By Lasisi Olagunju

Useful Abdullahi Ganduje kissed the canvas on Friday. Many more will go his way. His fall was the wish of his maker, the king: cold, calculating, ruthless.

Ganduje said he resigned as APC National Chairman to take care of his failing health. APC governors, deities that they are, assisted him with a different reason. They held a meeting in Benin at the weekend and said the man’s exit aligned with internal reforms and ongoing efforts to strengthen their party. “His Excellency, Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje’s resignation is in tandem with the party’s continued evolution,” the governors said. How could someone’s sickness be part of a party’s reforms?

If the voice of an elder does not sprout yams that are good for pounding, it will sprout yams good for planting (Ohùn àgbà, bí kò ta isu gígún, á ta èèbù). The president is the elder here; nothing he utters or orders goes unheeded. We have since learnt that Ganduje had to go because the president needed a clearer view of the future. The president is busy weeding the field and mounting the stakes to the applause of the indentured. The whole country is behind the one who hires and fires; like the old lion, all walks lead into his tent.

The stage President Bola Tinubu is today was the stage Zulu king, Emperor Shaka, was at the peak of his glory. From 1816 to 1828, from River Pongola to the Tugela River, Shaka conquered this enemy and defeated that foe. In deft, strategic moves, he allied with all rivals around, massed for himself a vast empire of 200km-wide area, north of the present-day city of Durban, South Africa. He built an empire of marvel that has been difficult for history to ignore. Shaka moved from king to emperor; he dominated, ruled, developed and plundered as he wished. Then, one day, God said “enough!” The man suffered the final loss, but his reign left ugly scars.

Emperor Shaka did no wrong no matter how gross the things he did were. Everything he did was right and was worthy of his people’s applause, and the people applauded him. Even when the emperor treated and called his subjects dogs in their presence, the subjects clapped and said they were blessed. In 1824, Shaka was visited by Henry Franics Fynn, an Englishman on official duty. A fascinating exchange, which ensued between them, was carefully kept in a diary by the white man:

Shaka: “I hear you have come from umGeorge, is it so ? Is he as great a king as I am?”

Fynn: “Yes; King George is one of the greatest kings in the world.”

Shaka: “I am very angry with you.” (He said while putting on a severe countenance). “I shall send a messenger to umGeorge and request him to kill you. He sent you to me, he did not send you to give medicine to my dogs.”

All present immediately applauded what Shaka had said. (They were the ones he called dogs, and they knew).

Shaka: “Why did you give my dogs medicine?” (in allusion to the woman I was said to have brought back to life after death).

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Fynn: “It is a practice of our country to help those who are in need, if able to do so.”

Shaka: “Are you then the doctor of dogs? You were sent here to be my doctor.”

Fynn: “I am not a doctor and not considered by my countrymen to be one.”

Shaka: “Have you medicine by you?”

Fynn: “Yes.”

Shaka: “Then cure me, or I will have you sent to umGeorge to have you killed.”

Fynn: “What is the matter with you ?”

Shaka: “That is your business to find out.”

Fynn: “Stand up and let me see your person.”

Shaka: “Why should I stand up?”

Fynn: “That I may see if I can find out what ails you.”

(Source: Stuart and Malcolm, ‘Diary of Fynn, 83-5’, in ‘Tshaka and the British traders, 1824-1828’ by Felix N. C. Okoye, 1972).

If Shaka were Yoruba, he would be worshipped as Kabiyesi, an emperor, the one no one queries. “To be truly imperial, one must have an empire to govern.” Harold Larrabee wrote that in his review of Arthur Schlesinger’s ‘The Imperial Presidency.’ Larrabee was right. I add to what he said: To have an empire, you must fight and conquer all enemies, and “eat up” friendly neighbours. Shaka did that in Zululand. That is the point our ‘democracy’ is at present in Nigeria. Kabiyesi has removed all gloves, he is on a strategic offensive, building a pan-Nigeria empire.

Dutifully daily, Tinubu signs appointments, he instigates rebellion in enemy camps and inspires defections; he whispers resignations. His Imperial Majesty does unimaginable things and gets away with them with uncommon success. Yet we say Nigeria will defeat him in 2027. From the first shot in 1999, the man was clear what he wanted to do with the farm put in his hand. He has since grown strong to become a master of confounding abstraction: positioning, counter-positioning. Sometimes he fights in calculated silence. You remember that saying about the dude whose soup plate is a buffet of lamb and ram parts; the man who eats his pounded yam with relish, mounts his horse in daytime and his woman at night. Yet they say we should ignore him because he is not well. Who is not well? What he does is not a definition of insanity. That is not stupidity; it is cold steeze. His sneeze is a chill jitter. To defeat him, you need extra, extra work – and a surfeit of ‘sense’.

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Let us examine this: Rauf Aregbesola plays his politics with plenty, plenty songs of battle (orin ote). Sometimes he sings the songs and his fans dance; some other time, you see his followers take the lead while he follows with electrifying dance steps. Such a lively politician. There is a particular song from his talking drummers that I hold to: “Ení máa bá e s’òsèlú o, á ní sense t’ó pé…(anyone who wants to engage you in politics must have very good, adequate sense).” I take that song as not an ordinary blab of the bard. I take it to heart as both a warning and a war cry. ‘Sense’ in that song should be read as wile and guile varnished with mountains of money and might. Every politician from Lagos School of Politics lives by that song and is certificated in its foundational philosophy. Yet, all of them, including Rauf Aregbesola, are mere students. The school principal is Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the pilot of our imperial presidency.

The Sage of Chelsea, Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher. Thomas Carlyle saw the world of politics as a chess board with “councillors of state sitting, plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are men.” Tinubu, today, plays out that allegory with chilling clarity. In just two years of his imperial presidency, he has recreated the political arena, rebuilding it from what it should be, a place of ideals to a chessboard where every defection is a ‘rook’ captured, every resignation a ‘bishop’ displaced, and every silence from the Villa a move made under the cover of strategy.

Almost all reports that announced the exit of Dr Ganduje as the national chairman of the APC said he was forced to quit by the president. I have no problem with Ganduje leaving the buffet table for another to hop there and eat. Literally, there is no issue in the use and flush of the expendable. What I find intriguing is the normality and the ease with which the ‘democratic’ system opens its door for imperial presidential invasion while we all shout “Hail Caesar”!

Chess is an Indian invention, imported into the Middle East, and exported to Europe by the Arabs. In ‘Chessmen and Chess’ by Charles Wilkinson published in May, 1943, we read of Masudi, a tenth-century Arab writer, who tells us of the various uses of the chessboard, especially “how it served for studying the strategy of war…” It is on the chessboard that you meet the ‘king’ dominated by the stately ‘queen’. “If there is trouble on the board” look for the sly old fox called ‘bishop’. There is also the most eccentric ‘knight’ “who loves a bloody fight”; and then the ‘rook’ who “will beat the ‘bishop’ any time.” There is also there the weak, expendable pawn. I am not a chess player, never played the game. I read all those in ‘Chess Pieces’ authored by David Solway. I found it good for my meditation.

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If I am allowed to bring chess into political commentary, I would set Nigeria down as a board, take the forced resignation of Ganduje, the wave of defections into the APC, and steady-handed President Bola Tinubu as the master chess player behind it all. The man plays chess, not dice; he does not place his hope on luck. What he plays is a game of precision, deep foresight, and ruthless elegance. That is unmistakable chess. With some other blocs, Tinubu created the APC years ago. The party started as a company of many directors. Now, the man is possessing it wholly. He is fast becoming the sole inheritor of not just the party, but the Nigerian state and its blessings. With his ingenuity, he is excising competition, those who may not be happy that he is recreating the party and the country in his own image.

If you don’t play chess as I don’t, watch those who do, or ask them for directions. Ganduje’s fall was a perfect act of the master moving a knight to expose a king. There are many more movements to make, going forward. Check this president’s records since Lagos; his skill at neutralising kings before they rise is topnotch and legendary. And he has not started. The man is just showing us the faint head of the bird in his pocket.

Elephant’s hide that confounds the cobbler (awo erin tíí dààmú onísònà). That is what Tinubu has become. He plants corn of trouble (àgbàdo òràn) in his neighbour’s garden; he sits back and watches if they will dare harvest the corn. When a PDP governor defects to the president’s party today, a senator yesterday, and a whole state House of Assembly follows tomorrow, we all know these for what they are. The defections are not patriotic or spontaneous acts of conviction; neither are they movements of love for the god they worship. The deity also has no feelings for them. They are what chess players would dub precise recruitments for battle; pawns, bishops, and sometimes whole castles brought to the side of the reigning monarch. If you like, keep murmuring or shouting betrayal. That is your headache. My chess teacher tells me all this is Tinubu repositioning the board ahead of 2027, removing weak links and replacing them with loyal sentinels. The APC governors said almost the same thing in their communique on Saturday: The ill health that sacked their chairman is the health of their party.

It would have been excellent if half of the energy and brilliance we see in all these political actions and movements are seen in the management of the affairs of our country. We don’t see the captain maximally at work; he is, instead, busy playing politics with everything. The nation tanks; businesses, big and small, reel in pains, and the people suffer not lightly. Over 130 million Nigerians still live in extreme, multidimensional poverty. Bandits lock fingers with terrorists and are on the prowl, unrestrained, unrestrainable. Yet, all we see is politics being played with one-hundred percent of attention and resources. Democracy has failed here.

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Social Democratic Party (SDP) presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Adebayo Adewole, in a recent comment scored Tinubu A1 in politics and F9 in governance. “That is a problem because the A1 in politics only means that he knows the political class very well; he knows what moves and motivates them as well as how to recruit them. He sometimes retrenches them, retires them and reengages them because he knows what they want. But I wish he knew what the Nigerian people want, which are basic services, economic stability and security. If he cannot save lives in Benue, Plateau and many parts of the country, then he has failed.” Adewole stressed and added that the only skill Tinubu has in the management of the economy “is the economisation of truth, which basically is what they do rather than manage the economy.”

Well, I won’t comment on the failure score which the SDP man gave the president – because I want to be safe. But A1 in politics I also score the grandmaster of Nigeria. I salute him.

Thomas Henry Huxley, prominent 19th-century biologist and agnostic, once described the world as a chessboard governed by hidden rules and unseen players. Well, what we have happening before our very eyes in Nigeria is not a game of hidden rules and unseen players. They do not play with masks here. The players on all sides are known and very well too. Huxley said the player on the other side “never overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.” The president is the player on the other side. He has rewritten the rules; his fingers are seen probing every hole. He does not bend and break the rules: the rules bow, bend and break before His Imperial Majesty. And he does not care if the whole world says he is wrong. He must win every game.

On Friday, it was with heavy heart that the house of Ganduje saw their master leave the APC board. The once-useful ‘bishop’ was yanked off the board for the master’s greater control and sweeter win. The Kano man, like all expendable pawns, is out, but the game continues. And the real player is still seated, still calculating, moving the pieces. He is Tinubu, cold blooded like Emperor Shaka, the eagle, watching, calculating while his enemies counter-calculate. The grimmer the play, the more pleasurable to watch. That is where the good news is for watchers like me, and for popcorn makers. The board is resetting for 2027. Be attentive. I am.