Three Hunchbacks and Their Heavy Baggage – 2

Femi Akintunde-Johnson

The second ‘hunchback’ of our analogy in the current Nigerian political reality is the presidential candidate of the All Progressives’ Congress, APC, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Adekunle Tinubu. Interestingly, here is a man blessed with a long line of notorious baggage which grows convoluted and mind-boggling the deeper you probe. Yet, the same unsavoury connotations have a special appeal to a huge swathe of his adoring fans.

  The first charge his traducers would fondly file against him, and perhaps the most recurrent, is what essentially sells him the best to his fan base: his purported patrilineal and hegemonic grip on the jugular of Lagos shadowy power and fiscal architecture. It is an allegation that his supporters reverentially tout as a testament to his “political sagacity” dating back to his 2003 exploits to outwit a rampaging incumbent president, Olusegun Obasanjo. His opponents believe that no juicy circumstance – political, transactional, or what-have-you – flows through the Lagos establishment without the know-how and go-ahead of Tinubu.

  His detractors often share in the social media a viral list of innumerable property and assets spread across choice areas of Lagos allegedly owned by Tinubu, or held in proxy for him. A particular list is so confoundingly long and lavish that it somehow betrays the eagerness of those against his ambition to throw any rubbish at him, even if it borders on the outrageous.

  His shadowy antecedents have always been the joysticks of his opponents who claim that being a man-made product of a well-constructed character sketch, many holes would ultimately expose the contraption of the Tinubu Identikit: they point to his place of birth as being more than a hundred kilometers from Lagos; his oft-adored late mother, Alhaja Abibatu Mogaji as foster, or at best, surrogate mother; they allude to hitherto frosty contestation of his Tinubu lineage by the larger Tinubu family – today, that peculiar acrimony has vanished. They nominally dismiss his attendance of primary and secondary schools in Nigeria (prior his admission into Richard Daley College, USA) as further proof of chinks peeling of his elaborately designed persona framework. 

  And of course his state of health – despite the valiant and vigorous rebuttals of his supporters flaunting his last visit to Saudi Arabia to observe the rigorous dictates of the Tawaf (the arduous task of encircling the Ka’abah seven times as part of Umrah or Hajj). As well as his rollercoaster nationwide whistle-stops in pursuits of the attention and endorsements of state governors and primary delegates for what turned out for Tinubu a successful special presidential convention of APC – with hundreds of photos and videos to suffocate any doubting Thomases. Yet, the braying crowd would not be quietened.

One of the major “koboko” Tinubu’s attackers  have consistently soaked and used to whip his political ambition is his connection, imagined or real, to the octopal tax consultancy firm, Alpha-Beta Consulting Ltd. (ABC), which was concessioned the state’s ailing tax collection systems around 2000, during the first tenure of Tinubu as governor of Lagos. The monthly internally generated revenue (IGR) of Lagos State ballooned from the paltry ₦500 – ₦600 million bequeathed by Muhammed Buba Marwa, the last military administrator, to the excess of ₦6 billion by the time Tinubu stepped out of Alausa in 2007. Admirably, the current governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, announced late in 2021 that the state’s IGR was easily topping ₦45 billion monthly!

 Undoubtedly, Lagos showed the way, and other states have scrambled to learn from the tiniest state in Nigeria, the tricks and tonic of improved tax collection, to the incredulous advantage of ABC… and its stakeholders. Today, statisticians have announced that Lagos IGR exploded by 7,400% between 1999 and 2021! Invariably, such a humongous leap would also be to the astonishing fortune of ABC’s much touted 10% commission, and of course, to the glory of its stakeholders.   No one is mystified that ABC’s 10% has been sustained and coolly respected by succeeding governors who are putatively considered as Tinubu’s vassals.

  While it is difficult to begrudge a thriving symbiotic and technical relationship between a state and a professional, legitimate entity, it is the disparaging immorality of a sitting governor approving a consultancy arrangement with a company which later turns out that he is one of its promoters, if not the main honcho. For many years of successful operations, and unsuccessful attempts to authenticate his umbilical cord to ABC, many critics fumed haplessly in their suspicion of Tinubu’s culpability. And for many years he and his handlers pretended the so-called links to ABC – long after leaving office – was the figment of hopeless opponents and idlers.

Until 2018, when its former managing director and founding partner, Dapo Apara (who lays claim to 30% of Alpha-Beta)  filed a 40-page writ before a Lagos High Court, pointing heavily indicting fingers at his erstwhile partner and angel investor (Tinubu) and a former Lagos finance commissioner (during Tinubu’s second term), who is also ABC’s current MD, Akin Doherty. The allegations range from money laundering, to fraud, tax evasion, bribery of government officials, diversion of funds, and sundry acts of corruption.

Of course, ABC lashed back at Apara with sordid counter allegations: he allegedly siphoned huge sums of company’s money, fraudulently converted $5 million for cloud-based services which, in any case, should have been a mere $300,000, amongst other robust claims. 

During the course of the legal fisticuffs, Tade Ipadeola, lawyer to Apara revealed, in late October, 2020, that the originating summons containing the details  of Tinubu/ABC case filed at an Igbosere high court, against the former governor and ABC, had been burnt during the calamitous spillover of the #EndSARS protests. The courts were sacked, like many important edifices, and looted by miscreants in those few days of madness. 

 However, sometime in 2021, lawyers from both parties told the court they were considering an out-of-court settlement. Puff…and the media went on a snooze over the matter. The last hearing announced was an adjournment for a report on the settlement status by Justice Aishat Opesanwo to March 24, 2022. A brief telephone chat with another of the plaintiff’s lawyers, Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, SAN, confirmed to me that parties have virtually completed the settlement processes.

Hot on the heels of the above as implements of havoc and stones of derision, in the hands of his harsh critics, to truncate Tinubu’s lifetime ambition to preside over the affairs of this nation is the matter of who will be useful and strategic as his running mate, and possibly the vice president. Because of the peculiarity of his geographical focal point, the South West, in the contorted imperatives of our politics, his vice must have to come from any of the three northern zones. It is however not as simple as that.

If the major opposition party, People’s Democratic Party, PDP had followed its own maxim, and selected a southerner as its flag-bearer, it would have been easier for Tinubu’s camp to pick any northerner. Unfortunately, a wily old fox in Atiku Abubakar emerged as PDP’s candidate – a repudiation of their long-held zoning system, to the chagrin of many of their supporters and chieftains. 

As it stands, the headache for Tinubu is his status as a Moslem from the South West, and the rupturing potential of picking a Christian Northerner in a region where the highly indoctrinated masses are not only suspicious of southern Moslems, but to now be saddled with another vice president of the Christian faith, alongside a president in whom they are ostensibly suspicious of his devotion to Islam, is a terrifying prospect. To assuage that mindset, the Tinubu camp has flown a kite to test the waters: out came the “doctrine” of a “placeholder” running mate in Ibrahim Masari, a fairly nondescript Moslem politician from the voter-rich North West zone (Katsina to be precise). Incidentally, Masari also has issues with his credentials. He claimed to have lost all his educational certificates, among other documents, in a recent affidavit.

Well, the kite is not flying well as expected. The gale of negative reactions to the tentative Moslem-Moslem ticket has not been sufficiently doused by notes of optimism, and appeals for higher emotional gravitation towards sophistication and meritorious consensus – an idyllic throwback to the epoch-making 1993 election of Chief MKO Abiola and Alhaji Baba Gana Kingibe (an election irresponsibly abrogated by the arrogant ruling military merchants). But the signs are clear to any keen observers not clouded by bullish delusion and hubris, may God forbid a repeat of 1993 – in all its pristine and innocent ramifications. 

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 So, whichever route Tinubu takes is fraught with the unexpected: His southern people have made it clear that his wife is neither the president nor the vice, and therefore her faith cannot transmogrify into the national equation; while his northern brothers are insisting that a hard sell (northern Christian) would be doubly hard to sell in the North, unlike a fellow northern Moslem (preferably a sitting governor), especially in the voter-rich North West, or, at the very least, from the current whipping ‘child’ of Nigeria, Borno. 

  This is one of those moments that sorely tests the fecundity of political strategists and power gamblers – for whatever path Tinubu chooses, his numerous naysayers are waiting, baiting and sharpening their swords. And so his numerous passionate supporters.

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