PLS READ WITH AN OPEN MIND Who is Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu? I don’t know this man personally but I know few who are very close to him. Presently, whether you like him or hate him, one thing you can’t take away from him is that, he has become an issue in Nigerian Politics. Sometimes, I feel uncomfortable with his politics but I like him for his doggedness, indefatigable spirit and his ability to dare politically without looking back. Also, a lot of things have been said about him. Character is like a smoke, it cannot be hidden. What you see Tinubu doing now is what he has always done as a private person. If you are selfless, generous and always ready to make sure that life is better for your fellow human being, it is not something you start doing when you get a big platform. He has always put his money where his mouth is and I dare to say that he did not just start spending money, Tinubu has always been ‘liquid’ and ready and willing to let it flow. This is a tribute from one person who knows Asiwaju very well. Happy reading. -Kay Lord (June 2 2014) AN APPRECIATION OF TINUBU By BAYO ONANUGA (Editor in Chief, TheNEWS Magazine) “You cannot dream yourself into character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.” – Henry David Thoreau, 19th century American writer. I have known Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu for more than a third of his life on earth. My first impression about him stuck since then: a man of conviction and courage, a generous man, ready to deplore all his arsenals, human and material, in the promotion and realization of public good, a man who genuinely befriends people and sticks with them, bad weather or good weather, a man who sees the future, far ahead of his time. Back in late 1992, we were looking for champions to back the publication of our anti-establishment news weekly, TheNEWS magazine. A friend of mine had spoken to the American accented man, then known as Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu and also gotten an appointment fixed for me to see him in Abuja. I still remember my first meeting with him in one of the suites at Transcorp Hilton Hotel, along with Opeyemi Bamidele, who was then his PA. He was all ears as I told him our needs and our invitation to him to support us. He listened sympathetically and offered words of encouragement. Few minutes after, I walked out of the hotel room with the address of the person that I would meet in his Compass Investment in Lagos, to collect a cheque. Bola Tinubu had made an investment in a low margin media business, look so simple! My greatest surprise was that he never asked to see our feasibility report, which you would expect from a man who had then spent over a dozen years in the corporate world. He simply invested because he subscribed to our dream, to start a paper that had promised to be on the side of the people, under military-civilian order. His gesture completely stunned me. Here was a Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Chairman of the powerful Appropriation Committee, a businessman in his private life, who did not equivocate for a moment; who did not even say ‘treat me as an anonymous backer’, like some other lily-livered people would have preferred: he was ready to risk all his privileges, his business engagements, his rising political profile and be on the side of the people. The investment was to prove very significant to our organization, especially in the special relationship that it enabled me and a host of my colleagues – Dapo Olorunyomi, Babafemi Ojudu, Idowu Obasa, Kunle Ajibade, Seye Kehinde – to forge ahead with Senator Tinubu. Although known as an accountant or an auditor by professional calling, Bola Tinubu would also have made a success of journalism as a career. A voracious consumer of the printed media in Nigeria, Tinubu possesses a very sharp analytical mind and very seasoned newsman’s instinct: ability to scent what is news, especially news that will be of public interest and public good. Sometimes, when I ran out of ideas about what to put on our magazine’s cover, I would simply walk to his office, especially when he became a Governor, and by the time we discussed the state of the nation, I would depart, with an idea. There was always something to take away, after rubbing minds with him. I sometimes joked that he should have come to the world as an editor and not as an auditor! He was for the short spell he spent in the Senate, a great source of news for our TEMPO and TheNEWS. His Balarabe Musa Crescent home, with his beautiful wife ever available to pamper us was our meeting point, away from the snoopers of the Babangida-Abacha junta. And when the Abacha junta proscribed several newspapers in 1994, he was the man who inspired the establishment of P.M. NEWS, our most successful medium, with the seed money. In exile, both in the UK and the USA, he continued as our freelance reporter, feeding us now and then about the external activities of NADECO and information about the Abacha regime that he had picked up from his impeccable sources, close to the junta. I must say some of the information he passed on to us, were dangerous and one of them led to the arrest of Babafemi Ojudu, after we published the story of the massive looting that General Abacha was inflicting on the Nigerian treasury. This was two years before General AbdulSalami Abubukar made this known to the nation. Tinubu was ever there for us in those dark days when we operated underground, when it was not easy running a ‘guerilla’ operation, having to contend with the constant harassment of Abacha’s goons, shut downs, and the incarceration of staff. I remember one day in December 1995 when he called to ask about our well-being and I told him we were having problems paying staff and staring the possibility of many staffers spending Christmas in hunger. His reaction was spontaneous: there was some money with his friend in Surulere. ‘Go and collect the money’, he said. That friend happened to be Lai Mohammed. The money was a big life-saver for many of our staff and the company that December. Tinubu goes to great length to ensure that those around him never suffer, even when he bears the brunt. His trademark is spontaneity: ever ready to give, ever ready to lend a helping hand to the weak. When he was in exile during the Abacha years, his homes in the UK and Maryland in the USA were points of convergence for many emigrants hounded out of the country by the Abacha junta. In my own case, he accommodated me in one of his flats in DC for all my 8 months in the USA, arranging that I applied for asylum and ensuring that some allowance in hundreds of dollars were given to me by his gas station in Washington DC, then being managed by his wife, Remi Tinubu. All this while, even while he spent himself thin in exile, he kept touch with the Nigerian based NADECO and the other political structures in Lagos. He was not just ‘touching the base’ by word of mouth, he was also contributing financially to all the schemes being carried out by the politicians at home. There was an incident that remained evergreen when he sent me to Pa Abraham Adesanya at his office on Simpson Street, Lagos. Pa Ajasin had died and NADECO Nigeria was trying to mobilize funds to give the old man, a befitting burial. Pa Adesanya and other NADECO chieftains were at a meeting when he was informed that I bore a message from Senator Bola Tinubu. I handed the old man an envelope, containing N200, 000. Pa Adesanya was utterly overwhelmed as he told me Tinubu’s donation was the biggest the group had received for the burial. Many Yoruba businessmen, he said, were afraid of identifying with the burial and had given miserly donations, the highest of which was N50, 000. I believe such contributions came into reckoning when Tinubu was locked in a dispute with Engr Funso Williams for the Lagos governorship ticket of the AD in 1999. There was no way the grand old men of Yoruba politics would have forgotten Tinubu’s past contributions. It was only logical that they backed him against Funso. In office as Governor for 8 years, Tinubu forged a dinstinctive character for himself, about how those who occupy power should behave. The character I speak about is beyond his trade mark cap; it’s about a style that he deployed to make a mark. From day one, he refused to fall into the trap of the establishment by declining the drivers sent to him from Alausa, moments after his election as Governor was announced in Jan 1999. He told the government then that he had his “personal driver”. That driver, Mustapha, who died last year, was to prove a big bridge, in connecting Tinubu with his primary constituency – the media, the human rights groups, the political activists and so on. Being part of Tinubu’s struggles for more than a decade, Mustapha knew everyone who ever interacted with is boss and he ensured his boss never missed ‘touching base with them’. All through his tenure, it was either he picked his phone call himself or Mustapha picking it and passing it on. He simply made himself accessible. His accessibility also made him not to fall into the trap of being disconnected and shielded from the society by sycophants and liars to power. Today, Tinubu remains the leading Yoruba man, ready to back good political cause with everything he has got – his brain, his energy, his money, his ideas and tactics, his connections in very high places. He remains the foremost defender of our constitution and the apostle of true federalism, fiscal and political. However, Bola Tinubu’s greatest weakness in inhered in his strength: because he is faithful to people, to his friends, he is also easily too trusting and ends up being bamboozled by some of those friends, leaving him shattered with grave disappointment.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Jun 2014 09:38:58 +0000
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