whoever can design the national fabric. Now, she says that dress will be donned on October 1st. Well, the first thing she should have asked the Zimbabweans was how the national fabric, launched in 2020, is working for them. Are they more united because they wear a uniform now?
If Mrs Tinubu had bothered to inquire, she would have found that the main reason the Zimbabwean national dress seems to be popular is because the interest is imposed by the first lady who uses the government machinery to sell it. Nobody wears it because they buy into the idea of national unity, nor do they imagine their historical and ideological fault lines will magically disappear because they wear “andco.” The dress will disappear the moment the government that made it near-compulsory for civil servants and party supporters leave power.
Mrs Tinubu, like a typical African leader who pursues symbolism at the expense of substance, thinks that in addition to changing the national anthem, they can foster unity through a dress. That is how they will obsess over national unity until the next election, when their attack dogs will be unleashed with their usual divisive rhetoric, and they will pretend to be blind, deaf, and mute.
Mrs Tinubu says local manufacturers will mass-produce the fabric, thereby boosting the local textile industry, creating jobs, and improving the economy. There we go again with magical expectations. You are not even sure that people will give a bleep about your fabric, but you are already building castles in the air. Apart from the APC flock who will be made to wear their uniform to prove they are still standing on Bola’s mandate, how does Mrs Tinubu hope to sell enough nationwide to keep the local textile factories working? How much money is even being invested in this farce?
Meanwhile, Mrs Tinubu is so locked in the Yoruba insularity and nepotism of her husband’s government that she fails to see that the optics of the project are entirely bad. So, she, a Yoruba woman, initiated the project. The named judges are Yoruba women; her Lagos friends, and the winner of the N25m fabric design competition is a Yoruba woman too! Mrs Tinubu wants an incredibly diverse country people to wear a national aso ebí, but it just did not occur to her to extend the sphere of creating the material beyond Yorubas? So how do you hope to get the buy-in of non-Yoruba Nigerians if you do not think their contributions are valuable? So much for national unity!
Like her vegetable garden, I can bet Mrs Tinubu did not think through what the national fabric project was meant to achieve or how to organize the idea. This “andco” thing is just another means of seeking social relevance for a woman who does not know what she should be doing with her time or how to justify budgetary allocations to her “office.” Unfortunately, she does not have advisors or friends who can help her design a sensible project. All the women surrounding her are likely to just say “yes, ma” each time she proposes another witless idea. Even if an idea for a worthwhile project were to be created for her, she still does not come across as someone who has the discipline to sit down and master what it takes to turn it into a success. She just wants to be seen as relevant and that is why she is all over the place, doing too much of nothing.
THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN PUNCH
