By Lasisi Olagunju
Decades ago, my late mother pointed at a house to me: “Someone in that house once snatched someone’s wife. In the evening, when it was time for husband and wife to sleep, a storm swept into the bedroom and carried off their sleeping mat. Then pandemonium followed…Ó di b’óòlo o yàá mi.”
She described that scene as one of a cyclone of vengeful rage. Wife snatcher fought back strongly, got his mat back, but had to let go of the woman he snatched. He had to.
There was an exchange on Seun Okinbaloye’s ‘Mic On Podcast’ programme on Saturday. The video is trending online. Answering Seun’s questions was beautiful, brainy, bold Zainab Buba Galadima. She is the daughter of fiery opposition politician from the North, Alhaji Buba Galadima.
Zainab is an APC member, a former public servant who served in the Buhari administration while her father was busy throwing darts at that same government.
Zainab is asked some really interesting questions, and she gives very interesting answers and insights. She is an APC member who is scared that the party has frittered away its goodwill and has incurred the people’s anger in indescribable ways. She looks into the belly of time and warns that a hurricane is hurtling towards our complacent country.
“I am really disappointed (with the APC and its government); very disappointed. You know, there are some places I cannot go to. During Buhari’s second term, they (the poor) broke my windscreen. They said ‘oh. You promised us, now you are enjoying. You are inside a car.’ Before, at the traffic light, you saw them begging with outstretched arms, now, they would knock on your window; now they would snatch whatever it is that you have (for them). So, even if you think it doesn’t affect me, it is coming. I am afraid of the storm that is coming”
“There is a storm?”
“Oh. Yeah. There is a storm that is coming. You know, people would think that ‘oh it’s the North, they don’t go to school, there is insecurity’. Look, if it blows up in the North, Nigeria is gone.”
At Phillipi, Shakespeare’s Cassius sees something exactly like this: “The storm is up, and all is on the hazard.” Zainab does not mince words about what is coming.
What she sees coming is not as portentous as the way she says it. Watch the video – almost 36 minutes long. Watch her; watch her eyes.
She is a foundation member of the APC. But, she is asked to look at the eight years of Buhari, and two years of Tinubu. “Are you proud of the APC?” She is fast in answering that question in the negative. She goes on to explain in ghastly details: “Unless you are in the government, you won’t know the extent of the damage. I am really not happy. I thought APC was ready for victory. But it did not know how to manage victory and I don’t think we were ready for governance. You see people who scream ‘I am for the people, I am for the people’ but once they get into government, you ask, ‘Is this the same person I used to know?”
The lady is asked if she is not proud of the Buhari government she worked for. She says: “There are a lot of regrets”, although she served in the government, not in a capacity where her performance could be assessed. “So, it is hard for someone like me to say, ‘oh I regret.’ But, there are some situations where I said, ‘no, we shouldn’t have done this.’
Who should then be blamed for the failure of the APC government? Her answer isn’t what APC politicians would say: “You know, I can’t single myself out. I was part of the people that actually campaigned and believed in that government. So, any failure on our part, I think I am one of the people that should be held responsible for it.” Compare her answer here to Adams Oshiomhole’s shameful sermon to APC governors at a meeting in Benin last week. The former APC national chairman said the current economic hardship was caused by Buhari’s government. Specifically, he accused that regime of “printing over ₦31 trillion.” Oshiomhole likened the heist to the fiscal suicide of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and Idi Amin’s Uganda.
Smooth-talking Oshiomhole spoke the truth to an audience that is complicit. Buhari is APC; the governors listening and nodding to Oshiomhole’s truth are all miserably APC. There are more twists in this tale: The ‘lecturer’, Adams, is an insider recasting himself as a truth teller. Adams was right there, hands on the steering wheel while the vehicle of Nigeria was driven into the ditch.
From 2018 to 2020, Oshiomhole served as national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC). He was not a bystander in the Ways and Means and other heinous acts of the government he put and sustained in power. Check his words, his utterances and interventions during that era. In August 2018 when Nigerians groaned under Buhari’s misrule, Oshiomhole went to Daura and declared there that “Buhari’s critics are saboteurs and thieves.” He was the party’s loudest cheerleader; he was the enforcer, the one who silenced dissent, who abused and mocked critics. He was in the room when the teapot was left at the edge. Now, with the teacup shattered, he blames someone else for the mess.
A proverb for the elder who acts this shameful way: Àgbà tí kò ní’tìjú, ojú kan ni ò bá ní; ojú kan òún, l’ógangan iwájú orí è ni yí o wà (An elder without self-respect might as well have only one eye; that one eye being in the centre of his forehead). Instead of forging a furnace of informed efforts, Oshiomhole is helping his party to mint fake notes of self-indicting excuses. In societies that have consequences for actions, and punishment for crimes, Oshiomhole’s confession is enough to sink the ‘Hispaniola’, the ruling party’s ship with Long John Silver and his gang of pirates.
One day, the volcanic ash of today will clear from the skies. But, if we are not careful and deliberate in refreshing the memory of history, today’s abortionists will write it in our skies that they were midwives of peace and plenty. The complicit must not return, dust ash off their clothes, and then point fingers at the fire they helped ignite and say it is someone else’s misdeed. They cannot stroll into the marketplace, clad in the immaculate innocence of the prophet who warned the people, after the flood.
Zainab is not like Oshiomhole. She asks to be joined among the damned who acted Ali and the Angel; those who burnt the barn and packaged its ash, and labelled the ash as sugar and sold it to Nigeria. Zainab is asked to speak on Tinubu’s cabinet. “There isn’t much they are doing. I think it is just a waste.” I don’t think anyone outside the regime would say she is wrong. Nigeria is in a mess and the Tinubu government is clueless. Can they still fix the broken system? She says they can.
“How?”
“They should get experts; people who can do the job.” The ones there now don’t know Jack? No. They don’t. Or, rather, they know something: how to borrow and spend money on inanities.
Zainab’s appearance on Okinbaloye’s Mic On stirred more than foaming content; it dropped an omen: “A storm is coming.” She thinks the storm is coming from the North. I don’t think she is entirely right. I think the storm is coming from everywhere we have the ditched, the stranded. It is coming from the four cardinal points; and they, in their millions, are raring to go; seething.
When I watched the way Zainab announced the coming of the storm, I remembered the old American blues lyric by Richard Hawley:
“There’s a storm a-comin’, you’d better run.
There’s a storm coming, goodbye to the sun…”
Nigeria is in wedlock with storms; it gets tossed from one to the other. This one that is coming, when it comes, how many caps and roofs do you think will stand? No one knows. The year 2027 has been primed by politicians to be a mountain of the heartless (òkè òdájú) which all must climb, the orphans inclusive. From the North, we hear stuff like ‘even if Bola Tinubu’s son is made the INEC chairman, he will hit the canvas (ó máa lu’lè).’
It is scary. The man won’t do what the wife snatcher I started this piece with did. He will demand his furled mat and hold on to the snatched wife. He is wired that way. His pestle pounds in a mortar of brass (omo olódó ide). That is what his oríkì says.
His enemies probably know all these about the man they are raging against. The coalition that will do the pig fight with Tinubu morphed into ADC last week. Its choice of battle-tested David Mark as leader has created enough jitters. The howling of the winds presages what is coming.
I am not done with Zainab and her ultrasound scan of our politics and prospects. She paints the profligate APC with what she believes it truly is: a party that never should have been trusted with power. She is searing in her reflections. Hear her again:
“I am highly disappointed… I thought APC was really ready for victory. They did not know how to manage victory and I don’t think we were ready for governance.”
From the totality of what she is saying, would it be correct to say that APC is a difficult name to bear in public now?
She says “Yes.” And she explains: “Let me tell you. There was a reconciliation meeting at the Women Centre for FCT APC members. I swear to God, I only saw one APC cap. People went there as APC people but they did not go there for the government. People are scared…” They should be.
She says the country is worse now under Tinubu. She hints that the APC is in disarray inside but looks perfect outside. Fish rots from the head. Zainab says in the APC “you can’t vie for positions if you really want to serve the people. (You won’t get the ticket). You have to buy it or steal it and run with it, with your full chest too, proudly.”
While the ruling party misbehaves and misrules, daily the country goes down, progressively. “People are saying Goodluck was better than Buhari; people are saying Buhari is better than Tinubu. That is how it will keep going…We have to fix the system.”
She has reservations about the coalition that was unveiled last week. “Some of them were in government for eight years. What did they do to help the people?” Despite that, however, she says the coalition’s ADC is definitely not good news to (and for) the APC and Tinubu.
Does she think this coalition can remove Tinubu and the APC in 2027? She is asked and she answers “Ah” and smiles, and says “If they are united. And they have to bring all their… army…on board.”
So, looking at 2027, as a Northerner, what is the North saying about Tinubu? She says she honestly does “not have good reviews. It is bad; it is really bad.”
Specifically, does she think the North will vote for Tinubu? She says the man will get, “maybe, 30 percent or less.”
That is to say it is going to be worse for him than in 2023?
“Oh yes. It is going to be.”
And, generally, Tinubu’s chance of winning in 2027?
“It is going to be the toughest battle he will ever see. It is going to be the toughest.”
The president will do well for himself by listening to this lady. He will also help himself by listening to other real human beings like Colonel Abubakar Dangiwa Umar. You remember Umar’s recent advice to Tinubu? I paste it here for emphasis: “The other day, the Senate President was reported to have predicted that President Bola Tinubu will win the 2027 election with 99.9 percent of the votes! Even allowing for the fact that this Senate President is widely known for his humorous incitement, Mr President will do well to shun such oracles.”
Zainab Galadima says there is a storm coming. We wait to see how it lands and who gets swept away. But, before then, we should remind ourselves that in politics, storms don’t just happen. They are caused by choices, by silence and by complicity.
Remember, the wife snatcher in my opening story could not have his furled mat back until he dropped the wife he stole. So, until sinners who provoked and helped create the storm admit their part; until they stop the blame game, make restitutory propitiations, they (and even the innocent) are not safe from the coming rage of the winds. A storm is coming. I will be safe.
