Eedris ‘teargasses’ Tinubu; Ali Baba ‘besaints’ Obasanjo

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, April 18, 2025)

Nose – off-centre; mouth – misshapen; eyes – squinted; ears – rabbity; every Nigerian is familiar with this green face without a grin. On the green face, teary streams gutter down the sides of the nose, towards the nostrils, coursing to the chin. This is Nigeria and its map.

The tears streaming on each side of the green face typify the River Niger and River Benue, which meet at the base and confluence of the nose at Lokoja, meandering through Onitsha and the Niger Delta – the chin of the Nigerian face.

Death is the cessation of life. To die, in the Hausa language, means ‘ya mutu’. I don’t need the letter ‘d’ in the ‘death’ referenced in the preceding sentence, but I will use the letter ‘y’ in the ‘ya mutu’ phrase. After centuries of running deep, River Niger and River Benue have etched a big letter ‘Y’ on the Nigerian map.

The northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria were amalgamated in 1914. Today, an x-ray of the letter ‘Y’ engraved by the two longest rivers on the Nigeria map, more than ever before, shows the frayed thread of colonial suture, threatening to rip apart. Successive leaders chanted CHANGE, but both rivers are drying up due to climate change. The discernible warned before polls; now we can all see that they pay lip service to Nigeria and global warming.

For ‘Ya mutu’ not to be written as an epitaph for Nigeria soon, the threat to the riverine ‘Y’ on the Nigerian map should be taken as a call for national rebirth. Rivers are natural sources of rejuvenation, but the ‘Y’ of the two rivers that geographically suture Nigeria together is a yoke. Let’s break the yoke!

A grandmaster of Nigerian comedy, Atunyota Alleluya Akpobome, is an influential personality. Popularly called Ali Baba, the ace comedian earns a living cracking ribs. In doing his job, Ali Baba mimics and distorts reality. In distorting reality, he could change the letter ‘y’ in his name, Atunyota, to ‘r’, thus becoming Atunrota. In the Yoruba language, Atunrota means someone who fools people, and Ali Baba fools his audience with his crazy jokes.

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On April 1, last year, Ali Baba came out with a viral post, saying his family had been blessed with a triplet. With the viral post emerging on April Fools’ Day, I had thought, “This Atunrota man can’t fool me.” But, lo and behold, Ali Baba wasn’t fooling, he was for real – he had truly become Baba ibeta.

Ali Baba was born on June 24, 1965, inching within a scraping distance of 60. I don’t know what fascination he has with April, but he has come out with a viral video in April 2025. In the video, Ali Baba, who spoke in a podcast, “Outside the Box,” revealed the political tactics of ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Initially, I was cautious. Was Ali Baba in his prankish element? I asked myself repeatedly as I watched the video. No. Ali Baba wasn’t kidding. To show his seriousness, he asked the host if he could read from his phone, and he fished it out of his pocket and read out the private chat he had with Baba Obasanjo.

Since Ali Baba attained national prominence many years ago, trust has been the bedrock of his career. He is friends with many of Nigeria’s Who’s Who. My bosom friend, Duke Orusara, an Urhobo like Ali Baba, told me Atunyota means ‘Let us say the truth’. I believe Ali Baba was saying the truth in his podcast on OBJ.

In the interview, Atunyota recalled that Obasanjo had thought he was going to run for an elective post. So, OBJ gave Ali Baba the template needed to win a presidential election in Nigeria.

With the headline, ‘Infiltrate parties, secure governors’, Alibaba outlines Obasanjo’s political strategies for winning election, The PUNCH, on April 6, 2025, published the story of the podcast.

According to the podcast, Obasanjo told Ali Baba how to violate Nigeria’s electoral process and win fraudulently. Either as a joke or as an expression of the Nigerian reality, Obasanjo’s teaching in the podcast showed the truth of Nigerian politics. It showed the minds of those who lead the country and why Nigeria can never attain development. Obasanjo sees power as grabbable, Tinubu sees it as snatchable, Muhammadu Buhari sees it as a birthright, Goodluck Jonathan sees it as a toy, and Nigeria tumbles downhill.

To win a presidential or governorship election, Obasanjo counselled Ali Baba, “You need seven governors to win an election: Lagos, Bayelsa, Delta, Rivers, Kano, Kaduna and the CBN governor.”

When Ali Baba reminded him Kano and Kaduna do not have money, Obasanjo said that the two states were for numbers, just as money was for numbers, too.

Reading further, Ali Baba quoted Obasanjo saying, “You need 44 of the most popular senatorial districts. You need to have awarded 10 contracts, and 15% of those contracts can give you a marginal impact at the polls. And you must award this contract in your first year of assumption of office.

“If you don’t do that, then you can’t ask the people for anything because when you give them at the first year of your getting into office, when it’s time for elections, you just tell them ‘Do you want to continue this contract or…?”

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According to Alibaba, Obasanjo also advised that pending cases of corrupt former governors who are ‘loaded’ should be suspended, even as Obasanjo advised him to have a hand in appointing all ruling and opposition parties’ chairmen.

Obasanjo was the man who said his kinsman and winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Chief MKO Abiola, wasn’t the messiah Nigeria needed, after the business mogul and politician had been killed for winning the freest election in the nation’s history. His eight-year democrazy rule laid the foundation for the sky-high corruption bedevilling the Fourth Republic today. Anytime Obasanjo speaks, I see the ostrich, its buried head and exposed rump.

Now, come with me to Bourdillon, the Tinubu family house, where I’ll drop by to see Seyi, the son of the President.

Knock, knock, knock on Bourdillon gate.
“Hello.”
“Yes, how may I help you?”
“My name is Tunde, a journalist; I’m here to see Seyi.”
“Seyi?” Which Seyi?
“Seyi Tinubu, the President’s son.”
“Ha! You call Arole by name!? Who are you?”
“Yes, Seyi is a public figure and the son of our President, but I’m older than him.”
“Older than him? OK! He’s in Aso Rock; tell your age to take you to Aso Rock, Methuselah.”
(Slams the gate!)

At 39 years of age, I had expected Seyi to be weaned off his father’s apron strings and stand on his own like the other children of the President, who don’t live in the shadow of their father.

Seyi and his elder sister, Folasade, are the most politically exposed children of Tinubu. Officially, Folasade, in her post as the Iyaloja General of Nigeria, is the head of all market women in Nigeria. But Seyi presents like a catalyst. Seyi caresses the girth of power and hugs the width of wealth, thinking his father’s mystique will protect him from political arrows. He goes to the sea yet despises the splash of water.

In chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction without itself being consumed in the reaction. A catalyst can be likened to a baker who works in a bakery without feeling the heat. Seyi wants to be seen as a smooth operator – he goes everywhere sandpapering the atrocities of his father’s reign and feathering his own nest.

Seyi lives in Aso Rock with his father. He’s much more visible than the First Lady, Mrs Remi Tinubu, inspecting a brigade of honour here and breaking Ramadan fast there. Seyi is more visible than any minister, Tinubu’s chief of staff and advisers. Seyi seems to be operating an invisible Office of the First Son. Seyi is looking for something on Lagos beach. It is a needle. Seyi needs his father and his wisemen to find the needle and raise his hand up in 2027.

The Office of the First Son is powerful. It’s more powerful than any government ministry or agency. That’s why the lickspittles at the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission lashed out at hip-hop singer, Eedris Abdulkareem, banning his song, “Tell Your Papa,” which lampoons the Tinubu administration.

Declaring ‘Not-To-be-Broadcast’ fatwah on the viral song, the NBC quoted Section 3.1.8 of its code, saying, “This section prohibits content deemed inappropriate, offensive, or in breach of public decency from being aired on Nigerian broadcasting platforms.”

In its ban order to all broadcasting stations in the country, the NBC woefully failed to mention just one word or phrase or clause or sentence in Eedris’ song that breached the NBC Code.

Eedris’ song says nothing new. The song is a lamentation of the sufferings Nigerians daily go through amid government’s insensitivity, telling Seyi to tell his father that Nigerians are suffering, after all, “omo ina la n ran sina,” literally meaning, “It is the son of fire that is sent to fire.”

If Seyi has the right to defend his father, Eedris also has the right to protest the bad policies of the Tinubu government affecting him.

Obasanjo banned Eedris’ song, “Jagajaga”, Tinubu bans “Tell Your Papa;” hypocrisy has caught OBJ and Jagaban in the same bed.

Email: [email protected]

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Eedris ‘teargasses’ Tinubu; Ali Baba ‘besaints’ Obasanjo

Farooq Kperogi: Selective outrage over mass murders in Nigeria

When vigilantes incinerated traveling Hausa hunters in Uromi, Edo State, on the mistaken assumption that they were “Fulani herdsmen,” countless Hausaphone Muslim northerners sent the videos to me with commentaries that reeked of unappeasable wrath.

Because there is a 6- to 5-hour time difference between Atlanta and Nigeria, some of the people who shared the videos with me became noticeably impatient with the perceived delay in my response.

Frustrated by the lag in my intervention, they sent messages reminding me of my swift and impassioned condemnation of the May 2022 murder of Deborah Yakubu in Sokoto. They wondered aloud why, unlike my immediate reaction to that previous incident, I had not yet commented on these recent videos.

A few even recalled my January 1, 2011, column titled “Jos bombings: Can we for once be truthful?” where I denounced, in the strongest terms possible, the mass massacre of Jos Christians by a group that called itself Jama’atu Ahlus Sunnah Lid Da’awati Wal Jihad. (I’ve just been made aware of a similar mass murder in Plateau recently. I could republish my 2011 column, and most people won’t notice that it’s a 14-year-old piece except for some names).

Of course, they never reminded me of my swift, full-throated denunciation of the February 1, 2018, murder and burning of 7 innocent Fulani cattle herders in Benue “by people who have been programmed to associate criminality with all Fulani cattle herders,” as I pointed out in my February 10, 2018, column titled “News Media’s Cultivation of ‘Fulani Herdsmen’ Hysteria.”

The people who were impatient with me implied that I was deliberately courting the approval of Christians. In their view, this meant I was seeking validation or favor from the Christian community, possibly at the expense of my own religious identity.

Essentially, they accused me of prioritizing external validation over internal solidarity, implying a certain negligence or disregard for the sentiments and expectations of my own religious community.

Nonetheless, since the publication of my March 29 column, titled “Barbaric Mass Burning of Innocents in Edo,” scores of Christians routinely tag me to mass murders committed by Muslims against Christians and challenge me to objurgate them with the same passion as I did the Edo mass incineration.

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It seems to me that public commentators unfairly shoulder a burden of intervention that should properly belong to people in positions of authority. Too often, it falls upon commentators to address and amplify crises, even though their roles are fundamentally different from those who wield executive power and influence.

Writing about the horrendous human tragedies that have increasingly become the signature of our national life in Nigeria imposes tremendous mental strain on me. It is emotionally draining and psychologically taxing to continually engage with, dissect, and articulate these disturbing events.

Nonetheless, I deeply understand the reasons behind distraught citizens’ desire to have their anguish acknowledged and amplified by individuals they perceive as having sizable platforms. They turn to public commentators because of their frustration with those in authority, who are perceived as detached, indifferent, or ineffective in responding adequately to their suffering.

Most importantly, though, our outrage toward mass murders often seems conditioned by whether the perpetrators differ from us in identity or affiliation. During Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, for instance, I faced vicious personal attacks from northern Muslims for drawing attention to Boko Haram’s relentless massacres of Muslims in the North, massacres that many preferred to overlook.

Similarly, bandits in the North have consistently burned, slaughtered, and dismembered their victims, yet these atrocities rarely provoke widespread indignation or inspire righteous anger. Because the victims do not fit the narrative of northern Muslims being victimized by (southern) Christian aggressors, their suffering is met with muted concern at best and outright indifference at worst rather than outrage or vigorous outcry for intervention.

This dynamic is not unique to the Muslim North. In the Christian North, numerous lives are frequently lost in inter-ethnic communal violence. In these cases, however, both the victims and perpetrators typically share a common Christian identity.

As a result, the collective sense of hurt and urgency felt by communities within these areas is markedly diminished. The outrage and intensity of grief that would typically accompany violence perpetrated by Muslims against Christian communities is notably absent, which reflects how religious identities powerfully shape public empathy and indignation.

In the southeast, so-called unknown gunmen perpetrate shocking acts of brutality, including gruesome murders, against fellow Igbo people. But there is rarely any pressure or expectation placed upon commentators like me to amplify these events publicly or to demand action from authorities.

This selective silence, this inconsistency in how acts of violence are perceived and responded to, this tendency for our outrage to be contingent upon the identity dynamics between victims and perpetrators, is an instinctive, age-old, even evolutionary human trait about which psychologists and philosophers have written.

For example in their Social Identity Theory formulation, Henri Tajfel and John Turner assert that we derive our sense of self from our membership of collective identities, and that attack on the collective triggers an intense emotional response but that intra-group violence, though troubling, is psychologically processed as an internal issue and thus evokes less public rage.

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From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, we are hardwired to depend on group cohesion and cooperation and to be suspicious of outsiders. Thus, violence perpetrated by out-groups is perceived as a threat to group resources or status, which invokes defensive anger and intolerance.

Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Rorty have also written about the moral burden of “othering,” which refers to the process through which out-group members are mentally constructed as fundamentally incompatible or as morally deficient, thus deserving harsher judgment or reduced moral consideration.

The moral distance created by “othering” leads people to interpret out-group violence as evidence of moral depravity or inherent hostility. The result is that out-group violence elicits intense moral condemnation. Conversely, violence within the in-group, involving individuals perceived as morally closer, is more readily explained away, forgiven, or rationalized.

In communication scholarship, we also talk of selective perception. It is an instinctive cognitive bias that predisposes us to perceive reality in ways that reinforce and soothe our predetermined prejudices.

Related concepts are selective exposure (the tendency to see only those things that affirm our pre-set biases and to block out those that cause us cognitive dissonance) and selective retention (the tendency to remember only those things that confer psychic comfort to our sentiments and to forget those that don’t fit that frame).

We are more tolerant of and readier to justify hurtful words that come from our “friends” than we are of even less hurtful words that come from our “enemies.”

Psychologists who study cognitive biases point out that our default positions as humans is to support our kind, to selectively expose ourselves to and perceive, even retain, only those points of views and perspectives that reinforce our prejudices.

It’s often an unconscious process. And so, it takes nothing to be prejudiced. It’s effortless. What isn’t effortless is the capacity for conscious distancing, for dispassionate reflection, and for self-criticism.

It takes self-reflexivity and self-awareness to rise superior to the default impulses that so readily and so easily crowd and becloud our minds in moments of emotional tension. Very few are capable of this, and that’s why some people question the practical utility of the idea of deliberative democracy—the idea of government by rational conversation.

Because this is not unique to Nigeria, I hope humans can evolve to the point where we transcend these troubling predispositions.

Farooq Kperogi: Selective outrage over mass murders in Nigeria

Farooq Kperogi is renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism

Tinubu, Atiku, and Argentina: United by pain, divided by rhetoric, By Farooq Kperogi

President Bola Tinubu’s Senior Special Assistant on Social Media by the name of Dada Olusegun reportedly said on Thursday that had Nigerians elected former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as president, they would have been sweltering in the same snake pit of torment and economic decline as Argentinians are.

Olusegun’s comment was informed by Atiku’s previous praise for Argentinian President Javier Milei’s economic reforms on February 25, 2024, when Atiku had encouraged Tinubu to emulate the Argentine model.

“Reports have shown how Argentina’s real economy which Alhaji Atiku wants Nigeria to emulate is in severe crisis,” he was quoted to have written on Twitter. “Public debts have reached new highs with the country owing more to the IMF than any other country in the world. Meanwhile, its education sector, manufacturing and construction are collapsing amid rapid deindustrialization. Argentina has $41 billion in credit outstanding, representing 28% of all debt owed to the Fund.”

It’s interesting that the presidential aide painted a dystopian vision of Nigeria’s fate under an Atiku Abubakar presidency by invoking the existential turmoil gripping Argentina under Javier Milei. Yet, delicious irony hums beneath the surface, unseen by Olusegun. President Tinubu’s own economic prescriptions mirror Milei’s policies so closely they might as well be fraternal twins.

Both Tinubu and Milei are champions of punishing austerity. Both are architects of spiraling inflation and social distress. But as the presidential aide warned Nigerians against the imagined peril of emulating Argentina, he entirely missed the reflection staring back from his own political mirror.

He seems blissfully unaware that his cautionary tale is already Nigeria’s lived reality, which is dramatized in the daily hardships and grievances of citizens enduring a spectacle not different from Milei’s Argentina.

In my March 9, 2024, column titled “Rise of Right-wing Economic Populism in Nigeria,” where I tackled Atiku for prescribing Argentina as a model for Nigeria,’ I wrote the following, which is still relevant today:

“Everyone within striking distance of becoming president in Nigeria in 2023 subscribed—and still subscribes—to the consensus that the IMF and the World Bank are inviolable economic oracles that must not be disobeyed, that subsidies must be eliminated and the poor be left to fend for themselves, and that the market is supreme and should be left to determine the value of everything.

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“In fact, the other day, PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar put out a press statement titled ‘Argentina’s Javier Milei approach to reforms should serve as a lesson for Tinubu’ where he extolled the dangerously right-wing Argentinian president Javier Milei whose rightwing economic populist policies are destroying the fabric of his country.

“‘I read a recent report in Reuters titled: “Argentina’s market double down on Milei as investors ‘start to believe”,’ he wrote.

“Well, the same Western financial establishment is already praising the outcome of Tinubu’s economic policies. A March 8, 2024, report from Bloomberg, for instance, has said that ‘Foreign investor demand for Nigerian assets surges as reforms instituted by President Bola Tinubu’s administration starts paying off.’

“Similarly, one David Roberts, identified as a former British Council Director in Abuja, bragged the other day that Nigeria’s economy ‘posted a GDP growth of 3.46% in quarter 4’ as a result of Tinubu’s economic reforms.

“He wrote: ‘Why would a country with a severe infrastructural deficit invest more money on a wasteful expenditure such as cheap petrol, instead of building schools, hospitals, dams and a national railway system? It is evident that it had to go.

‘We joined the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in saying as much to the Nigerian government. And at long last, it is gone.’

“People outside Nigeria reading about Nigeria in the Western financial press would think Nigerians are now living in El- Dorado as a result of Tinubu’s ‘reforms’—just like Atiku thinks a favorable Reuters story about the anti-people economic policies of Milei, who is called the ‘Madman of Argentina,’ is already yielding excellent outcomes.

“If you do the bidding of the Western establishment, they will always make up statistics to show that your economy has grown. I called attention to this in my June 28, 2023, column titled, ‘Why Tinubu’s Hiring and Firing Frenzy Excites Nigerians.

“I wrote: ‘What shall it profit a country when it pursues policies that cause the economy to ‘grow’ but cause the people to growl? After the economy has ‘grown’ but the people still groan, where is the growth? The most important growth isn’t the rise in abstract, disembodied, World Bank/IMF-created metrics but in the improvement of the quality of life of everyday folks.’

“Milei’s Argentina that Atiku is praising is almost in the same right-wing economic hellscape as Nigeria is. Like Tinubu, Milei began his presidency by removing subsidies for petrol and transportation and devaluing the Argentinian peso by more than 50 percent. In addition, he threw scores of workers into unemployment when he reduced the number of ministries in the country.

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“He is so market-centric he scrapped a whole host of rules designed to reign in the greed and exploitation of private enterprises. He did this by getting the parliament to approve the principle of ‘delegated powers’ to the executive for one year, which allows him to rule by decree like a military dictator in the name of ‘economic urgency.’

“The result? Like in Nigeria, most Argentinians are having a hard time finding food to eat. A February 1, 2024, CNN story captures it: “‘I don’t know how I will eat.’ For the workers behind Argentina’s national drink, Milei’s reforms are turning sour.”

“Argentinian workers periodically go on strike to protest Milei’s punishing right-wing policies. On February 28, all flights were cancelled in the country because air travel workers went on a crippling 24-hour strike.

“A March 4, 2024, Bloomberg report said Milei’s policies had caused spending to plunge at shops in Argentina, that firms were seeing double-digit sales declines for third straight month, that the worth of salaries had plummeted amid a paralyzing 250% inflation, and that recession was deepening in the country.

“The lead to the story says it all: ‘Consumers in Argentina are running out of options to shield themselves from runaway price increases as President Javier Milei’s austerity measures send the country deeper into recession.’

“That’s Atiku’s exemplar for Nigeria. Peter Obi is, of course, no different. Tinubu, Atiku, Obi, and in fact Yemi Osinbajo are united in their love for rightwing economics, which invariably leads to an increase in poverty, suffocation of workers, rolling back of welfare for common people, etc.

“In a perverse way, they are actually worse than Buhari because they are self-conscious conservative economic ideologues. Buhari is merely a know-nothing, bungling, kakistocratic power monger.

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“The real tragedy is that the vast majority of Nigerians who are ensconced in the narrow ethno-religious political silos built around the personalities of the major 2023 presidential candidates don’t realize that on economic policies, which is what really matters, Tinubu, Atiku, Obi, and Osinbajo are more alike than unlike.

“Sadly, Nigerian leftists, who used to be the bulwark against the dangers of conservative economic totalitarianism, have either been coopted or silenced. Only Femi Falana, Majeed Dahiru, I, and a few others consistently stand up to the forces of economic conservatism.

“This state of affairs will ensure that Tinubu’s successor will be another neoliberal ideologue who will bludgeon his way to the presidency using religion and ethnicity as cudgels. When he deepens the misery he inherits, he will blame his predecessor for not being a faithful practitioner of the neoliberal gospel. His own successor will replicate his template.

“After three terms of this right-wing baloney, Nigeria will be irretrievably gone. The time to pivot from the IMF and the World Bank and to reject everyone who is their poodle is now.”

Because Tinubu’s presidential aide is shielded from the biting aftermath of his principal’s cruel economic policies, he imagines that Nigeria is different from Argentina. He is deluded. He lives in an alternate, sequestered reality.

Just as Tinubu’s swift removal of petrol subsidy and his devaluation of the naira set off inflationary shockwaves that hit millions of households in Nigeria, Milei’s shock therapy, which also involves subsidy cuts, currency plunge, and fiscal austerity, has exacerbated hyperinflation and unemployment, caused more than half the population to teeter below the poverty line, and provoked social unrest.

In both Nigeria and Argentina, the middle class has been squeezed: many who were managing to live decent lives have slid backwards because soaring prices and job losses, undermining the very social fabric needed for a stable economy. Tinubu’s Nigeria and Milei’s Argentina present a distinction without a difference.

Tinubu, Atiku, and Argentina: United by pain, divided by rhetoric, By Farooq Kperogi

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.