In a taxi at Kuto, Abeokuta, I heard drivers and passengers saying; “Won ti kowo nle, won kepo wole…”
Even Tinubu sef is angry at what is happening in Nigeria today. I looked at the passenger, he was clad in a yellow shirt with the inscription “Dapo For Governor.” I smiled loud!
Right from 1993, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, after being denied being a Commissioner in the military regime that annul the June 12 Elections won by M.K.O Abiola, has decided to join National Democratic Coalition (NADECO); Afenifere and such other pseodu activism organizations.
Bola, a drug convict who joined SDP through Shehu Yar’Adua and contested to be Senator all because he was the adopted son of late Alhaja Abibat Mogaji the Iyaloja of Lagos, was never a radical. He decided to join activism because of the popularity of the June 12 Struggles. Like Bode George said, “after he couldn’t get an appointment, he left to practice activism.” An opportunist can become radical, just to explore the trends of the moment. Opportunists employ populism when it matters. They run back to their cocoon when the struggles become endangered. This is why people like Tinubu, even though they never led any struggles nor were they on ground to do real organizing, ran to exile at the slightest state threat.
To win the presidential primaries, Tinubu became a sudden activist. He started attacking President Buhari because he knew he was not popular among the people. The conman understands perfectly that a party is a microcosm of the popular feeling. He exploited the anger if Nigerians against Buhari to win the primaries. Unlike Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, a former law activist, who gucked the moment to win the hearts of the APC delegates. Most saw him as unable to look Buhari in the face. Loyalty failed Osinbajo. Tinubu won through pseudo-activism.
Pseudo-activism is a practice of struggles from above. It is a fake and opportunistic kind of activism that is at best populist. Pseudo-activists are people who admire their oppressors but climb on the back of the angers of the oppressed to get to the top, and join or even become worse than the conservative oppressors.
Pseudo-activists are as Tinubu who is actually for privatisations and deregulations of the oil sector as demonstrated in the hosting of Dangote Refineries, but comes back to the public to accuse himself and other oil Marketers of hoarding oil. Pseudo-activism is when you are a bank owner who advocates Naira Devaluation yet goes to Abeokuta to shout “they are making money scarce, but we will win!”
The real activists are those who always stand with the masses, under the sun and in the rain. So, Nigerians should understand, like Deji Adeyanju noted, that Tinubu’s attacking Buhari is a “winning formula” to curry the favour of the people. Tinubu will be worse than Buhari. The #LekkiMassacre of #EndSARS protesters showed that Tinubu wrote and practically engineered the Buhari government’s genocides against protesters. Luckily, the dare-devil candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) could not hide his hate against ENDSARS when he asked “those who were killed, what were they doing there?!”
Ahmed Bola Tinubu is only criticizing the effects of Naira Devaluation as seen in the backlashes of the new Naira notes, and the fuel hikes caused by Oil deregulations as marketers now determine the prices. Nigerians should not be deceived by the Bourdillon conman. Neither should we be swayed by the outright capitalist hellishness being preached by Atiku and Obi.
Nigerians need the fuel crises to be resolved through the return of structural regulations through the now useless Petroleum Price Regulations Agencies (PPRA), not the jamborees by DSS. We need government to build more refineries while fixing the old. We need the refineries to be controlled by the people through a workers’ government. We need to renationalize all the stolen wealths and resources of Nigeria through the rogue privatisations.
And as I told Ibrahim, the APC passenger beside me, the ruling party is the chief undertaker of the current sufferings of the people. To get a new Nigeria, APC must be defeated. And to move really forward, we must never go back to PDP and it’s sub groups in LP and NNPP. Let Nigerians start from the scratch. Let’s fight from below. If voting is what we should wait for, liberty is on the ballot. If not, let’s troop out and fight for a new Nigeria by resisting fuel price hikes and the madness on Naira. Neither of these agitations can be achieved either through ballot on the streets without the real activists like Omoyele Sowore and other candidates and leaders of the African Action Congress (AAC). We have no excuses anymore!