As Foes and Friends Unite Against Tinubu

MaTaZ ArIsInG
Dallas, Texas

In today’s Saturday column, I look at the shifting alliances in the country in preparation for the 2027 election and point out that no one seems to care about the plight of common people:

As Foes and Friends Unite Against Tinubu
By Farooq A. Kperogi

Although 2025 has only just begun, the Machiavellian maneuvers and the increasingly tensile, high-decibel political shrieks being emitted by politicians about the 2027 election might lead one to believe that the election will take place next year.

Of all the political realignments that are forming preparatory to the 2027 election, it’s the unity in political adversity between former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and former Governor Nasir El-Rufai that strikes me as the most intriguing.

El-Rufai feels understandably betrayed by his humiliating exclusion from the Bola Tinubu administration whose ascent to power he helped to facilitate with uncommon vim and vigor. Nonetheless, he is protesting his betrayal by making common cause with Atiku Abubakar whom he had serially stabbed in the back more treacherously than Tinubu has thrown him under the bus.

It is akin, in a way, to a soldier who, after leading a fierce battle to enthrone a king, finds himself cast out of the palace. Wounded and seething, he seeks refuge in the camp of an old mentor and ally whom he once betrayed in the heat of war, hoping that their shared resentment for the new ruler will be enough to overlook past treacheries.

Recall that El-Rufai consistently disclaimed any debt to Atiku Abubakar in his political rise even when leaked US Embassy cables quoted him as telling US Embassy officials that Atiku is the single most important reason he made an “accidental” detour to public service. Worse still, he was the lynchpin in President Olusegun Obasanjo’s all-out, no-holds-barred, scorched-earth decimation of Atiku’s presidential aspirations.

As I pointed out in my August 12, 2023, column titled “El-Rufai’s Betrayal and Akpabio’s Buffoonery,” it was El-Rufai who carried Obasanjo’s messages to Western embassies saying Atiku must never be allowed to be president.

“On September 21, 2006, for instance, El-Rufai met with the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and the UK High Commissioner ‘under instruction’ from President Obasanjo to inform them of and seek their blessing to deny Atiku Abubakar the chance to succeed Obasanjo,” I wrote and characterized El-Rufai’s volte face as “a wild change of loyalties.”

Of course, it’s a banal fact of Third World life that betrayal is the lifeblood of partisan politics. So, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about El-Rufai’s duplicity. In any case, El-Rufai had also ridiculed Muhammadu Buhari as a bigot who was “serially unelectable” but later embraced him and even became the single most important reason why Buhari decided to run for president again, according to Buhari himself.

Yet, although Atiku must have developed a thick skin to perfidy (I am sure he, too, has stabbed quite a few people in the back in the course of his political career), I can’t help but wonder what goes on in his mind when he strategizes with El-Rufai toward the political containment of their common foe now.

Does he see El-Rufai as a repentant traitor seeking redemption, or merely as a desperate, scorned man whose newfound friendship is actuated by opportunistic political self-preservation rather than conviction?

Atiku must feel like sharing a meal with a man who once poisoned his drink. He will probably watch his hands closely and weigh his every word, knowing that today’s ally could easily be tomorrow’s betrayer.

Nevertheless, in the ruthless calculus of politics, perhaps Atiku understands that some alliances, however uneasy, are dictated not by trust, but by the urgency of a common enemy.

This sentiment underpins the rumored subterranean rapprochement between Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. Although they appear to be at loggerheads, there are credible hints that Abdullahi Ganduje’s recent appointment to the chairmanship of the board of the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria is a calculated first step to strategically ease him out of the chairmanship of the APC, which is said to be the irreducible minimum for Kwankwaso’s alliance with Tinubu.

A Tinubu-Kwankwaso alliance is projected to be a formidable checkmate for the emerging Atiku-El-Rufai coalition.

However, in all the alliances and re-alliances that are being formed and reformed and the boundaries of friendship and betrayal that are being negotiated and renegotiated, one thing has been remarkably missing: how to reverse the progressively worsening plight of common people.

The condition of poor people who are vulnerable to the whirlingly blinding vagaries of market forces is the cornerstone of my public intellection. This sprouts from my own experiential brushes with poverty growing up. Although I have escaped my past condition, I have not lost, and won’t ever lose, my empathy for the poor.

None of the people strategizing about taking over or retaining power in 2027 spares a thought for the seemingly irreversible death spiral that cruel neoliberal economics has visited on the masses of economically disinherited Nigerians. That worries me deeply.

It is obvious that even so-called opposition politicians don’t have an alternative template for husbanding the economy. That’s why their criticism of the present torment has been muted at best. They all believe the state should be rolled back from the quotidian life of everyday folk and that governments have no responsibility to assist citizens to live decent, dignified lives.

This style of government frees people in power from the responsibility to be accountable to the people and the license to jettison the unwritten social contract they signed with the people.

They all want a country where, as I pointed out in the past, the economy will “grow” even if that causes the people to growl. “After the economy has ‘grown’ but the people still groan, where is the growth?” I wrote in my June 24, 2023.

That is precisely what is happening in Argentina, which is pursuing similar inhumane market-centric policies as Tinubu. Argentina’s populist rightwing president is getting plaudits for “growing” the economy while the people are growling in anguish.

He is being celebrated for achieving a budget surplus at the expense of deep deficits in people’s quality of life, at the cost of a recessionary economy that has plunged more than half of the country into extreme poverty. The Western press is also praising Tinubu’s “reforms.”

No politician, to my knowledge, is talking about a more compassionate, people-centered approach to managing the economy. Unfortunately, the people don’t seem to care. Maybe that’s why the politicians don’t care, either.

Or perhaps it’s the other way around: the politicians stopped caring first, numbing the people into apathy through years of airy promises and performative concern. When hardship becomes routine and disappointment a certainty, cynicism replaces hope, and survival takes precedence over ideals.

In such a climate, politics becomes a spectacle rather than a means of change, and the people, resigned to their fate, watch passively, expecting nothing and receiving exactly that.

Betrand Russell could very well be describing Nigeria’s situation when he wrote 1923 that “A very large percentage of English-speaking people really believe that the ills from which they suffer would be cured if a certain political party were in power. That is a reason for the swing of the pendulum.

“A man votes for one party and remains miserable; he concludes that it was the other party that was to bring the millennium. By the time he is disenchanted with all parties, he is an old man on the verge of death; his sons retain the belief of his youth, and the see-saw goes on.”

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