Bola Tinubu – The kingmaker’s tumultuous journey to achieving his lifelong ambition
“It’s been over 25 years now that I’ve been serving them…bring the presidency. It’s my turn! I also want to be president,” Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared while addressing delegates of his party – the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Abeokuta, Ogun State, on Thursday, June 2, 2022.
“If not for my support for Buhari, he would not have become president. He failed in his first, second and third attempts, and even wept on national TV, vowing not to run again. I went to him to tell him to run and we’d support him.”
While many agreed with his Abeokuta declaration that he has made many kings, his declaration that it is his turn to rule the country raised dusts and became a subject of debates. It also pitched him against some members of his party and dimmed light on his chances at the APC presidential primaries later in the month.
But Tinubu was undeterred, he went bullish and took no prisoners in his journey to becoming Nigeria’s president which he described as his life-long ambition after a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari in January 2022.
The Abeokuta declaration, many believe, was a result of pent-up anger from the challenges in his journey to clinching the APC presidential ticket. Seeing that the major obstructions to his ambition were from his home front in the southwest. The people he claimed to have helped to become ‘kings’ were also jostling for the presidential ticket with him when he would have expected them to be at the forefront of his campaign for president.
At the time Tinubu made the declaration – Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, former Governor of Ogun state, Ibikunle Amosun, then Governor of Ekiti State, Dr Kayode Fayemi, were in the race for the APC’s presidential ticket.
Tinubu himself declared that he sacrificed his ambition to be Buhari’s running mate in 2015 for Osinbajo and nominated the Professor of Law in his stead. Amosun and Fayemi are also believed to be beneficiaries of Tinubu’s political empire after helping them to become governors of their respective states. He wouldn’t have thought that Osinbajo, Fayemi and Amosun would become his opponents in a race where he’s a leading contender.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s body language that suggests he was not in support of Tinubu also contributed to the Abeokuta outburst where he also declared that he helped Buhari to become president after weeping on national TV that he would not run again after three failed attempts.
The APC primaries turned out to be a walk in the park for Tinubu as Amosun, Fayemi and candidates from other geo-political zones stepped down for him at the convention ground in Abuja while Osinbajo stuck to his guns and went into the race.
From the moment he emerged as the APC candidate in June 2022 after polling 1,271 votes to defeat his closest rival, Rotimi Amaechi who scored 316 votes, Osinbajo 235 votes, Senate President, Ahmad Lawan 152 votes, and other candidates, his journey to becoming Nigeria’s president-elect on March 1, 2023, was full of upheavals. From multiple rumours of ailments to his many gaffes at public functions, Tinubu was perhaps the most abused presidential candidate in the 2023 presidential election held on February 25, 2023, but he surmounted them.
“I don’t read social media anymore; they abuse the hell out of me,” he reveled in November 2022.
The many plots
The first hurdle he faced was his choice of running mate – Kashim Shettima, a former governor of Borno state who is a Muslim like Tinubu. The choice pitched him against some members of his party and many Nigerians who believe a Muslim-Muslim ticket was not right for Nigeria.
In December 2022, when the CBN announced released the redesigned N200, N500 and N1000 notes, and set January 31 as deadline for the swap of the old notes, many believe it was targeted at politicians to stop vote buying in the February 2023 elections. The deadline set for the swap, scarcity of new notes and fuel scarcity placed untold hardship on many Nigerians, and Tinubu believed it was a move by a ‘cabal’ in the APC-led federal government to frustrate his presidential ambition.
“Even if they hoard the new Naira notes and hoard the fuel, we shall vote and be victorious,” Tinubu declared at his campaign rally in Abeokuta in January 2023. Again, the declaration and many other murmurings from Tinubu’s camp that Buhari was not supporting his ambition, sparked controversy that was further fueled by the opposition PDP’s accusation that Tinubu was attacking Buhari.
Tinubu’s team in their response said PDP was only trying “to create a wedge between him and President Muhammadu Buhari.”
“Asiwaju Tinubu was only drawing government’s attention to the sabotage being carried out by some fifth columnists in the system, possibly working in cahoots with the PDP,” a statement by Tinubu’s campaign team in January 2023 said.
Tinubu and 17 other candidates which include a former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP, went into the polls on February 25.
Tinubu went into the race with a record of 100% political victories. He has never lost an election where he is a candidate, and on March 1, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Tinubu the winner of the hotly contested presidential election with 8,794,726 votes. It was the lowest a presidential candidate has ever polled to emerge Nigeria’s president since the country’s return to democracy in 1999.
Tinubu’s survival of all the plots, pundits say, is part of what makes him a revered political leader and kingmaker who has been instrumental to the installation and removal of many political office holders in over two decades.
Victory
“I am profoundly humbled that you’ve elected me to serve as the 16th president,” Tinubu said in his acceptance speech at a reception held at the presidential campaign secretariat in Abuja in the early hours of Wednesday, March 1, 2023. “I promise I’ll work with you to make Nigeria a destination of returning home to contribute to the development.”
He also extended an olive branch to opposition candidates saying “we must work for unity, happiness and harmony. We must not act like that orchestra that has no direction of a conductor.”
INEC declared Tinubu winner amid widespread reports of violence and the opposition’s (PDP, LP, NNPP and ADC) call for a rerun. Tinubu’s party – the All Progressives Congress (APC) has described the call as an attempt to truncate democracy.
The victory makes Tinubu Nigeria’s 16th president, achieving his lifelong ambition to govern the country largely divided along religious and ethnic lines and bedeviled by rising insecurity.
The journey ahead
When he’s sworn on May 29, 2023, Tinubu will replace Muhammadu Buhari, a former military general, and inherit a nation with 63% (133 million) multidimensionally poor residents and 33.3% (23.18 million people) jobless citizens, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). He also inherits a nation with 21.82% inflation as of January 2023, the highest since September 2005.
Although he was not the favourite of a majority of the country’s youth population who had campaigned vigorously for Labour Party’s Peter Obi and matched their online advocacy with action by delivering over 6 million votes for him, Tinubu will work hard to unite the young population and address some of the issues like police brutality, unemployment and economic woes that have multiplied hardship for the young citizens.
These are some of the issues forcing the young population to leave the country in droves in search of a better life in Europe and America. The Africa Polling Institute (API said 73% of Nigerians were looking to emigrate with their families in 2021.
“I promise I’ll work with you to make Nigeria a destination of returning home to contribute to the development,” Tinubu said in his acceptance speech.
He also restated his campaign promise that there would be no strike in Nigerian tertiary institutions under his presidency.
The man Tinubu
An Accounting and Management graduate from the Chicago State University with a barrage of drugs, certificate forgery, age and identity falsification allegations hanging around his neck, Tinubu first shot into national politics in 1992 when he was elected Senator from Lagos West under the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the party that produced the adjudged winner of the annulled 1993 presidential election – MKO Abiola.
Before politics, Tinubu, 70, worked with Arthur Anderson, Deloitte Haskins and Sells (now called Deloitte Haskins and Touche) and GTE Service Corporation – in the United States. On his return to Nigeria, he joined Mobil Producing Nigeria as a Senior Auditor before retiring as the company’s Treasurer.
When the June 1993 election was annulled, Tinubu was one of the political figures who fled Nigeria after the arrest of Abiola by the General Sani Abacha regime and a clampdown on socio-political activists. In exile, Tinubu was one of the financiers of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), one of the most vocal pro-democracy groups that campaigned against the arrest of Abiola and called for his declaration as president.
Tinubu returned to Nigeria after Abacha’s death in 1998, ran and won election as Lagos state governor under the Alliance for Democracy (AD), mostly populated by NADECO members.
Since leaving office in 2007 after two terms in office, he remained a political godfather in the state and has spread his political influence across the southwest contributing to the emergence of political officeholders. In 2013, Tinubu’s party the ACN which was a regional party merged with three other parties – the CPC, ANPP and a faction of PDP and APGA to form the All Progressives Congress (APC) which ousted a sitting president in 2015 and produced Buhari as president after his fourth trial.
