Beating all odds, By Sam Omatseye

A few days after his colleagues elected him speaker in 2019, Femi Gbajabiamila was already looking ahead.

Plopped down in his chair with a wrinkled brow, he had a matter in mind.

“Has Asiwaju told you about his intention to run for president,” he asked me, his face part smile, part earnestness.

“It goes without saying,” I replied. “He does not have to tell me.”

“It’s going to be tough,” he predicted, the furrows clearing into a sunny visage. “But don’t underestimate his reach in the country.”

His face was now increasingly more sanguine. “He has acquired a lot of IOUs across the length and breadth of the country.”

As for him, he was ready to stand behind him, treasure, toil and all.

This author relished his sentiments of Asiwaju Tinubu’s bid. It looked like a long shot, but he can shoot long. He is an archer whose bow and arrow fire in the storm. He is like the species known as shorebirds that cruise to higher altitudes in stormy skies. He is like the character in John Webster’s play, The Duchess of Malfi, who said, “I will thrive some way: black birds fatten best in hard weather, why not I, in these dog days.”

So, I reckoned, like the Chief of Staff, that he needed to fight the good fight of faith. Faith, in this sense, had no God or mammon. It was the fight of a man of politics. But paradoxically, the issue of mystical faith or organized faith loomed in the horizon, and it was the least he expected in the fog of war. As a man of many battles and not few heroic conquests, he had the gear and stamina for the contest. The only obstacle I saw was not the general election but his party. Other than the vagaries of fate, the ineluctable force of destiny would either work for him or quelch him. The former happened.

I knew the president – Muhammadu Buhari – did not want him. The peacocks and vampires around him did not want him. Some stakeholders in the country did not only resent him, they were afraid of him. The plot thickened quickly. Conspiracies festered in sewers and in the open. And it began with the party’s top brass. In cahoots with the presidential cabal, they edged out Adams Oshiomhole’s executive as the first major step to immobilise Tinubu’s ambition. They also broached a consensus candidate. Law crippled them as they fell foul of defining the phrase they coined, and they could not even manage the idea of open and closed primaries. At every turn, they stumbled into crosswinds. Their own weapon turned their own folly.

Tinubu was never fazed about the task ahead. He peered a rose-scented garden when others saw for him a forest of a thousand demons. In 2021 December, he said he was preparing a speech towards the end of January, 2022, to announce his intention to run. He would wait for the yuletide and new year euphoria to ebb out before throwing himself in the ring.

But he was not a man to predict. Early January, he paid a visit to President Buhari at the Aso Villa, and on his way out he walked into a storm of reporters.

“I wondered what I was going to tell the reporters,” he recalled. He decided instanta to tell them that he had just discussed his ambition with the president. There was no need to formalise his entry into the race. No fanfare or ceremony necessary. It was there he uttered the phrase, “It is my lifelong ambition,” a quote that set in motion a long train of quotable quotes that juiced up his campaign north and south, spilling over to the first flushes of his presidency.

The word was out. Not that it was not out before. It was now out like taking the peel out of a groundnut. Everyone knew what it was, peel or not. Everyone knew he was running. Everybody knew the hour was coming. Announcing it was only a technicality. As Poet Samuel Coleridge wrote, “Anticipation is more potent than surprise.”

I had said once to him that I didn’t fear the general election, but only the party primary. Little did I know that after the party wheelhorses failed at the primary, they would move their artillery to the final battleground.

“If you win the primary, you will have nothing to fear,” I had declared in my naivety. He did not say a word in reply, only a smile, half-quizzical, half knowing. Very close to the primary, though, we spoke on the phone and I wondered if he was wary of the moves among the other contestants. I asked him, if he had a plan B in case the party cabal wrung the ticket from him and played a Houdini with the primary. He did not sound worried. I wanted to know if he might contemplate another platform, or party, or if he intended to fight it early or preempt any move to foist another candidate. His voice was aplomb.

This time, he replied, saying that he did not see or sniff any such major impediment and if he saw it, he would know how to respond. He would not say how he would respond. He did not think the party was capable of mounting any resistance or throwing any punches above the muscle and cunning of his ambition. He had a lot to depend on, his long history as a political matador, his inner reserves of strategy, his repertoire on the battle stage. He was ready. He said something I took to heart. “I have looked at the whole situation,” he said speaking about his ambition and reason for running. “I told myself, If I didn’t run, I am damned; If I ran, they may want to damn me. So, I had to run anyway. And I know that I will win.” He was speaking like a man in the eye of battle, suited for war like David and damning Goliath.

It had always been his attitude never to abandon the party he formed. In the heady days of the Buhari era when he was ignored and alienated, he resisted overtures. He saw it as self-betrayal and a cop-out. He was set to fight for his place in his own home.

So, when he picked up the APC ticket, and said in the air of celebration that he did not expect to win, it was the humility of triumph. The battle gear was no longer important. The brow and fury of war were already calm. The guns were mute. The party was won over. That part of the quest was over. Humility was the next virtue.

His is also a matter of destiny. He did not have a hand in all his victory. In some of them, he watched himself rise like a swimmer on the crest of a sudden tide, or a shorebird. For instance, he was not the one who coerced the northern governors of his party, some of them with ambition to be president, to coalesce to endorse a southern candidate. He did not rally some northern governors to meet with President Muhammadu Buhari and say they did not believe the party should field a southerner because Atiku was too formidable to tackle with a southerner. A northern gladiator called for a northern foil. They returned with a list of themselves when the president asked them to draw a list, and the president shunned them for advertising themselves. He wanted someone else, Ahmad Lawan. His candidate was not the choice of the northern governors, so they compelled then Governor Simon Lalong as chair of the northern governors to convene a meeting. When it held, it was more a chaos of finger pointing and colliding ambitions than a strategy for a northern point man. Less out of altruism than love of the south, they yielded.

Tinubu was not there when the party chairman was throwing tantrums over the choice at a party stakeholders’ meeting with President Buhari. Not a shadow of Tinubu was there when the northern governors were summoned to defend the idea of a southern candidacy to President Buhari. It was not he who was on Lalong’s lips when he defended the justice of having a southerner. As Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “history affects us more than we affect history.” It was a case of an unflinching hand of fate working for him. Even in epic tales from Shaka to Odysseus to Sundiata, the hero enjoyed the mercy of the gods.

It was not Tinubu who set Peter Obi on a collision course with his PDP. He did not set the party on fire with five governors led by then Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike. Or Kwankwaso who turned the Kano tide against PDP.

It is still speculative if all those votes would have gone to the PDP, although it is generally believed that the southeast votes were Peter Obi’s gift to Tinubu. Negative became positive. Could there have been a renewing of strategy if it was a straight fight between Tinubu and Atiku? Would Atiku have succeeded in rallying Christians the way Obi did? What kind of bona fides would he have invoked from his logic or biography to impress pastors who saw an apocalypse in a so-called Muslim-Muslim ticket. Would southerners and those in the Middlebelt have picked a Fulani to take over from a Fulani? Would a Tinubu hatred have forgiven Atiku’s sins? We can only speculate. Maybe Obi came to quell all their anxieties. He was a “godsend” expiation. He gave them an excuse to make peace with their conscience who would not vote a Muslim or a Yoruba man.

It is an irony that what they did not see during the campaigns are too obvious very early in his stewardship. For instance, the appointment of a Christian from southern Kaduna as chief of defence staff, Christopher Musa, let out a reverie of delight, a geo-political epiphany. Or an EFCC chairman as a pastor must have calmed apocalyptic fears.

Now, they see that having Oluremi Tinubu as wife was a big indicator of Tinubu’s pious neutrality. Or Kashim Shettima’s many accommodations of his Christian folks in Borno while he was governor was an act of genuine grace.

As the new Bishop of Katsina Diocese and first Hausa Bishop, Gerald Musa, told me, some clerics were bought over during the polls. It also shows that politicians exploit elections to lie and deceive in order to flatter the people’s secret hopes.

The polls are now over, and governance has begun, and the elections are taking backstage as we face the heres and nows of governance.

Excerpts from Sam Omatseye’s new book: Beating all odds: Diaries and essays on How Bola Tinubu became President, due for presentation March 12.