Connect with us

News

OPINION: The President Is Missing

Published

on

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: Wike, Fubara: Bitten By Tiger Cub [OPINION]

Advertisement

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”.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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!

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: Nigeria @ 64: The One The World Troubles [OPINION]

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).

Advertisement

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!

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: ‘Protest’ That ‘Restructured’ Nigeriass

Advertisement

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!

Advertisement

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: The Streets Are Empty

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!

Advertisement

“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.

Advertisement

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!

Advertisement

News

FG Predicts Heavy Rainfall, Flood In Seven States

Published

on

The Federal Ministry of Environment on Saturday predicted possible flooding in seven states and 25 locations across Nigeria.

The ministry, in its flood alert warned that heavy rainfall expected between August 23 and 24 could lead to flooding in the listed areas.

Advertisement

The alert was signed by the Director of the Erosion, Flood and Coastal Zone Management Department, Usman Bokani.

He further directed residents of communities along the flood plain from Jebba to Lokoja to evacuate immediately as the River Niger’s water level continues to rise.

READ ALSO:NiMet Predicts 3-day Thunderstorms, Rains

Advertisement

Due to the rise in the water level of River Niger, communities on the flood plain from Jebba to Lokoja are advised to evacuate,” he said.

The states and communities expected to be affected include Benue State (Abinsi, Agyo, Gbajimba, Gogo, Makurdi, Mbapa, Otobi, Otukpo, Udoma, Ukpiam); Borno State (Briyel, Dikwa, MaiduKamba; Gombe State (Bajoga, Dogon Ruwa, Gombe, Nafada); Kebbi State (Gwandu, Jega, Kamba); Nasarawa State (Agima, Keana, Keffi, Odogbo, Rukubi); Niger State (Lapai); and Yobe State (Gashua, Gasma, Potiskum).

On Friday, the National Emergency Management Agency urged residents in high-risk flood plains to evacuate to safer and higher grounds.

Advertisement

READ ALSO:Again, NiMet Predicts Three-day Thunderstorms, Rain From Saturday

The states at high risk according to the agency are Kebbi, Niger, Kwara states that share borders with Benin Republic.

This was disclosed in a press statement signed by the agency’s Head of Press Unit, Manzo Ezekiel.

Advertisement

The Director General of NEMA, Mrs. Zubaida Umar, also directed all NEMA offices covering communities along the River Niger to intensify advocacy and mobilization for flood preparedness following alerts of rising water levels in the upstream of the river in the Republic of Benin.

READ ALSO:NiMet Predicts 3-day Rains, Thunderstorms Across Nigeria From Sunday

In an urgent directive conveyed to the operations offices, Mrs. Zubaida Umar instructed them to sensitize communities to remain vigilant and advise residents in high-risk flood plains to evacuate to safer, higher grounds, especially those in Kebbi, Niger and Kwara states that share borders with Benin Republic.

Advertisement

“She further urged the State Governments of the identified high-risk areas to support their Emergency Management Agencies (SEMAs) and Local Emergency Management Committees (LEMCs) in activating contingency plans and preparedness measures to mitigate the potential impact of this year’s flooding.

“The Director General reaffirmed NEMA’s commitment to ensuring coordinated actions to safeguard lives and livelihoods along the River Niger,” the statement noted.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

News

‘Court Of Corruption’ — Obasanjo Knocks INEC Chairman, Judiciary In New Book

Published

on

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has criticised the Nigerian judiciary, saying it has been “deeply compromised” and that corruption among judges has turned courts into “a court of corruption rather than a court of justice.”

In his new book, Nigeria: Past and Future, Obasanjo laments the steady decline of the Nigerian judiciary’s integrity, warning that justice has become commodified in Nigeria.

Advertisement

“The reputation of the Nigerian judiciary has steadily gone down from the four eras up till today. The rapidity of the precipitous fall, particularly in the Fourth Republic, is lamentable,” Obasanjo wrote.

He expressed concern that the judiciary’s decline poses a significant threat to the nation’s stability.

READ ALSO:EFCC Raids Obasanjo’s Hotel, Arrests Suspected Internet Fraudsters At Pool Party

Advertisement

Obasanjo recounted an incident where a governor showed him six duplex buildings belonging to a judge who allegedly acquired them from money made as chairman of election tribunals. This anecdote, he said, illustrates the depth of corruption in the judiciary.

The former president also accused Mahmood Yakubu, INEC chairman, of undermining the electoral process since 2015.

“No wonder politicians do not put much confidence in an election which the INEC of Professor Mahmood Yakubu polluted and grossly undermined to make a charade,” he said.

Advertisement

Obasanjo further alleged that politicians believe the outcome of election disputes depends on the will of tribunal judges, court of appeal judges, and supreme court judges.

READ ALSO:Obasanjo Blames Loss Of Values For Democracy’s Failure In Africa

No matter what the will of the people may be, the Chairman of INEC since after the 2015 election had made his will greater and more important than the will of the people,” he added.

Advertisement

Moreover, Obasanjo directly accused the late former President Muhammadu Buhari of colluding with the judiciary during his election cases.

Buhari threw caution to the wind, no matter what had transpired between him and the judges who did his bidding. In his election cases, financially, he topped it up with appointments for them no matter their age and their ranks,” Obasanjo alleged.

The former president concluded that the current state of the judiciary and electoral system in Nigeria is alarming, saying, “After a false declaration of results, making losers winners and winners losers, the victim of the cheating is advised to go to court, which is a court of corruption rather than a court of justice.“

Advertisement

Continue Reading

News

Sanwo-Olu Unveils Leather Hub, Eyes 10,000 Jobs

Published

on

Lagos State Governor, Sanwo-Olu, on Saturday inaugurated a state-of-the-art leather processing and manufacturing hub in Mushin, projected to create 10,000 direct jobs and generate over $250 million in annual export turnover when fully operational.

In a press release sent to PUNCH Online, the governor said the facility was formally inaugurated on Saturday by the First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, during her three-day official visit to Lagos.

Advertisement

He added that the hub was named in her honour to recognise her grassroots initiatives in social investment and economic empowerment, with 70 per cent of its employment slots reserved for women and youths.

The hub is equipped with modern machinery to support Nano, Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (NMSMEs), enabling mass production of shoes, bags, belts, packaging materials, and other leather products.

READ ALSO:I Will Snub Gov Sanwo-Olu Again – Mr Macaroni

Advertisement

It is designed to ease production bottlenecks, scale operations, and position Lagos as the leather logistics capital of West Africa.

Speaking at the inauguration, Tinubu described the hub as a “trailblazing project” aligned with President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda to diversify Nigeria’s economy through industrialisation, manufacturing, and innovation.

The Lagos State Leather Hub in Mushin, formally commissioned by the First Lady of Nigeria, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, on Saturday, 23 August 2025.
Leatherwork is a traditional craft that has stood the test of time. This facility will empower artisans, scale up leather goods production, and enable them to compete confidently in both local and international markets,” she said, urging entrepreneurs to dedicate themselves to excellence and continuous learning.

Advertisement

Sanwo-Olu said the project would provide training and start-up support to over 150,000 artisans, boost the local economy, attract investments, and strengthen trade links with fashion districts, e-commerce platforms, and future rail services.

READ ALSO:Sanwo-Olu Unveils Bus Terminal, Slashes Red Line Fares By 30%

“Hides and skins that once left our shores unprocessed will now be transformed here in Lagos into world-class footwear, garments, and accessories proudly stamped ‘Made in Lagos, Made in Nigeria’,” the governor said.

Advertisement

He pledged to expand the facility through transparent regulation and continuous infrastructure upgrades, adding: “True dividends of democracy are best felt when they reach the cobbler in Mushin, the tanner in Oko-Oba, and the young fashion designer in Yaba.”

Commissioner for Wealth Creation and Employment, Akinyemi Ajigbotafe, said the hub would lower production costs and raise quality standards, positioning Lagos-made leather products for dominance in both local and export markets.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending