Emperor. Kabiyesi. Alberto Fujimori. Isolationist president. No Nigerian leader has laid so much store on their own credentials as a democrat than President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Yet, just two years into his presidency, Tinubu has been variously described by the opening unflattering terms by people whose own politics are as distant from one another as Sule Lamido, Femi Falana, Usman Bugaje, and Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, respectively.
All four men wear their politics on their faces, of course, but you would scarcely find them in the same political camp, meaning that they speak only their independent minds. Descriptions of President Tinubu in those terms matter because they are unusual for an elected leader. The late President Yar’Adua and former President Jonathan had their faults, but there was simply no basis for anyone to have called them those names. Accusations of authoritarian style trailed former President Obasanjo throughout his eight years in office, and there were good reasons for them, not least his attempt at tenure elongation. Still, he was not compared to notorious dictators like Fujimori, and was certainly not isolated from his own government.
The Punch newspaper tried to smear Buhari as a leopard who would not change his military spots even under a democratic system. That characterisation is unacceptable because as president, Buhari’s embrace of democratic tenets was only to a fault, and light years better than Obasanjo’s, with whom he shares a military background. Buhari did not remove any governor, did not interfere with the National Assembly or its leadership, and did not try to compromise opposition political parties throughout his two terms.
While we wait for the Punch newspaper to find an appropriate label for Tinubu, who has done all of those things already, we must raise the more important question of how Tinubu has gone from a candidate praised for his promo-democracy activism to a president described as a wannabe tyrant in just two years? In the mid-1990s, we have been told, the then Senator Bola Tinubu was a leading figure in the “pro-democracy” movement that chased the military back to the barracks to usher in our current democratic dispensation.
This narrative is not without some merit, but I am more with those who stayed here and bore the consequences of what they believed in than with those who ran into the safety of exile in foreign lands. Tinubu’s pro-democracy credentials loom large today only because, as usual, the roles of other more important figures in that struggle have been muted by a generally fickle and narrow-minded press. The Shehu Yar’aduas, the Bagauda Kalthos, the Abubakar Rimis, the Sule Lamidos, and the Balarabe Musas of this world who paid the price of that struggle in one way or another under Abacha have been written out of this history.
Still, skepticism about Tinubu’s pro-democracy activism before 1999 does not deny or diminish his contributions to deepening and sustaining democracy under Obasanjo. Few Nigerians took a more principled stand against Obasanjo’s autocratic excesses between 1999 and 2007 than Bola Tinubu, then Governor of Lagos State. Unlike former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, for example, who fought Obasanjo for personal political survival, Tinubu’s fight had little direct personal motivation, at least at the time. Moreover, Tinubu pursued his fight against Obasanjo largely by democratic means—through the courts of law or of public opinion—unlike Obasanjo’s own more soldierly approach to politics. Why, then, is President Tinubu falling to the seductions of tyranny as many now believe?
I can think of two related factors. First, unlike any Nigerian president before him since 1999, President Tinubu arrived in office in 2023 with two serious and unprecedented political complications. He won the presidency in an election that counts as one of our best so far. But he won with only the smallest margin of victory of any first-term president since 1999, just 1.8 million votes. Moreover, the combined votes of his nearest two rivals, Atiku and Obi—over 13 million—nearly doubled Tinubu’s 8.7 million votes.
These two facts—smallest presidential majority and two strong rivals—mean that right from his first day in office, Tinubu’s re-election was already seriously threatened because both Atiku and Obi were not only of the same political party, the PDP, only months before the election, they were in fact on the same presidential ticket in 2019. Therefore, it is in Tinubu’s best interests to ensure that these two never find their way back to the same platform, or indeed any platform at all, even if it takes Machiavellian tactics to achieve.
This situation would explain Tinubu’s meddling—now an open secret—with the internal affairs of leading opposition parties by especially foul means. It also explains the president’s stranglehold on and destabilisation tactics in vote-rich states like Kano and Rivers—the second and fourth largest in the country by number of registered voters—which were outside of his party’s control at the beginning of his term.
Second, and more unfortunately for the president, he used his own hand to destroy the small goodwill a new leader enjoys and for nothing other than the characteristic hubris of the average Lagosian. By declaring fuel subsidy gone from his first day in office, without thinking clearly about its economic and political ramifications, Tinubu set himself in direct conflict with a majority of the 8.7 million voters who elected him, not to talk of the nearly 15 million voters who did not.
By that singular action, Tinubu not only canonised Buhari into sainthood, but he also tore down his own electoral base and swiftly lost more than two-thirds of the very voters who thrust him into office.
If ever there was a case of tearing down the ladder one climbed to the top, the president’s fuel subsidy policy is one. All politicians begin thinking of the next election campaign from their first day in office in the current term. But for Tinubu, fuel subsidy removal means he has no record on which to campaign for re-election because everything else he has done or achieved has been overshadowed by the still-punishing effects of that policy on a majority of Nigerians.
Of course, Tinubu and his people continue to defend their subsidy policy in public as a success achieved through a bold and brave decision, often citing World Bank and IMF approval for it. But in private, they know that will not fly with voters in the next election. Therefore, effectively having no record of his own to campaign with, Tinubu must tighten the reins on wider democratic participation to ensure no one else wins. If Tinubu’s record cannot get him reelected, then no one else can use that lack of record or their own record to win against him. The practical outcome of such a Machiavellian strategy is a totalitarian control of the entire political space, either through inducement—money, money, and more money—or through political intimidation of all kinds.
To give just one example of the forms of intimidation we are now seeing under Tinubu, just think of this. Former governor of oil-rich Delta State, Ifeanyi Okowa, was not just the vice-presidential candidate of the PDP in the 2023 election, he was also one of the main financiers of his party’s campaign. In November last year, Okowa and several officials who served with him were arrested by the EFCC over charges of corruption amounting to N1.3 trillion. Since “porting” to the APC with the governor he installed last month, Okowa now roams free, and with Delta, the seventh largest state by votes, now under APC. This is only one example, but how else is it to be explained in realpolitik terms?
As a final word, I can understand President Tinubu’s increasing closure of democratic participation by foul means. And his tactics might yet work to achieve his goal of winning the next election, given the poverty of the opposition even without his prompting. But he might do well to remember that Nigerians can be pushed only so far. Nigeria has never really been a fertile soil for despotism, as the history of even our military regimes makes clear.
