Opinion

The abduction of Pa Reuben Fasoranti (OPINION)

Published

4 years ago

November 6, 2022

By Festus Adedayo

In 1996, his car riddled with bullet holes inflicted by General Sani Abacha’s goons aimed at assassinating him, Yoruba Afenifere Leader, Senator Abraham Adesanya, had made a bullseye statement. That statement appeared to explain the raging furore among the leadership of the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural group today.

Adesanya’s father had 20 children. He was the only one initiated into the awo secret cult by the older Adesanya. As such, Senator Adesanya was known to be highly fortified with the powers of his ancestors. It was a time when the demonic Nigerian state under Abacha sought to wipe out any dissent to its infernal rule.

The then Lagos police commissioner had inspected the spatter of bullet holes on Adesanya’s car and concluded that no human being could have survived that assassination attempt. Alarmed and apprehensive of further associating with Adesanya, his driver, who survived the assassination attempt with him, had immediately eloped, sacked himself from Adesanya’s employ, fearful for his life. When told of his driver’s abscondment, Adesanya was said to have retorted in Yoruba that Omode lo’n se e. O ye ko mo wipe bi agbe o ba fo, omi inu re ko le danu – he is being childish; otherwise, he would have realized that if the gourd does not break, the water inside it cannot be spilled.

Last week, the gourd of Yoruba leadership broke – or was broken – and the water has since spilled like a burst cistern. The forceful break of the gourd however has a consistent tragic trajectory. The destruction of the gourd has a consistency in the recent hitorico-political tale of the Yoruba. The gourd was forcefully broken by the same evil dramattis personae, political merchants and vultures, who have consistently sought an option reminiscent of biblical Samson’s – to crumble a house that has proved impenetrable to their attempt to make it a house of Mephistopheles.

Since the founding in London in 1945 of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, the progenitor of Afenifere, by Yoruba leaders – Adeyemo Alakija, president; Yekini Ojikutu, vice president; Obafemi Awolowo, General Secretary and others like Akinola Maja, Oni Akerele, Akintola Willliams, Saburi Biobaku, Abiodun Akerele, D.O.A. Oguntoye, Ayo Rosiji and others – five persons have made futile attempts to destroy this Yoruba foremost leadership organization and its Afenifere mutation.

The first anvil of its destruction was Nnamdi Azikiwe. Though his attack on the leaders of the Egbe preceded its founding, the tribal tension in the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) was Zik’s – as he was fondly known – opportunity to sound a death knell on Egbe Omo Oduduwa, the first major attempt at unity by the Yoruba. The Egbe had huge prospects to unite these people who had, for centuries, splintered in discord like the seeds in a walnut pod.

In the February 1941 split in the NYM over the contest for the Legislative Council seat between Samuel Akisanya (who later became the Odemo of Isara) and Ernest Ikoli, erstwhile Daily Service editor, Zik and his West African Pilot newspaper pitched their tents with Akisanya. Yoruba leaders queued behind and voted for Ikoli. This generated further tension between 1946 and 1948 in the NYM, eventually and effectively leading to the death of this anti-colonial government movement.

Azikiwe didn’t hide his disdain for the Egbe and its leaders. Indeed, Egbe Omo Oduduwa had not been formally inaugurated by the time Azikiwe’s NCNC, in December 1947, sponsored protest demonstrations against it, using the editor of the Pilot, F. O. Coker, as the peg of the protest. Zik and his party, the NCNC, went on to form the Yoruba Federal Union (YFU) as a counterpoise to and as such, weaken the Egbe. This was at a time of growing solidarity among the Yoruba. Zik and his crew launched the YFU on June 12, 1948, at Glover Hall, Lagos but were so tactless as to make the speakers at the inauguration be Azikiwe himself, Mbonu Ojike, a known Zik apostle and columnist in the Pilot, as well as Oged Macaulay, a known Zik ally. The YFU however suffered the fate of all politically concocted contrivances – it faded out.

Zik would however not relent. Deploying a weekly newspaper called Ijebu Weekly Echo to achieve their aim, Zik and his group pilloried the Egbe headed by Sir Adeyemo Alakija. Bitter, crude and vulgar personal insults were splashed on them by Igbo, mainly residents of Lagos, using such words as “bane of our age,” “a nihilist, totalitarian, fascist organization,” as well as “dirty exhibition of egocentric stupidity, ethnocentric arrogance and capitalized idiocy” on the Egbe Omo Oduduwa. This was followed by an incendiary editorial comment in the Pilot of September 8, 1948, which said, “Henceforth, the cry must be one of the battle against Egbe Omo Oduduwa, its leaders at home and abroad, uphill and down dale, in the streets of Nigeria and in the residences of its advocates… There is no going back until the Fascist Organization of Sir Adeyemo has been dismembered.” Osita Agwuna, a leading Zikist, after his conviction for sedition, had written an open letter he entitled “To all the people of Nigeria and all Zikists” where he advocated attacks on the Egbe.

The second attack on the Egbe was led by the mercurial Adegoke Adelabu, an acolyte of Zik. Though his disdain for both Awolowo and the highly perceived Ijebu people-dominated Egbe was historical, the incendiary age-long intra-ethnic fissure and struggle for power between the Ijebu and the Ibadan was the peg. By the 19th century, Ibadan had become a very potent military force but its prowess was crippled by the embargo placed on the importation of guns and powder on their routes by the twin nations of Ijebu and Egba. Peeved, Ibadan, in the rainy seasons of 1877, matched out its military arsenal against the Ijebu and Egba, with the aim of forcing open their roads to the coast and conquer, as well as absorb, their territories into Ibadan. Unfortunately, this expedition failed and the Egba and Ijebu thereafter aligned with all enemies of Ibadan like the Ilorin, reflected in the treaty of 1886 signed to recognize the independence of the Ekitiparapo. Even after this, their mutual hostility continued. The Ijebu distrusted and feared the Ibadan. These pre-colonial polities and realities gestated into and found their way to the founding of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa.

Ibadan elites, preening themselves as warriors who would not play second fiddle to the Ijebu, rallied around to thwart the emergence of Awolowo as the modern-day dominant power. They created a counterpoise to the Egbe which they called Egbe Omo Ibile, Society for Native Sons, and appointed as leader, Adegoke Adelabu, The Ibadan Egbe later coalesced into the Ibadan Peoples Party (IPP) or the Mabolaje. The sub-ethnic threat from the IPP to Awolowo’s Egbe was so intense that, apart from the cross-carpeting of five IPP House of Assembly members to the side of the Action Group which ensured that Awolowo’s AG formed the cabinet in 1951, the IPP subsequently won the 1954, 1956 and 1959 elections. A death knell on the Ibadan advocacy however came in the commission of enquiry into the affairs of the Ibadan District Council which indicted Adelabu of financial malfeasance and eventually his death via car crash in 1958. This led to an intra-national uprising in Ibadan, with Mabolaje splintering into the Mojid Agbaje and Adisa Adeoye factions. Both groups however failed to muster enough opposition to the AG and Egbe Omo Oduduwa which eventually swallowed them.

Erstwhile editor of the Daily Service, a lawyer and polemicist who took up the newspaper’s editorship from Sese Ikoli, Chief S. L. Akintola, was the third architect of the plot to destroy Egbe Omo Oduduwa. Akintola had come into journalistic prominence by launching one of the most visceral attacks on Azikiwe’s claim of an attempted assassination on him. As editor of the Service, Akintola cut the ground from under the feet of Zik when he published the whole pamphlet alleging Zik’s assassination in one issue of the newspaper with the title, Assassination de luxe, price one penny. In the thick of the AG rump’s attempt to remove him as Premier, Akintola also formed a counterpoise to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which he called Egbe Omo Olofin, Olofin being one of the cognomens of Oduduwa.

Named at first Egbe Omo Yoruba and later on, Egbe Omo Olofin, the major undisguised aim of the group was to finally destroy Awolowo who was by then serving a ten-year jail term in Calabar prisons. This Egbe was conceived by political arch-enemies of Awolowo and new converts who believed that his jailing had put a wedge on his relevance. Some of the coupists were the former Administrator of the Western Region in the Emergency year, Dr. M. A. Majekodunmi, who was personal physician to the Prime Minister; Chief H. O. Davies; some high court judges and traditional rulers. Some leaders of the Awolowo’s Egbe were also seen in the new Egbe, Members of the new Egbe then issued a press release where they castigated Awolowo after their maiden meeting held on January 3, 1964.

The fourth threat to the pan-Yoruba socio-political group came from a man known as the Arole AwolowoIo, Awolowo’s heir, Chief Bola Ige. His loss in the Wednesday, January 27, 1999, electoral college of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) held at the D’Rovans hotel in Ibadan threw up the messy tussle in the fold of the political children of Awolowo. At the end of the exercise, Ige got nine votes as against 14 for Chief Olu Falae. Since that election, Afenifere and the post-Awo leadership of Yorubaland have never been the same again. Though he disguised his roiling anger at the Ijebu Four – Olaniwun Ajayi, Ayo Adebanjo, Abraham Adesanya, and Pa Onasanya – with the claim that he was “gaudily joyful” at Falae’s emergence, Ige’s actions and utterances thereafter showed that he was poised for a fight with the mafia. One of the things he did was to get his long-time friend and fellow Ijesa Yoruba, Justice Adewale Thompson, to form the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE) to rival and indeed factionalize Afenifere. Alajobi, a group headed by Bishop Emmanuel Gbonigi’s intervention couldn’t stop the derailment. After Ige’s assassination, the crisis metastasized, so much that Afenifere was broken into two factions, one headed by Fasoranti who had been handed the leadership of the group after Adesanya fell ill and Ayo Fasanmi, Ige’s friend. By the time of his assassination in 2001, Ige left a Yoruba land that was roiling in leadership crises.

The fifth threat to the Afenifere and the quest of the Yoruba is Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Using his singular win in the 2003 governorship election and the loss of his AD colleagues in the west as the propelling force, Tinubu immediately began what ostensibly was the reunification of Yoruba politics under his roof. It was however a veneer for his presidential and prebendal ambition. Deploying a huge war chest of resources of his Lagos State, he funded virtually all political activities in the region, literally heaving all his ex-AD governor colleagues, except Adebayo Adefarati, inside his pocket. By then, it had become clear to him that the Afenifere mafia who collectively ensured his emergence against Funsho Williams in 1999 would fight him to a standstill, having fallen out with him.

With all he had, Tinubu battled this Yoruba leadership hegemony, infiltrating their ranks and creating a counterpoise, the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG). At Fasanmi’s death, his group appointed Senator Biyi Durojaiye as Afenifere leader to further delegitimize Fasoranti’s leadership. When Durojaye also died, the Tinubu group appointed another Afenifere leader. With the support of his governor colleague, Bisi Akande, who had become his bag carrier, Tinubu dismantled the AD which was the most impregnable political base of the Afenifere socio-political group, formed the Action Congress, later with Atiku, and which, in 2013/2014, went into alliance with the ultra-conservative north to form today’s All Progressives Congress (APC).

In the build-up to the 2023 presidential election, there has been a frenetic scavenging by candidates for ethnic legitimacy as affirmation of their bids. Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Abubakar, began the forage when he asked his kin at an Arewa event in Kaduna to vote for him. Being a northerner, he told them, he was the most suited to know where the shoe pinched the region. Southeast is already agog with Peter Obi. His presidential bid is almost an obsession for a region which sees in his presidency the first opportunity for a “highly vilified” Igbo stock to come back to the mainstream.

Until the Akure fiasco, Tinubu wore the Olusegun Obasanjo visor of 1999. In that year’s presidential election, a high chunk of Yoruba leadership openly disclaimed Obasanjo who was seen as a Yoruba enemy. This antagonism led to Obasanjo’s election by “outsiders”. Frustrated by the prospect of a repeat of the route Obasanjo trod, Tinubu’s desperation to procure Yoruba leadership legitimacy, no matter how crooked or brimming with fraud, becomes understandable.

His recent visit to the Akure home of Pa Reuben Fasoranti has been generating a lot of seismic comments. Like Michael Adekunle Ajasin and Abraham Adesanya before him, Fasoranti had ceded his headship of Afenifere to Adebanjo almost two years ago when it became clear that age would impede his leadership. This same Fasoranti was fought to a standstill by the Tinubu group whose goal was to make his leadership inconsequential. Most of the pilgrims with Tinubu to Akure were conscripts of the coup that unsuccessfully delegitimized Fasoranti and serially appointed renegade leadership for Afenifere.

Tinubu, acting as if coerced to go pay this same man a condolence visit after his daughter was brutally killed by Fulani herdsmen, literally urinated on the balcony of the Yoruba leader. In an attempt to deflect arrows shot at Muhammadu Buhari’s marauding, bloodthirsty kin, Tinubu had asked “where are the cows?” He similarly exhibited such conceit to highly respected Chief Olu Falae during the invasion of his farm by Fulani herdsmen.

The Akure pilgrimage was an abduction of 96-year-old Fasoranti by elements who spent over a decade undermining his Yoruba leadership. They took advantage of Baba’s advanced age and the suspicious company of turncoats who enveloped him to get Tinubu to reap where he did not sow. The coup reeked of corruption, abduction, and coldblooded execution of a most clinically infernal hijack of ‘power’ in Yoruba history. It was originally convoked by a group of hungry lay-about who went by the name Conscience of Yoruba Nation, a name reminiscent of a Babangida era ragtag military apologia crusade which was masterminded by a man who claimed to be driven by conscience but whose spineless interventions brimmed of a ‘conscienceless conscience’ even as he sought to grease his esophagus from crumbs that fell off Babangida’s table. In Akure, that Conscience of Yoruba Nation gathering was then criminally labeled with the mis-biology of an Afenifere endorsement of Tinubu.

The fraudulence of the whole enterprise was to be revealed when the coupists issued a communiqué, not under the conscienceless banner with which they invited conferees to Akure but Afenifere. Respected Prof Akin Onigbinde said that not only was the assemblage “essentially a gathering of chieftains of APC in the South West,” many of them couldn’t claim linkage to Afenifere nor did they attend its meetings in the last ten years. They were just interested in the spoils of dollars allegedly left after the disastrous show. They then added a disgraceful icing on the cake of the infamy when they concocted a Fasoranti claim that he had taken over the headship of Afenifere which he vacated almost two years earlier. This lie thrived for a few hours, landed with a thud thereafter and scattered into smithereens.

Instead of going through the futile attempt to abduct Afenifere and its leadership, I wonder why the group behind this penkele mesi – the offerees and offerors of legitimacy – did not deploy ARG for the legitimacy-hunting game; or simply create a brand new organization. That would have been neater in this last-minute tan’na w’ebi – grope in the dark for kin – that they are engrossed with.

Related Topics:Afenifere Festus Adedayo Tinubu

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Opinion

Beyond the Ballot: Shaping a Bar That Works for All

Published

2 days ago

August 30, 2026

Trends Admin

Beyond the Ballot: Shaping a Bar That Works for All

By Asiwaju Kunle Kalejaye, SAN

The inaugural address of Mrs. Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, titled “From the Call to the Cause,” marks a historic turning point for the legal community as she officially assumes office as the 33rd President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) as she wa sworn in by her predecessor, Afam Osigwe, SAN, at the High Court complex in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

Her leadership, the hiccup of her emergence notwithstanding, represents a historic milestone as the first woman elected to the NBA presidency through a competitive, though highly disputed, national ballot. Her address presents a powerful vision for a “bolder Bar” that actively confronts internal fractures, deep professional disconnects, and economic vulnerabilities. Central to her message is the core understanding that an association tasked with safeguarding judicial independence and speaking truth to power cannot effectively fulfill its national mandate if it remains internally fragmented. By focusing on the professional survival of young lawyers and vowing to act decisively against public misconduct, Badejo-Okusanya highlights an urgent reality: institutional strength requires collective solidarity and institutional determination. Fostering lasting unity within the NBA under this administration demands a deliberate shift from performative governance to deeply institutionalized, structural changes that build bridges across classes, factions, generations, and geographical divides.

To bring the NBA together, the new administration must incorporate proactive mechanisms for post-election reconciliation directly into its governance framework. The leadership must deliberately distance itself from divisive rhetoric and provocative nuances. The competitive nature of Bar elections often leaves behind lingering bitter factions that can stunt long-term cooperation and slow down progressive policies. By building an “olive branch” initiative that integrates runner-up contestants and their core campaign stakeholders into strategic national committees, the leadership can transform former rivals into active co-creators of the Bar’s future. Indeed this strategy which I dubbed the Abraham Lincoln strategy remains an eternal clincher.

Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election and famously appointed his chief Republican nomination rivals to key cabinet positions. Lincoln believed the country faced extreme peril during the crisis leading into the Civil War l. He wanted the most capable and influential leaders in his administration regardless of past personal competition. He valued robust debate over agreement, using differing viewpoints to make better decisions. This inclusivity must simultaneously bridge the widening economic and generational gap between senior practitioners and younger advocates. Enforcing standardized minimum remuneration and welfare requirements across all local branches will help reduce the economic alienation felt by younger members. To make this sustainable, the administration should establish joint mentorship hubs where senior legal practitioners collaborate with tech-savvy young lawyers on modern areas of practice, such as artificial intelligence, data privacy, and digital commerce, turning a generational divide into a symbiotic avenue for mutual professional empowerment.

True unity also requires restoring civil digital discourse through a comprehensive Digital Ethics Enforcement framework, fulfilling the President’s explicit warning against the breakdown of professional etiquette on social media. The profession has lost some vast mileage due to the digital posture of some members. To achieve this, the NBA can look to established global precedents where foreign bar associations have successfully navigated the complexities of digital misconduct. For instance, the American Bar Association (ABA) successfully integrated technological expectations into its framework via the Ethics 20/20 Commission, explicitly modifying its Model Rules of Professional Conduct such as Rules 1.6 and 8.4 to govern online confidentiality, misleading public statements, and deceptive digital behaviour. Similarly, the Law Society of England and Wales updated its practice note and compliance frameworks to penalize offensive online remarks, reinforcing that comments made by a lawyer in a personal capacity can still be actively disciplined as professional misconduct if public trust is damaged. By adopting a similar structure, the NBA can expand its own Rules of Professional Conduct into a clear code for online behaviour, utilizing its network of regional Ethics and Disciplinary Committees to monitor digital spaces and safely review flagged misconduct via secure portals.

Backing this framework with public disciplinary actions and a tiered system of sanctions will allow the NBA to decisively penalize cyberbullying, transitioning professional disputes into mediated internal forums rather than chaotic public platforms. This digital accountability should be reinforced by introducing mandatory continuing legal education (CLE) modules in digital etiquette, ensuring that practitioners maintain technological and behavioral competence.

Immediately, the NBA must dismantle the persistent perception that it is a “Lagos-Abuja centric” organization. Actively decentralizing national activities, rotating National Executive Council (NEC) meetings across various geopolitical zones, and providing direct financial and technical resources to smaller, rural branches will make every lawyer feel valued regardless of geography. Ultimately, by integrating these targeted, practical strategies and internationally proven ethical standards into the foundational ideals of her inaugural address, the administration can successfully unite its members and establish a cohesive, resilient front capable of defending the rule of law across Nigeria.

The new administration must pursue a deliberate policy towards attracting many docile members back into its fold.
If the new administration must know, the opaque electoral processes that had dogged the association in recent history has adversely affected the morale of a significant number but silent members of the Association. Chief Yomi Alliyu graphically stated the disturbing position when he posited in an opinion piece that: “The NBA has been hijacked by political lawyers to the disaffection of real practitioners of law. “Elections from 2016 or so vide e-voting had been manipulated to favour members of this class.”

The new administration must therefore consciously pursue reconciliatory steps that rein in all members. As at now, the silent class war must end for NBA to achieve its full potential.

I was sorely tempted to headline this peice: Nigerian Bar Association: the road to Kigali. I refrained because I still saw a silver lining which this new administration can latch on to save the NBA from itself!

The “road to Kigali” serves as a grim warning about the risk of total institutional fracture, polarization, and potential irrelevance. If proactive steps are not taken to unify and reform the body, it faces the danger of fracturing into competing, ethnicized, or regionalized professional factions, effectively ending the era of a single, unified voice for the Nigerian Bar.

The 1992 Port Harcourt Conference Crisis, was a definitive moment that brought the NBA to the brink of permanent destruction. Today, unless we play the ostrich, the cries of war are abroad but the present leadership could etch their names in gold if the NBA is consciously, deliberately and clinically steered from self implosion. Their job is cut out for them.Failure to seize the moment may end up placing us all on the road to Kigali.

Asiwaju Kunle Kalejaye SAN
Eagle102.5 FM Ilese-Ijebu

Opinion

Why Atiku’s subsidy gambit rattles Tinubu, By Farooq Kperogi

Published

1 week ago

August 22, 2026

Trends Admin

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based professor of journalism.

Farooq Kperogi

Why Atiku’s subsidy gambit rattles Tinubu, By Farooq Kperogi

Atiku Abubakar may finally have discovered the issue that can draw political blood from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And I am enjoying seeing the president and his inner circle squirm in discomfort like cats stranded on a hot zinc roof.

On Thursday, barely a day after official campaigns began for the 2027 presidential election, Atiku pledged to restore petrol subsidies if Nigerians elect him president. That pledge, more than anything he has done lately to dislodge Tinubu, is the clearest signal yet that he is prepared to wrest power from the president.

Before now, Atiku expended money, time and energy excavating Tinubu’s past, much of which Nigerians already know. Tinubu’s 1993 civil forfeiture of $460,000 to the US government in a case that grew out of a heroin-trafficking investigation has been public knowledge for years. It was Sahara Reporters that first reported it on September 15, 2008. Fresh FBI or DEA papers are unlikely to suddenly alter electoral attitudes.

The Chicago State University expedition was even less politically useful. Tinubu genuinely attended and graduated from CSU in 1979. Caleb Westberg, the university’s registrar, said so under oath. He agreed that the photocopy Tinubu submitted to INEC did not look like the 1979 samples shown to him, but CSU’s diploma templates changed over the years and the BBC found that Tinubu’s copy resembled replacement diplomas from the 1990s. Westberg also said the missing portion of the university logo could have been cut off during photocopying because American diplomas are unusually large and aren’t intended to be photocopied.

In America, diplomas are largely ceremonial documents that people frame and hang on walls. Transcripts are the official records routinely used to verify attendance and graduation. Atiku’s legal expedition ironically helped establish that Tinubu has a CSU transcript and graduated with honors.

The BBC Global Disinformation Team found no evidence for the claim that Tinubu forged the CSU diploma he submitted to INEC. The report, in fact, won “Fact-Check of the Year by a Working Journalist” at the 2024 African Fact-Checking Awards in Accra. In other words, Atiku spent enormous political energy helping to settle a question whose answer was electorally barren.

Tinubu understood this and mostly ignored the attacks. More importantly, Atiku offered little policy distance from Tinubu on the economic question that has tormented Nigerians since May 2023. He had promised during the last election to remove petrol subsidies within his first 100 days in office. On the most consequential economic policy of the Tinubu presidency, Atiku was traveling on the same ideological road.

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That changed this week. Atiku asked the question millions of Nigerians have been asking: where is the money supposedly saved from subsidy removal? He then promised a new subsidy structure that would privilege locally refined petrol, give qualifying Nigerian refineries crude at preferential prices, impose a fixed annual spending ceiling, trace subsidized crude to actual domestic production and punish diversion. His formulation is that “the subsidy will follow the barrel.”

That is a more serious proposal than the Presidency’s caricature of it. And Tinubu suddenly found his voice. He personally dismissed Atiku’s pledge as a demonstration of “serious ignorance” of governance and the economy. Atiku’s previous assaults on Tinubu’s character produced studied presidential indifference. But his challenge to the economic orthodoxy that has pauperized Nigerians produced presidential irritation. That means he struck a raw nerve.

If Atiku’s proposal demonstrates ignorance, what does Tinubu’s policy demonstrate? Any honest person knows the answer: cruelty. Between ignorance and cruelty, which is more benign? You be the judge.

The anti-subsidy theology that Tinubu and his neoliberal choristers recite has always rested on a false premise. Subsidy simply means government assistance. Every functional society subsidizes something its people need for survival and economic productivity. Governments subsidize food, agriculture, housing, healthcare, transportation or energy according to the peculiarities of their societies.

For Nigeria, petrol occupies a uniquely central place because it doubles as an infrastructural substitute. People buy petrol because public electricity is unreliable. Small businesses generate their own power. Goods move mostly by road. Workers commute in vehicles powered by fuel. Farmers, artisans, traders and manufacturers absorb fuel costs and pass them on through prices.

A petrol subsidy therefore travels through the economy. Its removal travels through the economy too, only in the opposite direction. It raises transportation costs, production costs, food prices and the cost of nearly everything that depends on movement or power.

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I warned about this exactly one month before Tinubu was inaugurated. In my April 29, 2023 column titled “Six Agenda Items for Tinubu’s Success,” I warned that any policy that caused an arbitrary and unbearable increase in petrol prices without a corresponding improvement in incomes and living conditions would sink Tinubu. That warning was elementary commonsense.

The subsidy removal has since wreaked havoc on the economy, deepened poverty, killed businesses, murdered hope, hollowed out the middle class and democratized misery. Reuters now describes the aftermath of Tinubu’s reforms as the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation. Nearly 80 percent of Nigerians in a recent voter tracker said the country was headed in the wrong direction.

The government’s answer is always the same sterile, tired, intentionally dishonest incantation: temporary pains will yield permanent gains. But we have heard that sermon before.

Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Program came with the same vocabulary of sacrifice, deregulation, currency devaluation, subsidy withdrawal and deferred prosperity. Nigerians were told to endure pain today for abundance tomorrow. By the time Babangida left in 1993, manufacturing had been battered, purchasing power had collapsed and social misery had spread. The promised gains vanished into the ether.

Only living people can enjoy future gains. A government that starves people in installments cannot redeem itself with a hypothetical prosperity scheduled for an undefined tomorrow.

Tinubu’s most frequently advertised dividend of subsidy removal is that states now receive more money and can pay salaries and pensions. That is useful to salary earners, pensioners and the relatives who depend on them. Every Nigerian with a functioning brain cell knows that formal salary and pension earners constitute only a small fraction of Nigeria’s population. The wellbeing of state treasuries is a poor substitute for the wellbeing of the vast majority of citizens.

What kind of economic triumph makes governors more solvent while making citizens poorer? Government has improved the liquidity of public treasuries by draining the liquidity of household economies.

Atiku has finally opened a policy flank that Tinubu cannot wave away with moral insults, ethnic mobilization or tales of macroeconomic “reform.”

Nonetheless, Atiku’s conversion deserves scrutiny. He promised in 2023 to remove the same subsidy he now wants to restore in a redesigned form. I disagreed with him then. A politician who changes his mind after observing the destructive consequences of a policy can reasonably plead that evidence changed his assumptions. Nigerians also have abundant reasons to distrust politicians who discover compassion during campaigns.

They campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Tinubu, after all, told Nigerians during the 2023 campaign that if he failed to give them electricity and returned for a second term, they should not vote for him, although he inserted an escape clause about giving “adequate reasons” for failure. Muhammadu Buhari promised a paradise of security, prosperity and integrity before power exposed the hollowness of his promises.

Atiku therefore has work to do. He must keep explaining the cost of his subsidy plan, its funding source, its legal path under the Petroleum Industry Act, its anti-corruption safeguards and the mechanisms that will ensure cheaper energy reaches households and industries. He should put these commitments in language that can be measured and used against him if he wins.

In spite of my well-justified distrust of the promises of politicians, including Atiku who supervised a ruinous privation program when he was vice president, I can’t help but concede that this is the first truly useful political argument of the 2027 campaign.

Policy contrast is finally replacing pointless and unproductive character assassination. Nigerians already know that Tinubu has a morally complicated past, but they live every day with something more immediate: the extortionate price of food, transport, electricity, medicine and survival.

Atiku has finally moved the contest from Tinubu’s old files in America to Nigerian kitchens, markets, factories and motor parks. That is where Tinubu is most vulnerable. Tinubu can survive old scandals, but the mass hunger his “reforms” have created is a more formidable opponent than impotent darts thrown at his character.

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based professor of journalism.

Opinion

Onaiyekan: Is Tinubu insensitive to Nigerians’ plight? By Bolanle BOLAWOLE

Published

3 weeks ago

August 9, 2026

Trends Admin

Onaiyekan: Is Tinubu insensitive to Nigerians’ plight? By Bolanle BOLAWOLE

turnpot@gmail.com 0705 263 1058

(Published in the ON THE LORD’S DAY column in the Sunday Tribune edition of Sunday, 9 August 2026).

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) recently held a closed-door meeting with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu after which one of the bishops, John Onaiyekan, Bishop Emeritus of Abuja, went public with the contents of the meeting. The public was aghast when the president was reported as saying that hunger has been in the land before he was born!

But is it a lie? It is not! Tinubu reportedly asked the church leaders to feed the people if they – the church leaders – actually knew the people were hungry! Is it not a fact that many church leaders and denominations today behave like the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus Christ’s era – whom the Lord described as “serpents and generation of vipers”! – who “bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers”? As many as eight times, Jesus said unto them: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” He also repeatedly called them “fools and blind guides.” (See Matthew 23: 1 – end).

How many of the Catholic bishops who confronted Tinubu with the case of hungry Nigerians do not have hungry parishioners under their watch? How many of the hungry do they feed? Are they themselves among hungry Nigerians? How many of them, having two coats, give one to the naked (Luke 3:11)? How many follow the example of the Fathers (Acts 4: 32 – 37) or the Marxian doctrine of “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need”?

Despite the hardship in the land, which the Bishops went to Tinubu to complain about, are Church leaders not demanding tithes, vows, first fruit, and all manner of offerings – love offering, sacrificial offering, seed offering, thanksgiving offering, etc. from the same suffering masses? Before our very eyes, are they not building cathedrals worth billions of Naira, driving expensive cars, flying private jets, and living life to the hilt? Are they not?

However, this is an uncomfortable truth no one wants to hear! I should know because I am involved – if you know what I mean! Without speaking for Tinubu – because I, too, have my own grievances! – this must have been what he hinted at but which, understandably, was interpreted as an act of insensitivity. But since I, too, was born, up to date, I make bold to say that notable Nigerian musicians one after the other have complained of hard times. It is as if there has never been a time when things were okay in this country – except when we look back! Better times are usually behind us. No matter how bad a government might have been, succeeding governments always appear worse! That has been the narrative!

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It appears to me that Tinubu loves to be audacious once in a while. Like when he made his “O lu’le” speech at Abeokuta, detailing how the then President Muhammadu Buhari contested election thrice but failed until he, Tinubu, came to the rescue. The icing on the case at the occasion was his angry reference to Gov. Dapo Abiodun, as “eleyi”, meaning “this one!” Consider as well his wandering off-script “subsidy is gone” statement in his very first speech and on his very first day as President and Commander-in-Chief!

Tinubu possesses enough knowledge of the media to guess what kind of headlines his statements can attract. In the case of the Catholic bishops, maybe he thought he was safe behind the iron curtain of confidentiality – until one of the bishops chose to tear the veil, forcing the Presidency to respond.

Presidential response to Onaiyekan

The response by Temitope Ajayi, Senior Special Assistant to President Tinubu on Media and Publicity, compelled this intervention lest we, again, throw the baby away with the bath water. Often, once we have pitched our tents for or against, we fail to see the merits in opposing advocacies – all to the chagrin of our collective good. Let’s hear from Ajayi:

“There is something fundamentally inappropriate about Cardinal John Onaiyekan granting a television interview to offer his own account and interpretation of what transpired during the private meeting between the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria and President Bola Tinubu. It is, in my view, an abuse of clerical privilege.

“The bishops requested an audience with the president. He granted the audience graciously. They presented, as was their right, a catalogue of the country’s economic, social, and security challenges as they saw them. Except for their grudging acknowledgement of the benefits of NELFUND, they were dismissive of the other great things done by the administration. The bishops were notably acerbic in their submission, but the president listened to them patiently and responded.

“That should ordinarily have been where the matter rested. None of the issues raised by the bishops is beyond scrutiny or rebuttal. Their assessment is neither scripture nor an article of faith. It is a perspective, and perspectives can be challenged with facts and evidence.

“President Tinubu did exactly that, responding point by point to the issues they raised. On the bishops’ demand for the return of schools to their owners, the President was surprised that such an issue could be tabled before him, as it is a matter for the states to resolve, in line with our Constitution. So, he asked the bishops to take the matter to the governors and reminded them he returned mission schools in Lagos State (to their original owners) when he was (the) governor.

“The President argued that the bishops’ characterization of the country’s current condition was incomplete and, in several respects, inaccurate. He pointed to measurable progress on the economic, social, and security fronts. He did not pretend that Nigeria’s problems had disappeared. He acknowledged that significant economic and security challenges remain. His point was that the country has emerged from ‘a dark tunnel’, that his administration has laid the foundations for recovery and that the next phase is to ensure the greatest number of Nigerians feels the gains.

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“What the clerics often overlook in these interventions is that governing a country is fundamentally different from shepherding a church. In a democracy, every interest group, including the Catholic Church, has every right to demand more from (the) government. That is part of democratic engagement. But the president of a nation of more than 200 million people is required to make difficult choices every single day. Those choices involve competing interests, limited resources, and imperfect options…There is no president…who can wave a magic wand and make Nigeria’s accumulated problems disappear overnight.

“It is easy to compile a list of national problems. It is far more difficult to acknowledge the disasters that have been averted. Whatever anyone thinks of President Tinubu’s policies, it is impossible to ignore the fiscal crisis he inherited and the measures taken to pull the country away from the edge of a financial cliff. Even the bishops themselves should recognize that one tangible consequence has been the restoration of greater fiscal stability across many states.

“Countless civil servants and pensioners who, for years, endured unpaid salaries and pensions are now receiving them more regularly. That was certainly not the reality in many states from around 2014. Even about four years ago, 27 state governments struggled to meet even their most basic obligations. Many of those civil servants and pensioners are themselves parishioners in Catholic churches. They know, from lived experience rather than official pronouncements, that there has been real relief in the regular payment of salaries and pensions. While this does not erase the discomfort many Nigerians still face, it is wrong to dismiss or ignore those improvements casually.

“So when President Tinubu reminded the bishops of these facts during the meeting, he was not, as Cardinal Onaiyekan later suggested, being aloof or dismissive. He was presenting evidence to support his argument that the country is not standing still. A disagreement over facts should not be interpreted as arrogance. The same applies to security. The bishops declared that Nigeria is bleeding. The President thinks otherwise. President Tinubu did not deny the seriousness of the security situation. Rather, he acknowledged the challenges while outlining the gains recorded by the Armed Forces and intelligence agencies across different theatres of operation…

“Cardinal Onaiyekan’s Arise News interview also reflected a familiar error that many ideological and professional critics make. They often assume that only critics speak truth to power while everyone around a leader is either unwilling or incapable of doing so. It is an attractive narrative, but it is rarely true. What truth does anyone really need to tell President Tinubu that he does not already know? As president, he has multiple channels for feeling the pulse of the country…

“The Catholic Bishops discharged what they considered their moral obligation by presenting their concerns to the president. President Tinubu, for his part, accorded them respect by granting them an audience and responding to every issue they raised. That exchange reflected the civility expected in a constitutional democracy.

“Reciprocity should have dictated that the confidentiality and dignity of that engagement be preserved. As such, it was inappropriate for one of the participants to emerge almost immediately on national television to provide his own version of what was essentially a private conversation with the president…” That was Temitope Ajayi, SSA to the President for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Obligations of confidentiality

I asked Google: Is it appropriate to divulge the specifics of a closed-door meeting without the other party’s consent or prior knowledge? Google: “No, it is generally inappropriate and a breach of professional trust to divulge the details of a closed-door meeting without the other party’s consent or prior agreement. Why it is inappropriate: Breaches trust: Closed-door meetings imply an expectation of privacy and confidentiality so participants can speak freely. Damages relationships: Revealing private discussions destroys mutual respect and makes future cooperation difficult. Distorts context: Sharing only one side of a private conversation often misleads the public or other stakeholders who were not in the room.”

Again, I asked: Was Onaiyekan mandated by the CBCN to address the media after their meeting with President Tinubu? Google: “There is no official indication or report that Cardinal John Onaiyekan was specifically mandated or designated by the CBCN to grant media interviews or brief the press following their meeting with President Bola Tinubu…”

Then I asked: Is Onaiyekan the official leader of CBCN? Google: “No, Cardinal John Onaiyekan is not the current leader of CBCN; he is the Archbishop Emeritus of Abuja and previously served as CBCN president from 2000 to 2006.” The current president of CBCN is Most Rev. Matthew Man-Oso Ndagoso, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Kaduna.

Answering another question, Google described Onaiyekan as “a forthright and consistent critic of President Bola Tinubu’s electoral legitimacy and economic policies…” Arising from the above, we can see that Onaiyekan and Tinubu are no strangers to one another but are “old customers”, so to say!

Neither here, nor there

That said, Onaiyekun enjoys freedom of speech as enshrined in our Constitution, regardless how acerbic or far from the truth those views may be. Tinubu, too, has the right of reply which his being a sitting president does not deny him. Achebe said “Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too. If one says ‘No’ to the other, let his wing break.” China’s revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong, put it this way: “Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Scriptures cap it all in Proverbs 11: 14 thus: “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.”

Tinubu’s man described the president meeting with the bishops as a privilege; no, it wasn’t! It was their right – and the president’s duty. There is nothing “gracious” in it; it is an obligation duly discharged.

Onaiyekan, however, ought to know that closed-door meetings should be accorded the confidentiality they deserve. To break this important rule is to burn bridges and destroy trust. As journalists, we do not rush to press with information gotten from such sources; we store them to be discretely leveraged in future.

That Onaiyekan was not specifically mandated by the CBCN to speak on its behalf makes his case worse. If it was so important for the bishops to speak, why not their president?

It is not everyone that understands the nuances of Nigeria’s prebendal politics. Femi Adesina, media adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari, said they were flying with Buhari when news of Tinubu’s “O lu’le” atomic bomb dropped on Buhari at Abeokuta reached them. Who was detailed by Buhari’s kinsmen on the same flight to break the news to Buhari? Adesina! Why him? And, now, why Onaiyekan? Dirty jobs reserved for who?

* Former editor of PUNCH newspapers, Chairman of its Editorial Board and Deputy Editor-in-chief, BOLAWOLE was also the Managing Director/Editor-in-chief of The Westerner news magazine. He writes the ON THE LORD’S DAY column in the Sunday Tribune and TREASURES column in New Telegraph newspaper on Wednesdays. He is also a public affairs analyst on radio and television.