Too often, people view our highly esteemed President, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, solely through the lens of politics. Yet, to define him merely as a politician is to overlook the essence of his brilliance. He is not just a leader; he is a scholar, a visionary, a master strategist, and a statesman of unparalleled intellect. His rise to the pinnacle of Nigerian politics is not accidental—it is the result of decades of strategic thinking, relentless learning, and an unwavering commitment to progress.

Long before he stepped onto the political stage, Tinubu had already honed an extraordinary leadership acumen. He is an enigma of greatness, a man whose success is not confined to a single sphere but extends to every endeavor he undertakes. A natural-born administrator, he possesses a keen ability to see beyond the present, shaping the future with a clarity that few can match. Like Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, and Deng Xiaoping of China, Tinubu embodies the rare breed of leaders who do not merely govern but transform nations.

Nigeria, a nation of vast potential, has long grappled with daunting challenges. But now, in Asiwaju, we have been gifted with a leader of rare genius—one who does not stumble upon solutions but pursues them with the heart of a lion. He does not waver, nor does he second-guess his purpose. Like Winston Churchill in Britain’s darkest hours or Nelson Mandela in the fight for South Africa’s liberation, Tinubu stands as a pillar of resilience and determination. Like the great architects of transformation in history, he was born to redefine Nigeria’s destiny and steer it onto the right course.

Our country stands at the threshold of a new era—not just a political transition but a profound shift towards national greatness. The rise of global powerhouses like Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, and China was driven by visionary leadership, the kind that reshapes history. In the 1960s, Nigeria stood shoulder to shoulder with these nations, but a lack of visionary governance led us astray. Now, with Tinubu at the helm, the tide is turning. He is the architect of Nigeria’s resurgence, the force propelling us toward a future of prosperity and global relevance.

As we celebrate another year in the life of this extraordinary leader, Nigeria must embrace his vision, for it is our pathway to transformation. He has the blueprint, the experience, and the determination to build a nation that works for all. There will never be another Bola Ahmed Tinubu—not now, not in a hundred years. This is our moment, our opportunity to rise with him.

Let the nation stand in unison. Let the drums roll and the champagne flow—for our leader, our statesman, our visionary is here to shape history. The time for Nigeria’s greatness is now, and Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR is the man to lead us there.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MR PRESIDENT SIR.

E – SIGNED

Hon Segun Olulade Eleniyan
Executive Director, Customer Centricity and Marketing, Galaxy Backbone Ltd.

By Wole Olujobi

Senator Adeyemi Adaramodu, who represents Ekiti South in the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, will never cease to intrigue me. Adaramodu, a grandmaster of soap-box strategy and elegant essayist in political communications, is a doyen of the communications arts, who deploys both spoken and unspoken media to present his ideas in verbal finesse and strategic graphical details, to give expression to the arrays of political trends that sleep with Nigerians and wake them up dialy to more complex political realities. We saw this in him in his home state of Ekiti.

The Senate’s spokesman hit the limelight as the spokesman of the Kayode Fayemi Campaign Organisation in the 2007 Ekiti State governorship election that Fayemi won, but which the sphinx in the Nigerian power elite group would not allow.

Deploying his creativity in addressing the complex political realities of the time, it was the period that Adaramodu changed the age-long Nigeria’s political lexicon from everyday expressions to a more symbolic communication art and act, including the lucid presentation of the harsh and uncouth realities that the ruling party at the time had forced in the throats of Nigerians.

Coinages, such as “political masturbation”, “political pharisees” and “political ragamuffin”, “the Pharaoh’s disciples”, among others, were coinages by Adaramodu that found their ways to the consciousness of Ekiti people, which also gave a precise and concise expression to the reality of the unrealistic political suffocation in Ekiti State between 2007 and October 15, 2010.

These expressions woke Ekiti people to the reality that far away from the theatre of the absurd, they had worse than a Herod to contend with in their thirst for justice and right to elect the governor of their choice.

Adaramodu used his talents to wake consciousness among Ekiti people to be peacefully determined in the deployment of their grits and democratic rights to get justice. And in the streets and in courts, superior adherence to the rule of law prevailed, as the clock ticked to restore order and justice. Ekiti State was thus spared the crushing pains of the drumbeat of Pharaoh’s orchestra on October 15, 2010, which Adaramodu fought tooth and nail to achieve, after Ekiti State was on the crutches of political manipulation orchestrated for three and half years by those that Adaramodu dubbed as “the political pharisees” that held tightly to the throats of Ekiti people.

Fifteen years after, Adaramodu climbed to the national stage as the Nigerian Senate’s spokesman to draw our attention to how a harmless term in theatre and communication arts, particularly in public relations and entertainment, (that is, content creation), can be exploited by restive and desperate politicians to become irreverent, belligerent, despondent, ridiculous and, indeed, a source and sauce for national uproar and embarrassment, to rock the boat of the nation’s democracy and burn the arse of the mace in a maze of political intrigues that have potential to desecrate the pantheon of the parliament; the very source and fountain of democracy.

On a live programme on television, a brilliant Adaramodu, while explaining in details the events that led to the escalation of the sexual harassment rhetoric in the Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan theatrics, said that what Nigerians were seeing in Senator Natasha was nothing more than a “content creation skills in her Senate Committee on Diaspora and NGOs work” carried too far.

He warned that exploiting such a mundane antic in fighting against a non-existent marginalisation and oppression of women is injurious to the health of the nation’s democracy and her economic development plans.

Recently, the Senate that has been scurrilously turned into an amphitheatre of the absurd, witnessed a pantomime without percussionists and back singers. It was orchestrated by Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan. As the composer and arranger, Senator Akpoti from Kogi State, was also the lead and back-up singer, the drummer as well as the saxophonist.

Huge numbers of her party members refused to sing her song. Fellow female members in the Senate turned deaf ears to the offensive lyrics coming from one of their own in her “Portable’s anthem”. Senator Florence Ita-Giwa, a frontline women’s leader, dismissed Natasha’s allegation of sexual harassment as a weakness, arguing that both Akpabio and Natasha share same status as Senators and so Akpabio cannot molest her.

Back home in Kogi State, Natasha’s constituents hit the polls, opting for a recall process over alleged poor representation and shame they felt over alleged preference for the optics and their vanities far above adding value to their lives. But that did not stop other Nigerians from airing their views, as some spoke against discrimination against women.

Discrimination against women is not only bad; it is also evil, criminal and a sin against not only man but also against God. Women should not be discriminated against!

But what is at stake here, according to records and across the party lines, in the Senate? Evidently, following the Senate rules and tradition of changing seats from time to time is the contention and not any act of abuse of women. That much Senator Ned Nwoko explained in his intervention, like other Senators.

According to available facts, the alleged amorous advances happened long time ago and there are pieces of fact-based evidence that suggest that after those alleged advances, both Senate President Godswill Akpabio and Senator Natasha had related well privately and in the Senate. The law courts would dismiss Natasha’s current allegation as an afterthought ill-motivated for political capital.

It is therefore surprising that a mere matter over the shifting of sitting arrangement that is the norm could provoke a drama that triggered a national uproar in the Senate from the morning when the concert begins to the evening when the opera ends. And all this tending towards pitting women against men in a polity that needs robust aggregation of sound debates, formulation of productive principles and enunciation of mission and vision to grow an enduring economic legacy that takes care of the thoroughly abused Nigerians who have over the years been traumatised by the perfidious and jocund fellows in leadership positions, who chose buffooning foppery far above national etho for progress; the prospect that was spurned by the leadership of her party that has a scant regard for the judgment of history.

In Senator Natasha, we have regrettably seen a Socrates’ invention gone awry, and which has become a subject of mirth in the Senate chambers described in the holy writ as hallowed.

Socrates it was who surmised that the best among men must be in the parliament, the bedrock of democracy, to thinker with the best ways for human husbandry to make the society safe. But the events that headlined the polity in recent times in the Senate have shamed Socrates in his grave.

From sitting arrangements to sexual harassment, waist twisting, winking and tongue-wagging, among other nauseating accusations, the Nigerian Senate, like Adaramodu warned, has been turned into the house of humour and amusement for sensuous partisans and the romantic logic of the sensualists in a polity where reputations are very cheap, even as the fifth columnists have emerged to add dangerous pep to the already charged debate.

There was an allegation by an Internet crook who wrote on behalf of Natasha that a woman (Natasha) licensed at polls by Kogi voters to make laws had become licentious after an alleged N500m down-payment, to corral her into an erotic stripping session, and chew away at the restive hot candy lodged between the thighs. The allegation was denied by Natasha.

The sordid trend has drawn the riveting choler of a cross-section of Nigerians who wonder why their representatives should occupy themselves with the pleasure of the body while the very essence of life suffers.

Curiously, it is happening at the time for the annual ritual to plot the health of the nation when the National Assembly is set to start implementing the national budget that bonds all Nigerians to one destiny irrespective of tribes, tongues and ideological identities.

But then, it all boils down to Adaramodu’s suggestion that an elaborate “content creation” skill in the Senate is being propped in redemptive accoutrement for partisan motives to achieve undeserved advantage.

First, it was an excruciating sexual harassment that Natasha endured over time, even though she enjoyed the best of a relationship with somebody of equal strength as a senator. Yet, she said that she suffered from that sexual harassment for a very long time while we later heard that Akpabio is also a close friend of her husband!

When support from the expected quarters among top Nigerian women over alleged sexual harassment failed, the irate Senator expanded her content creation skill and turned to the international arena at the United Nations to tell stories of her ordeals in the hands of a man whose groins are always violently provoked into a vicious stir at the slightest glance at the vital parts of women.

When Nigerians railed at such inanity, another allegation emerged, as Natasha reportedly turned to another symbolic content, opting for a more consuming temptation among the lechers across the globe, saying that Akpabio once talked about her tempting, spherical waist and rotund “bum bum” that the daughters of Eve often flaunt to daze men into unconsciousness in the game of lechery as we have read in David and Uriah’s wife’s story.

All these took Natasha’s attention from her primary duty in the parliament to make laws that take care of the welfare needs of her people. Unfortunately, the bug also caught the attention of the nation that is struggling to overcome the burdens of poverty foisted on Nigerians by her party that is today devising and creating complementary contents to seize the government again, to complete the routing of Nigeria and put the spoils, as usual, in the pockets of members.

Curiously too, the opposition’s method to that power grab malady is being propped through legislative rascality, belligerence and political stratagem rooted in obnoxious content creation by the noxious totems of failed leadership of the past that now thrives in breathtaking blackmail stunts as a superior weapon of political manipulation.

The Natasha drama has since thrown up ludicrous narratives of more dramatic spectacles to the collective shame of the fake freedom fighters in the polity.

I watched in awe on television a pseudo anti-corruption crusader and self-advertised rights activist notorious for the subjugation of her workers, and who once almost turned the diamond in her office into dust in the acts of office abuse, as she harassed a Senator, protesting alleged rights abuse and crime against women and I marvelled at this insipid specimen of gregacious Nigerians in her egregious display of dubiety garnished in redemptive accoutrement!

From the back curtains, like a troubled ghoul, rang out Atiku Abubakar’s shrill voice to further foul the already dense and tense political air, calling Akpabio “a serial women’s abuser”. The Senate President was only spared the coital brutality charge of rape!

Elsewhere in Abeokuta, their grand patron held court in a blackmail seminar on alleged bribery in the Rivers State emergency rule brouhaha, eventhough he holds the trophy as a legend in the Nigeria’s evergreen history of bribery scam to rape the nation’s law in a desperate power chase to lord it over the rest of us.



Nigeria is ripe for fresh hope from fresh hands in a fresh environment devoid of failed men and women of yesterday who buried Nigerians’ hope for a prosperous future.

Nigerians must wake up to the reality that the Pharaohs never relent in the battle for survival. Sexual harassment game is just a smokescreen for the battle ahead in the next presidential poll.

The power grids of the yesterday’s men are fast collapsing, leaving them troubleshooting to hit the stream again.The National Assembly is the turf to test the colour and temper of the complex games that will shape the politics of the next dispensation, even though what Nigerians need are content creations that hold much promise for the nation’s growth.

More interesting times are ahead for more shenanigans and drama, as more scary power grab schemes unfold.

*Olujobi, a journalist, writes from Ado-Ekiti

By Festus Adedayo

“Everything is my business. Everything. Anything I say is law…literally law.” Barbara Geddes, et al in their How dictatorship works (2018) quoted Malawian dictator, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, as having once said the above.

In Nigeria of a little more than a week ago, they all came in quick successions: A National Assembly where libido ran riot; a son who said his father was Nigeria’s best president; a corps member who condemned that same father as terrible and that president, when he wakes up and looks at the mirror, like Banda, sees himself as “the law”. In the hands of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria appears to have become one complex, complicated web of mess and intrigues. When a people suffer such plague of multiple, endless afflictions, my people deploy a phrasal description to denote it. So, they compare such situation to an “egbinrin òtè”. Egbinrin òtè is a situation that defies solution. It scorns the biblical exhortation that affliction would not rise a second time. Under Tinubu’s egbinrin òtè Nigeria, afflictions come in multiple folds. Literally, egbinrin òtè is leaves of conspiracy. In usage, however, it is a scary, endless tale of repetitive sorrow. The affliction is sustained by a coldblooded-ness or bloodlessness. When you cut a leaf out of the branch of this tree, another sprouts immediately. In manifestation, you can compare an egbinrin òtè situation to the biblical cursed fig tree, doomed to bring out a sap of sorrow.

1957 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, French philosopher and journalist, Albert Camus’ 1942-published book, The Myth of Sisyphus, explains egbinrin òtè better. Using Greek mythology of the gods’ punishment for Sisyphus, we see a man condemned to a repetitive labour. In Tinubu’s Nigeria, like Sisyphus, citizens seem to have been condemned to a ceaseless and eternal task of rolling a boulder up hill, only for it to roll backwards down hill. In Fela Anikulapo’s word, “everyday na the same thing”.

Seyi Tinubu, son of Nigerian president, was in Adamawa State last week. As he spoke to youths, arrogance dripped out of him like foul-smelling bead of sweats. Except for the bombastic claim that his father was “the greatest president in the history of Nigeria,” which empirical facts do not support, every other claim in that address lacks collocation, context or even logic. Who are the “they” who keep coming “for your father” and for “me”? Whose father is “Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu”? Did Seyi mean that fatherhood in the sense of Tinubu being the Nigerian president?

Fatherhood requires responsibility. It is not just by an accident of seminal fluid. Not every person who occupies Aso Rock is the Nigerian’s father. Children must see themselves in their father and vice versa. Nigerians will indeed desire that Tinubu ‘fatherlizes’ them, in which case, he will act like a father in all material particular. To the millions of Nigerians who go to bed hungry every night, and the democratic tenets that Tinubu stomps upon like a matador, he is better described as a dictator next door.

If you attempt to overstretch blood ties but fail in family responsibility, my people will stop you in your strides. They then will tell you that, when issues get to the brass-tack, a “mother-of-all” can identify her biological children (Ìyá ẹgbẹ mọ iye ọmọ ẹ). If Seyi needs to hear the truth, what Nigerians see in Tinubu isn’t a father. That is why his other claim that the Tinubu economy has “benefited all” must have rankled suffering Nigerians. When he now said his father was “the only president that is not trying to enrich his own pocket,” many Nigerians must have fainted.

In Nigeria of close to two years now under Tinubu, we are faced with what, in grammar, is called irregular comparative and superlative adjectives.They are adjectives that don’t follow methods. When you conclude that a thinking coming out of Aso Rock is bad, wait for the next minute, worse one will follow. When you begin to lament the worse situation, then the worst happens. And this trajectory happens endlessly, like Sisyphus’.

As Seyi was waxing illogical in his mis-canonization of his father in Adamawa State as “one who gave the youth the wing to fly”, another egbinrin òtè was billowing. Ushie Rita Ugamaye, a serving corps member, was literally told that in Tinubu’s Nigeria, the youth can only fly if they grovel by the president’s feet. In Bob Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, I was told that even while locked up in the sacristy of your closet, you could only criticize old Bob in whispers, lest the wall transmit your criticism to the Fuhrer. In a social media post she made, Ugamaye lamented the excruciating existence Nigerians live under Seyi’s father’s government. Speaking directly to him, she said: “I don’t know if there is any other president that is as terrible as you… you are such a terrible president.” Thereafter, NYSC authority subjected Ugamaye to threats and eventually got her to apologize for her views on the grueling economic life Nigerians live today.

Ugamaye’s tortuous week in the hands of Tinubu’s hirelings is a mirror of the kind of life citizens live under repressive governments. Another example of this kind of rule was under the Malawian president, Banda. The people lived in palpable fear of their president. Not only was dissent criminalized, condemnation of the Fuhrer was treasonable. Their despotism began with negligible cases like Ugamaye’s and gradually, they harvested a captive citizenry from whom they wrung cult-like devotion under an atmosphere of fear. In Malawi, national grovelling and beatification of Banda were the norm. It was so bad that in June, 1967, Banda was awarded a honourary doctorate by a university which called him a “… pediatrician to his infant nation”!

Then, another billow of a smouldering egbinrin ote oozed out. On March 18, Tinubu wielded the big stick. He imposed a state of emergency on Rivers State, suspending the governor, Siminalayi Fubara, deputy and the House of Assembly for six months. In my last week instalment, I referred to Tinubu as a partial judge. With the proclamation of emergency rule, he earned another infamous medallion. In his nationwide address which read like a coup speech, without any remorse or pretence, Tinubu unapologetically removed the veil of his partiality. A few hours after, allegedly under heavy disbursement of grafts, the two national parliaments gave his coup against democracy legislative imprimatur.

I do not want to bore you with condemnations that followed Tinubu’s dismantling of democratic structures in Rivers State, which I share. The most disingenuous corroboration of that declaration of martial law that shouldn’t escape my comment came from Magnus Abe. On a national television last week, he said Tinubu had the latitude to read S. 305 of the constitution, which gives a president power to impose a state of emergency, in his own way, as different from Goodluck Jonathan’s reading of same. Not only does this nauseating drivel make one want to puke, it tells you the length people’s brain can travel to manufacture inanity in defence of their tenuous political location. That section of the constitution is not ambiguous. No president is allowed to collapse democratic structure. Abe must mean that Tinubu is the law that lawyers and Nigerians in general must read.

I think, judging by his almost two years in office, there is an urgent need for us to begin to assess the psychology that underpins Tinubu’s actions in power. We can do this by conducting a post-mortem on his words and actions in private. This will enable us know how tortuous the road with Tinubu as Nigerian leader would be in the years to come. In a bid to forewarn that the character in a duel is a principality of humongous evil, Juju maestro, King Sunny Ade, once warned, using the Ijesa dialect as a kicker, that, “Wé m’ẹni o kó, Paddy…” I think, in Tinubu, Nigerians do not realize what principality in power they are entangled with. He carouses power like a tobacco addict fiddles with his pipe.

So, it brought me to critical questions about Tinubu’s persona. The first is, when God’s-creation-Bola-Ahmed-Tinubu wakes up every morning, does he think there is God? Or, put differently, doesn’t he think he is God? Or, more explicitly, that he is the Nigerian God? Simulating the craft of anthropologists who gather information through fieldwork and participant observation, I have spoken with those who sat around Tinubu before he became president. They believe Tinubu has a God mentality. For instance, they cited him telling fawners who gathered round him in his Lagos Bourdillon court at wee hours of the night, when he was ready to go and sleep, that, “Èkó fẹ lọ sún” – Lagos wants to go and sleep. Forget the arrogance in that word, it explains the God that Tinubu thinks he is.

Again, those who witnessed the Nigerian president’s youth period in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, told me he went through a challenging time. He had to cobble together bric-a-brac for existence and learnt rough tackle tactics of the street. He emerged therefrom a street folk to the hilt, with its unorthodox survival methods. Decades after, the man who would be Nigeria’s president had had mastery of the colour of roughness and the language of manipulation. These have proven to be handy and essential tools in the Nigerian gangbanger political underworld.

The street has taught Tinubu to become so versatile in persona code-switching. It is such that, at one time, he is at home in the rough world of the MC Oluomos and musician, Wasiu Ayindes and at another, he blends perfectly with the varnished world of international leaders. He has faced life tribulations that drowned Goliaths, walked through landmines that made mincemeat of the brave and emerged therefrom unscathed. These experiences can get a man to do either of two things: become the staunchest atheist who is persuaded of his own ability and scoffs at the God factor in human affair. Or, become the most supine God worshipper. I think these harsh life experiences and his conquest of battles through street shenanigans must have scarred the president’s soul irreparably. The scar must have made fellow human beings appear as tiny as gnats in his estimation.

Tinubu is one of the boldest leaders in the history of Nigeria. A few days ago, news filtered in that he had just awarded a $700 million contract for the renovation of Tin Can and Apapa ports in Lagos to ITB Nigeria, a construction firm his son, Seyi is said to be a director, and which is owned by his close ally, Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire, Gilbert Chagoury. Earlier, he had awarded another multi-trillion Naira contract to a Chagoury-owned company, Hitech Construction. Same company handles many of Nigerian’s federal roads. Chagoury is already constructing the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway. Nigerians ranted at the opacity and compromise behind the awards but to Tinubu, the people could go jump inside the lagoon. Bishop Godfrey Onah of the Catholic Church of Nsukka recently told us that a nation is doomed when its leaders are no longer afraid of the reaction of the people.

I seem to think Tinubu has swallowed the Devil. With his raw hand, he can pull chestnut from red-hot furnace. He is not afraid to bite any bullet. The whole world may be on the verge of being incinerated but the street folk looks at the end game. It is a trait you get on the street. Street people are Machiavellian. To them, the end justifies the means. Unlike him, virtually all Nigerian military rulers, who were equally bold, got theirs consummated in fiery military traditions, especially grueling military training. Tinubu’s was weaned from the furnace of a heartless street. I recently cited Gen Ibrahim Babangida’s interview in the 1990s with some newspaper editors. He had told them he coveted the ruthless military prowess of Zaka, the legendary Zulu war General. Zaka was notorious for mass killings and violence. These worsened to psychopathic level when, at the death of his mother, Nandi, in 1827, Shaka suddenly thirsted after more blood, as showcased in his erratic blood-thirst. He killed thousands of Zulus, prohibited planting crops and drinking milk for a year while murdering pregnant women and their husbands. So when you marvel at why IBB heartlessly and summarily executed Mamman Vatsa and why torrents of Nigerians’ blood flowed under his rule, remember that Zaka’s ruthlessness fascinated him.

The proclamation of a state of emergency in Rivers State by Tinubu should tell Nigerians that what we have today is personal rule disguised as civil rule. In such rule, the people are forced to swallow dosages of authoritarianism. As consequence, gradually, national public politics wither. Tinubu’s palace politics makes the future of democratic government look bleak in Nigeria. Barbara Geddes, et al cited above also said that a major feature of personal rule is that the ruler conscripts the judiciary, castrates the political system and gets a pliant legislature. An icing on the cake of this infamy is a captive populace. Tinubu has all these by his palm. In the voice vote of the two parliaments last week, a somber Nigeria should not just see a grim democratic future but a gradual incubation of a Kamuzu Banda in Nigeria in the shortest possible time. Villaswill Akpabio will give Tinubu life presidency if and when he wants it.

In his oxymoronic authoritarian-democrat posture, Tinubu is gradually morphing into the Banda model. He is the law. He is the legislature. He is the Fuhrer. So when Lateef Fagbemi, his Attorney General, came out to read an address which reified Tinubu’s earlier rough stomp on the Nigerian constitution, all seems set on this road to Tinubu’s personal rule. Banda also had executioners who helped him dig the grave of Malawian democracy. Fagbemi had threatened Nigerian states that the cudgel with which Tinubu lashed the buttocks of democratic government in Rivers State is on the rafters waiting for any other governor who fails to grovel before Banda. Soon, this same legislature, with Fagbemi’s cavalier lending of self to autocracy, would land us in Malawi of 1970. That year, a congress of Banda’s political party, the MCP, declared him president for life. In 1971, Malawi’s Godswill Akpabio and Tajudeen Abass as heads of the legislature did this. I guess a Fagbemi was there for Banda, too. For the next quarter of a century, it was criminal not to address Banda with his full title, “His Excellency the Life President of the Republic of Malawi, Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamazu Banda.”