Nigeria’s economic crisis has turned every middling commentator into an expert on economic issues. Among the most voluble are some politicians, opinion moulders and traditional rulers from the North, who virtually slept through Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years in power with hardly a word of criticism except when they felt personally short-changed.
The sheer hypocrisy of their present position is made very obvious each time the likes of Usman Yusuf and Ali Ndume open their mouths to speak where they were mute for the most past of the eight years of an administration that rail-roaded us into poverty and insecurity. They have found common cause in those they pejoratively call “Lagos boys”.
The latest in this regard is a former member of the House of Representatives and stalwart of the PDP, Usman Bugaje. For Bugaje, it was the Lagos boys that misled President Bola Tinubu into the imposition of sanction on the Nigerien junta that seized power last July. It does not matter that ECOWAS is a regional body that had before Tinubu’s assumption of office committed to such measures among member states. Tinubu as chair of that body could not on his own impose his personal wish on others.
Narratives like this leave room for false attributions and accusations that the president could on his own act in the name and with the authority of a regional organisation. Would this be because Nigeria is the putative giant of Africa? A giant whose powers and authority are without limits? Yet, it is no secret that the North has from the start been opposed to the imposition of sanction on the Nigerien junta for reasons that are largely to do with the historical connection, familial, genealogical and otherwise, that have bounded people in some Northern Nigerian states to their counterparts across the Nigerian border with Niger.
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Some Northern political leaders like Buhari, whose paternal roots have been traced to Niger, for example, are believed to be as much Nigerian as they are Nigerien. They are, therefore, not happy that the kind of move made by ECOWAS could have happened under the government of a Nigerian. They are, on this score if no other, unimpressed by the economic blockade of Niger by ECOWAS. That ECOWAS has now lifted the sanction may not be unconnected to pressures from these Nigerians even if none of them would admit that. They would rather lionise the Nigerien junta and pretend that ECOWAS blinked after it was browbeaten by the devil-may-care attitude of the putschists.
There were those who also could barely disguise their desire to see what happened in Niger play out also in Nigeria under Tinubu. Their support of the junta or, at least, their opposition to the imposition of any sanction on their regime was based on a reason no more complicated than wishing that a leader they did not vote for but who nevertheless won a keenly contested election against the candidates they voted for does not deserve to hold that office. Here belong the supporters of Peter Obi. The veiled threat to democratic rule across the Western African region that the unconstitutional takeover of government in Niger meant was for them both a warning to the Tinubu administration that it could suffer a similar fate for winning against their wish and an invitation to the Nigerian military to toe the path of the Nigerien junta.
Some of these opposition elements did more than just suggest this in the immediate aftermath of the 2023 election. They craved and openly canvassed it. They went on protest, on their knees, at the Defence Headquarters in Abuja as they called for military intervention. Otherwise, there have been no clear specifics to the accusations against the Tinubu men labelled Lagos boys other than the idea that the supposed members of the group are all over the president. There are yet no concrete evidence of the assumed overbearing influence of the Lagos boys. Things reside mostly in the realm of hearsay.
Critics who prefer this line of argument are often Northerners and while it may not be impossible that there is some truth to their position, it also does appear like a part of the criticism is inspired by a determination to find something to criticise about the Tinubu administration in light of the often-repeated charge that the Buhari presidency was a hostage of a cabal that included his close circle of kinsmen, friends and associates.
That cabal, it was believed, effectively sidelined those outside their circle of influence from having much if anything to do with the president. Those affected included individuals and groups that contributed to Buhari’s emergence as president. Under the Tinubu presidency, Femi Gbajabiamila, the president’s Chief of Staff, has been accused a number of times of grievous misconduct. This includes but is not limited to selling of ministerial positions to the highest bidder. He is also said to take important decisions on behalf of the president and shielded him from those who could offer him useful but contrary advice to that offered within his shadowy circle of Lagosians.
Gbajabiamila is often fingered as the arrowhead of the so-called Lagos boys which supporters of the ancient regime would like to see as the Tinubu’s equivalent of the Buhari cabal. If Mamman Daura was the leader of the latter group, Gbajabiamila is seen as the leader of the former group. Having identified a group within the Tinubu presidency as responsible for most of the decisions and actions of the presidency, the North is just one step away from saying Tinubu is incompetent and that he is no more able than the bumbling Buhari that spent eight good years mostly sitting on his palm while the country went into ruins.
Since the best decisions of the Tinubu government have all but impoverished Nigerians, drawing them deeper into an economic bog, since the promised gains of the president’s harsh economic plans and decisions are yet to manifest while leaving a bitter taste in the mouth, it may be difficult for Tinubu to engage in any form of chest thumping at this time. Yet his government has made important gains that it has been too incompetent to showcase to Nigerians.
How about its fight against insurgents that the Northern beneficiaries have refused to acknowledge? The greater part of the country’s food inflation is tied to failures of insecurity, a leviathan of a challenge that has driven farmers from across all regions of the country from their farms. To get that right is to get a lot right. Yet all we hear from the North are cries of hunger and threats to withdraw support for a president who just happens not to be Fulani. It’s the price the city boy must pay!
Rotimi Fasan
