Lately the hashtags #TinubuForPrison, #I-Am-Drugified and #TinubuTheDrugDealer had been trending online especially on Twitter. Ever since he ‘won’ the presidential poll of last February 25th the ‘President-elect’ has been subjected to all sorts of ridicule with his mountain of baggage coming to the fore. No ‘elected’ President in Nigeria’s history had ever suffered such snide remarks and consistent reminders of a sordid past.
As the hashtags trended last weekend the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council (APC PCC) Director of Media and Publicity, Bayo Onanuga, had reacted angrily to the embarrassing tweets. Onanuga, the new Joseph Goebbels of our time, had said: “All those sons of bitches tweeting the hashtags #TinubuTheDrugDealer, #TinubuForPrison, your days are numbered. One day, you will face the wrath of law and God for tweeting malicious falsehood about Nigeria’s President-Elect”.
Onanuga overreached himself by derogatively describing those tweeting and retweeting the hashtags as “sons of bitches”! Pray, who would face the wrath of law and God first? The man rigged into the highest office in the land or those up against that injustice prevailing? The very man who forfeited hundreds of thousands of Dollars to a foreign government in a soft-landing plea bargain or those saying such behaviour rankles?
He who comes to equity, it is said, must come with a clean pair of hands. You cannot approbate and reprobate at the same time! God is a God of justice. If His wrath ever comes then Asiwaju Tinubu and his gang would be victims!
Bayo Onanuga is becoming a bundle of embarrassment to those of us who knew him as an intrepid patriotic pro-democracy activist. Even before he becomes ‘somebody’ in the Tinubu ill-fated presidency he has already shown his true arrogant colours demonstrating unmistakably what we would be up against in the event of the Tinubu presidency becoming a reality despite the mounting odds.
The major problem with the Asiwaju presidential ‘triumph’ is the fact that the majority of Nigerians do not recognise it as legitimate. Majority of our people must have voted for candidates other than the one pronounced victorious in the election, hence the general feeling of despondency and righteous indignation.
Tinubu symbolises everything wrong with Nigeria! Election, ordinarily, ought not to be a do or die thing but a healthy competition for power at the local, state and national levels. But when winners are announced as losers then there is bound to be a problem.
While the PDP’s Atiku and LP’s Obi are resolutely determined to pursue justice at the Tribunal (and up to the Supreme Court) the naked women that demonstrated recently against the rigged re-election of Governor Abdullahi Sule of Nasarawa State were not instigated or incited by the opposition. They felt that their mandate was stolen and handed over to the incumbent.
From all indications the process of delegitimizing the new government-in-waiting seems to have started in earnest. That is what happens when one’s victory is tainted and therefore a pyrrhic one!
While we recognise that the polity is being overheated by the different opposing camps the APC Spokesmen are meeting their match in a campaign of calumny and denigration. Femi Fani-Kayode was warning the opposition the other day that they (the ruling party elements) would make Nigeria ungovernable should his principal’s inauguration of May 29 be truncated for whatever reason.
Festus Keyamo issued a lengthy statement decrying the planned protests by opposition parties and warning of dire consequences. The Minister accused the opposition parties of trying to truncate Nigeria’s democracy.
According to the lawyer turned politician of fortune: “We know these persons and their sponsors from within and outside Nigeria and we shall be working closely with the security agencies to apprehend them and bring them to book.”
The 2023 general elections in Nigeria would be remembered for a long time for their intimidation, ethnic profiling, bigotry and sophisticated rigging mechanism. Prior to the presidential poll and later during the gubernatorial poll in Lagos State the ethnic profiling and disenfranchisement of Igbos in the state of aquatic splendour had become a reality executed by the APC thugs and dogs of war!
The truth of the matter is that Asiwaju Tinubu was once cited by the American judiciary in a drug-related business for which he had forfeited hundreds of thousands of Dollars! But the drug issue is not the only issue dogging Tinubu’s every political move.
He had been accused in the past of not doing his primary and post-primary schools in Nigeria. His Chicago State University degree certificate was once a subject of controversy until the American institution of higher learning cleared the air by saying that the Lagos ailing godfather did attend the school.
Again, the names he bore (Bola Ahmed Tinubu) were said to be fixed or doctored with critics providing other names like Yekini Amoda Ogunlere. He claims to be a Lagosian but his roots have been traced to Iragbiji in Osun state, a poor state he once boasted to be richer than!
We hold that Asiwaju Tinubu never won the presidential poll fairly and squarely! It was fixed, sealed and delivered by the INEC forces. Nigerians would not be that stupid to have voted for the APC that has brought untold hardship to them in the past eight years. They could not have been that naive to have voted for ‘Jaguda’, nay Jagaban, and his mob of touts and thugs.
We are wise enough to know the difference between a questionable character desperate to ascend the presidency and those opposed to him. If the dispossession and corruption he fostered in Lagos as the godfather is allowed to be replicated at the national level then Nigeria is finished!
Many frustrated Nigerians are voicing out their frustration online and offline. Some among them are going to the extreme by calling for an Interim National Government. Since not a few have lost faith and hope in the judiciary, time is of essence here. If the Atiku/Obi litigation drags on post-May 29 and Asiwaju is sworn-in as President then the prospect of doing justice may have evaporated.
The judiciary in Nigeria is not independent to the extent of pronouncing against a sitting President. So it is incumbent on the judiciary to do the utmost by dispensing with the cases prior to the inauguration end of May. Barring any ludicrous judicial technicalities the electoral heist would be validated once Asiwaju books official residence inside the Aso Villa.
In his military dictatorship days in Dodan Barracks early 90’s General Muhammadu Buhari had enacted a draconian decree that made drug peddling punishable by execution or life imprisonment. Three young Nigerians, Bernard Ogedegbe (29), Bathlomew Owoh (26) and Lawal Ojuolape, were executed to show how serious the regime at that time was.
How would Buhari the old man from Daura feel now handing over to a drug peddler or lord, convicted or not? Would the aging Buhari still remember killing the young trio so that a good example would be set against drug trafficking?
What if under Jagaban as President Nigeria relapses into a narco state?! Guinea Bissau and Mexico come to mind here!
Asiwaju Tinubu, the glorified bearer of a stolen mandate, is indeed ‘drugified’! He must, therefore, come clean of the forfeited proceeds of drug business in the United States or forever hide his face in shame. Besides, the horde of ‘Jagabandits’ — the MC Oluomos, Bayo Onanugas, Festus Keyamos and Femi Fani-Kayodes — defending the indefensible, must give us a deserved break, going forward.
SOC Okenwa
soco_abj_2006_rci@hotmail.fr
