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OPINION: The President Is Missing

Published

1 year ago

October 15, 2024

By Suyi Ayodele

I do not claim authorship of the above headline. That credit goes to Bill Clinton, former President of the United States of America (USA), and his co-author, the American novelist, James Patterson, who penned the words as the title of their novel, roundly described as “a political thriller novel”, “The President Is Missing”, published in 2018.

I adopted the title because the thematic preoccupation of the plot, with particular emphasis on the presence of inner enemies within power circles, resonates with the current state of the Nigerian presidency, especially under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

One of President Tinubu’s frenemies, Senator Ali Ndume of Borno South Senatorial District, last Friday, alluded to the bad elements in the Presidency who never wished Nigeria or its people well. Ndume suggested that these vipers in the corridor of power, have held Tinubu captive. He said those locusts were responsible for the bad economic policies of the president. He therefore asked the President to do something to ameliorate the pain in the land to avoid the impending disaster.

As much as I don’t trust Ndume or anyone else in his phylum, I think his allusion to bad close allies of the president is a bit plausible. That finds its strength in the saying of our sages that the insect which devours the vegetable lives right on the stems of the vegetable. Leaders, all over the world, are surrounded by terrible allies who engage their principals and feed them with the worst of ideas.

But that does not exculpate the principals. Show me your friends and I will tell you the type of person you are, goes the saying. President Tinubu must be bad himself to have accommodated those “bad advisers” for 17 months! I say this again because the elders of my place submit that a man who is taught bad behaviours and goes ahead to exhibit them must have been congenitally bad himself!

The fictitious President Jonathan Lincoln Duncan of the USA in the referenced novel above has trusted, but bad allies in his cabinet. One of them, and who is responsible for the entire incidents that permeate the episodic novel, “The Missing President”, is no other person than Ducan’s Chief of Staff, Carolyn Brock. How Ducan handles her and any other frenemy within the cabinet is what distinguishes a present president from a missing president. Ndume’s allusion to “bad advisers”, to me, only points to one thing, to wit: in the Nigerian Presidency, the missing link is nothing but a Missing President. I will explain.

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Alhaji Abdulrazak Ganiyu Folorunsho, otherwise known as A.G.F. (1927-2022), was the chairman of the committee that gave Nigeria the current presidential system of government. When General Murtala Mohammed’s military administration conceived the idea of a return to democracy, A.G.F. headed the sub-committees of the 1975 Constitution Drafting Committee saddled with the responsibility of determining the modus operandi of the envisaged presidential system of government. It is on record that of all the sub-committees of the Constitution Drafting Committee, only the Ilorin-born lawyer and diplomat’s sub-committee had all its recommendations adopted without changes. The question is, what did the A. G. F’s sub-committee do differently?

In determining how the presidential system would work perfectly for Nigeria, the sub-committee placed a huge premium on the personality of the would-be president. With the precision of a thorough surgeon, the sub-committee defined the personality of who should aspire to be president thus:

“He must perform and be seen as performing the following functions: that of being a symbol of national unity, honour and prestige; being a national figure- a political figure in his own right; and that of being an able executive-someone who can give leadership and a sense of direction to the country”.

This submission entails that there shall be no abdication of responsibilities by the president. No buck-passing and no blame-game. The president must be someone who is ready “to give leadership and a sense of direction to the country”. This is where Ndume’s theory of “bad advisers” to President Tinubu falls short.

The 1975 sub-committee, which is 49 years ago, validates this position when it submitted, alongside other recommendations, that in arriving at the identikit description of the intending president, its decisions “were very much influenced by the debate on national objectives and public accountability…., adding that “What has been uppermost in our minds is how to provide for an effective leadership that expresses our aspirations for national unity without at the same time building up a Leviathan whose power may be difficult to curb.” The whole argument is about leadership and that, unfortunately, has been in short supply in the present administration.

No one expects Mr. President to do it alone. He must, as a matter of necessity, have people he can call upon to do one thing or the other. The difference here, however, is that the buck stops on his table. His personality also counts. Bad advisers or no bad advisers, President Tinubu is the one elected and he takes the blame for his inability to be firm, resolute and consistent. The nation’s economy is dancing to the yoyo percussion because the President has not demonstrated enough understanding of the simplest of governance intricacies.

If President Tinubu has failed in the last 17 months to identify the “bad advisers” in his cabinet, and he keeps listening to them as his voodoo economic policies push Nigerians to the pit of want, lack and abject poverty, he is to be blamed. At his electioneering, Nigerians were assured that Tinubu would assemble the best of “technocrats” and fix the nation. If what we are seeing now is the best that can come out of the ovens of his “best technocrats”, then something is fundamentally wrong! Tinubu therefore carries the can, no argument!

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Our present situation in Nigeria has become like the case of a man whose mother was devoured by a tiger. Our elders say the method to adopt in consoling the bereaved remains a puzzle. They ask: “Do you tell him to take heart because it is the way of tigers to devour human beings? Or do you tell the bereaved that that was how your own mother was devoured?” This is the difficult task before those who sold Tinubu to Nigerians. They need a solid argument to convince the rest of us how the kola nut they sold to us at Ejigbomekun Market suddenly turned to abidan (pseudo kola nut).

Unlike what happened in Clinton and Patterson’s novel, when Ducan deliberately goes ‘missing’ at one of the most crucial times in the history of America, in order to solve the riddle of the bad element in his cabinet, President Tinubu at the moment is holidaying in one of the coolest spaces in the world, doing nothing, at a time Nigerians are gasping for breath because his administration, has, within a month, inflicted pain on them, twice, by increasing the pump price of fuel. One of President Tinubu’s handlers, Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, told us, that while on leave, Tinubu could go anywhere he chose.

I have no problem with that, and I will also not join the ‘bandwagon’ of those who think the President should be sensitive enough to show compassion, even if feigned at this period. When a president lacks the qualities the 1975 committee on the presidential system stipulated the way Tinubu does, the President can afford to crisscross the globe at a time Nigerians are dying in pain. In all honesty, I must say this: I may end up being the greatest fan of President Tinubu. A man who acts to type is my friend any day! President Tinubu, I confess here, has not disappointed in turning out to be a tribulation in his Presidency, the way we predicted in 2023 while he was seeking to be president!

I also don’t want to believe that Oga Onanuga is one of the alluded “bad advisers” of the president. Every man gives to the best of his aptitude. I have often heard that morality has no place in Nigerian politics. Only a morally-sound adviser would be able to tell his principal that this is not the time to junket at the expense of the people. What Onanuga failed to tell us is that while on holiday anywhere in the world, President Tinubu pays no bills. Our treasury does that. Tinubu is not just our president; he is equally our burden! Again, we are not at liberty to ask which duty has the president performed in the last 17 months to deserve a leave. A man who has the capacity to inflict this level of pain on us deserves a rest from his ‘hard work’! Phew!

I also think we should not blame Mrs. Oluremi Tinubu, the president’s wife, who, last week, asked us to look in the haystack for the needle for those responsible for our present economic woes. To the First Lady, 17 months is not enough for Nigerians to start asking Tinubu questions about how their nation’s economy has nosedived. It would not matter to her that Nigerians cannot afford the N1,700 loaf of bread as long as she can donate the sum of N1 billion to her alma mater, Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife.

How she came about the huge amount of money and the N500 million she earlier dashed the Borno flood victims, should we ask, Mrs. Tinubu is likely to tell us that 17 months is too short a time for Nigerians to think she must have helped herself to a part of our national cake. Afterall, she told us, plainly, that her family was already well-to-do before her husband’s presidency. Even with no known business concern apart from being the wife of Bola Tinubu, Mrs. Tinubu can afford to throw around N1.5 billion in just a month! Only a beneficiary of the Biblical proclamation: “Blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:42), can achieve that feat!

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Writers are ‘bad’ people. They depict characters in very fanciful ways. In depicting an average Nigerian in his novel, “Lonely Londoners”, Sam Selvon, gives Captain, or Cap for short, the portrait of a roué. That identikit fits perfectly typical Nigerian leaders, who, like Cap, do nothing but live on our common patrimony, smoke the best cigarette, drink the most expensive wine and keep the most beautiful ladies as their wives or girlfriends.

Selvon says this of Cap: “It have some men in this world, they don’t do nothing at all, and you feel that they would dead from starvation, but day after day you meeting them and they looking hale, they laughing and they talking as if they have a million dollars, and in truth it look as if they would not only live longer than you but they would dead happier.” So, it is with our leaders who not only live parasitically on our commonwealth but flaunt the same and ask us to go hug the next electric pole!

“They say there’s no manual for overcoming the death of a spouse (110). Ducan again, the fictitious US President, utters those words in the novel cited in our opening paragraph. Nigerians are at that stage of our excruciating pain inflicted on us because we have a President who chooses to be missing in his own Presidency. It is only a missing president that would allow “bad advisers” to take over his government and dish un-squeezed bitter leave portions to the people at regular intervals the way we have in this Tinubu’s administration. The physical presence of the man notwithstanding, President Tinubu is missing in action in his own government.

The allusion to a “missing president” was first thrown at us when the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal, in October 2017, asked rhetorically: “Who is the Presidency?” Lawal, who was accused of diverting the sum of N544 million meant for cutting grasses at Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDP) camps to his personal company, was asked by a horde of journalists to confirm his suspension as the SGF, after he emerged from the office of the Vice-President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo. Bewildered that the information he shared only with Osinbajo had leaked, Lawal threw the question back at the journalists by asking them who suspended him. When he was told “by the Presidency”, he retorted: “Who is the Presidency?”

The former SGF asked that question because in the administration where he served as the SGF, President Muhammadu Buhari was a “missing president”, a President-do-nothing, at best! And that has been the misfortune of Nigerians in the last nine years. Everything in the administration has been on autopilot because the one elected to lead has abdicated that responsibility. President Tinubu had no mistakes about the tasks before him when he sought to be president. He told whoever cared to listen then that he understood the enormity of the problems and promised to fix them.

He assured the people with his “E lo fokan bale” campaign payoff. On the fuel increase prior to the 2023 general election, Tinubu said “a ma gbe wa le” (we shall reduce it). So, the excuse by Mrs. Tinubu that her husband’s administration just being 17 months old is to say the least, blether! We should ask the mad man who spends 17 months removing his clothes, how many months he has to run around the market naked! For a man they sold to us as cerebral, he has had more than enough time in the last 17 months to fix many of the problems. Ndume said that the time is running out. I add here that we are on borrowed time already!

President Tinubu must change the narrative. What we have now is a situation where the government does not even know what the problems are. Nothing, I dare reiterate, in the last 17 months, shows that President Tinubu has the aptitude for the work he elected to do. If nobody has told the president that, I think we owe him that obligation to tell the President that he is missing in his Presidency! This is what I expect Mrs. Tinubu and the president-can-go-anywhere-he-likes gang to do: find the Missing President and bring him back to his Presidency to fix Nigeria!

News

Out-of-school: Group To Enroll Adolescent Mothers In Bauchi

Published

1 day ago

December 10, 2025

Editor

Women Child Youth Health and Education Initiative (WCY) with support from Malala Education Champion Network, have charted a way to enroll adolescent mothers to access education in Bauchi schools.

Rashida Mukaddas, the Executive Director, WCY stated this in Bauchi on Wednesday during a one-day planning and inception meeting with education stakeholders on Adolescent Mothers Education Access (AMEA) project of the organisation.

According to her, the project targeted three Local Government Areas of Bauchi, Misau and Katagum for implementation in the three years project.

She explained that all stakeholders in advancing education in the state would be engaged by the organisation to advocate for Girl-Child education.

The target, she added, was to ensure that as many as married adolescent mothers and girls were enrolled back in school in the state.

“Today marks an important step in our collective commitment to ensuring that every girl in Bauchi state, especially adolescent who are married, pregnant, or young mothers has the right, opportunity, and support to continue and complete her education.

“This project has been designed to address the real and persistent barriers that prevent too many adolescent mothers from returning to school or staying enrolled.

“It is to address the barriers preventing adolescent mothers from continuing and completing their education and adopting strategies that will create an enabling environment that safeguard girls’ rights to education while removing socio-cultural and economic obstacles,” said Mukaddas.

She further explained to the stakeholders that the success of the project depended on the strength of their collaboration, the alignment of their actions, and the commitments they forge toward the implementation of the project.

Also speaking, Mr Kamal Bello, the Project Officer of WCY, said that the collaboration of all the education stakeholders in the state with the organisation could ensure stronger enforcement of the Child Rights Law.

This, he said, could further ensure effective re-entry and retention policies for adolescent girls, increased community support for girls’ education and a Bauchi state where no girl was left behind because of marriage, pregnancy, or motherhood.

“It is observed that early marriage is one of the problems hindering girls’ access to education.

“This organisation is working toward ensuring that girls that have dropped out of school due to early marriage are re-enrolled back in school,” he said.

Education stakeholders present at the event included representatives from the state Ministry of Education, Justice, Budget and Economic Planning and Multilateral Coordination.

Others were representatives from International Federation of Women Lawyers, Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE), Bauchi state Agency for Mass Education, Civil Society Organization, Religious and Traditional institutions, among others.

They all welcomed and promised to support the project so as to ensure its effective implementation and achieve its set objectives in the state.

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OPINION: Fubara, Adeleke And The Survival Dance

Published

2 days ago

December 10, 2025

Editor

By Israel Adebiyi

You should be aware by now that the dancing governor, Ademola Adeleke has danced his last dance in the colours of the Peoples Democratic Party. His counterpart in Rivers, Siminalayi Fubara has elected to follow some of his persecutors to the All Progressive Congress, after all “if you can’t beat them, you can join them.”
Politics in Nigeria has always been dramatic, but every now and then a pattern emerges that forces us to pause and think again about where our democracy is heading. This week on The Nation’s Pulse, that pattern is what I call the politics of survival. Two events in two different states have brought this into sharp focus. In both cases, sitting governors elected on the platform of the same party have found new homes elsewhere. Their decisions may look sudden, but they reveal deeper issues that have been growing under the surface for years.

In Rivers, Governor Siminalayi Fubara has crossed into the All Progressives Congress. In Osun, Governor Ademola Adeleke has moved to the Accord Party. These are not small shifts. These are moves by people at the top of their political careers, people who ordinarily should be the ones holding their parties together. When those at the highest levels start fleeing, it means the ground beneath them has become too shaky to stand on. It means something has broken.

A Yoruba proverb captures it perfectly: Iku to n pa oju gba eni, owe lo n pa fun ni. The death that visits your neighbour is sending you a message. The crisis that has engulfed the Peoples Democratic Party did not start today. It has been building like an untreated infection. Adeleke saw the signs early. He watched senior figures fight openly. He watched the party fail to resolve its zoning battles. He watched leaders undermine their own candidates. At some point, you begin to ask yourself a simple question: if this house collapses today, what happens to me? In Osun, where the competition between the two major parties has always been fierce, Adeleke was not going to sit back and become another casualty of a party that refused to heal itself. Survival became the most reasonable option.

His case makes sense when you consider the political temperature in Osun. This is a state where the opposition does not sleep. Every misstep is amplified. Every weakness is exploited. Adeleke has spent his time in office under constant scrutiny. Add that to the fact that the national structure of his party is wobbly, divided and uncertain about its future, and the move begins to look less like betrayal and more like self-preservation.

Rivers, however, tells a slightly different story. Fubara’s journey has been a long lesson in endurance. From the moment he emerged as governor, it became clear he was stepping into an environment loaded with expectations that had nothing to do with governance. His political godfather was not content with being a supporter. He wanted control. He wanted influence. He wanted obedience. Every decision was interpreted through the lens of loyalty. From the assembly crisis to the endless reconciliation meetings, to the barely hidden power struggles, Fubara spent more time fighting shadows than building the state he was elected to lead.

It soon became clear that he was governing through a maze of minefields. Those who should have been allies began to treat him like an accidental visitor in the Government House. The same legislators who were meant to be partners in governance suddenly became instruments of pressure. Orders came from places outside the official structure. Courtrooms turned into battlegrounds. At some point, even the national leadership of his party seemed unsure how to tame the situation. These storms did not come in seasons, they came in waves. One misunderstanding today. Another in two weeks. Another by the end of the month. Anyone watching closely could see that the governor was in a permanent state of emergency.

So when the winds started shifting again and lawmakers began to realign, those who understood the undercurrents knew exactly what was coming. Fubara knew too. A man can only take so much. After months of attacks, humiliations and attempts to cage his authority, the move to another party was not just political. It was personal. He had given the reconciliation process more chances than most would. He had swallowed more insults than any governor should. He had watched institutions bend and twist under the weight of private interests. In many ways, his defection is a declaration that he has finally chosen to protect himself.

But the bigger question is how we got here. How did two governors in two different parts of the country end up taking the same decision for different but related reasons? The answer goes back to the state of internal democracy in our parties. No party in Nigeria today fully practices the constitution it claims to follow. They have elaborate rules on paper but very loose habits in reality. They talk about fairness, but their primaries are often messy. They preach unity, but their caucuses are usually divided into rival camps. They call themselves democratic institutions, yet dissent is treated as disloyalty.

Political parties are supposed to be the engine rooms of democracy. They are the homes where ideas are debated, leaders are groomed, and future candidates are shaped. In Nigeria, they increasingly look like fighting arenas where the loudest voices drown out everyone else. When leaders ignore their own constitutions, the structure begins to crack. When factions begin to run parallel meetings, the foundation gets weaker. When decisions are forced down the throats of members, people begin making private plans for their future.

No governor wants to govern in chaos. No politician wants to be the last one standing in a sinking ship. This is why defections are becoming more common. A party that cannot manage itself cannot manage its members. And members who feel exposed will always look for safer ground.

But while these moves make sense for Adeleke and Fubara personally, the people they govern often become the ones left in confusion. Voters choose candidates partly because of party ideology, even if our ideologies are weak. They expect stability. They expect continuity. They expect that the mandate they gave will remain intact. So when a governor shifts political camp without prior consultation, the people feel blindsided. They begin to wonder whether their votes carry weight in a system where elected officials can switch platforms in the blink of an eye.

This is where the politics of survival becomes dangerous for democracy. If leaders keep prioritizing their personal safety over party stability, the system begins to lose coherence. Parties lose their identity. Elections lose their meaning. Governance becomes a game of musical chairs. Today you are here. Tomorrow you are there. Next week you may be somewhere else. The people become bystanders in a democracy that is supposed to revolve around them.

Rivers and Osun should serve as reminders that political parties need urgent restructuring. They need to rebuild trust internally. They need to enforce their constitutions consistently. They need to treat members as stakeholders, not spectators. When members feel protected, they stay. When they feel targeted, they run. This pattern will continue until parties learn the simple truth that power is not built by intimidation, but by inclusion.

There is also the question of what these defections mean for governance. When governors are dragged into endless party drama, service delivery suffers. Time that should be spent on roads, schools, hospitals, water projects and job creation ends up being spent in meetings, reconciliations and press briefings. Resources that should strengthen the state end up funding political battles. The public loses twice. First as witnesses to the drama. Then as victims of delayed or abandoned development.

In Rivers, the months of tension slowed down the government. Initiatives were stalled because the governor was busy trying to survive political ambush. In Osun, Adeleke had to juggle governance with internal fights in a crumbling party structure. Imagine what they could have achieved if they were not constantly looking over their shoulders.

Now, as both men settle into new political homes, the final question is whether these new homes will provide stability or merely temporary shelter. Nigeria’s politics teaches one consistent lesson. New alliances often come with new expectations. New platforms often come with new demands. And new godfathers often come with new conditions. Whether Adeleke and Fubara have truly found peace or simply bought time is something only time will tell.

But as citizens, what we must insist on is simple. The politics of survival should not become the politics of abandonment. Our leaders can fight for their political life, but they must not forget that they hold the people’s mandate. The hunger, poverty, insecurity and infrastructural decay that Nigerians face will not be solved by defection. It will be solved by steady leadership and functional governance.

The bigger lesson from Rivers and Osun is clear. If political parties in Nigeria continue on this path of disunity and internal sabotage, they will keep losing their brightest and most strategic figures. And if leaders keep running instead of reforming the system, then we will wake up one day to a democracy where the people are treated as an afterthought.

Governors may survive the storms. Parties may adjust to new alignments. But the people cannot keep paying the price. Nigeria deserves a democracy that works for the many, not the few. That is the real pulse of the nation.

News

Human Rights Day: Stakeholders Call For More Campaigns Against GBV

Published

2 days ago

December 10, 2025

Editor

Panel of discussants at an event to commemorate the International Human Rights Day, 2025 on Wednesday called for more campaigns against Gender-Based Violence, adding that it must start from the family.

The panel of discussants drawn from religious and community leaders, security agents, members of the civil society community, chiefs, etc, made the call in Benin in an event organised by Justice Development & Peace Centre (JDPC), Benin, in collaboration with Women Aid Collective (WACOL) with the theme: Multilevel Dialogue for Men, Women, Youth and Critical Take holders on the Prevention and Response to Gender-Based Violence (GBV).

The stakeholders, who said causes of GBV are enormous, called for more enlightenment and education in the family, community and the religious circle.

Security agents in the panel charged members of the public to report GBV cases to security agents regardless of the sex Involved, adding: “When GBV happens, it should be reported to the appropriate quarters. It doesn’t matter if the woman or the man is the victim. GBV perpetrators should not be covered up, they must be exposed. We are there to carry out the prosecution after carrying out the necessary investigation.”

Earlier in his opening remarks, Executive Director, JDPC, Rev. Fr. Benedicta Onwugbenu, lamented that (GBV) remains the most prevalent in the society yet hidden because of silence from victims.

According to him, GBV knows no age, gender or race, adding that “It affects people of all ages, whether man or woman, boy or girl.”

“It affects people from different backgrounds and communities, yet it remains hidden because of silence, stigma, and fear. Victims of GBV are suffering in silence.”

On her part, Programme Director, WACOL, Mrs. Francisca Nweke, who said “women are more affected, and that is why we are emphasising on them,” stressed “we are empowering Christian women and women leaders of culture for prevention and response to Gender-Based Violence in Nigeria through the strengthening of grassroots organisations.”