Tinubu, Ahmed-geddon -By Dandy Jackson Chukwudi

Suddenly, it is all quiet on the western front. No street heckles or flag waving or mooning over the setting sun, no hooting or baying in public. The rabble no longer raves. Few wonder what happened to the Sunday Igboho crowd. Some may wonder if they are withering.

The answer is before our eyes. The Oduduwa Republic babblers are alive and well. They just swapped icons, rechristened the shrines and rewrote the rites. They left the prophet for a secular priest. They have had a switch of battle gear.

Maybe it is not quiet. We can hear and feel the cacophony. The chants and caterwauling are everywhere, especially on the phones. The Twitter bees, the Instagram grimes, the Facebook freaks. They are alive and well, but they have not been at war at the side of their icon, who has gone into hiding.

It’s farewell Igboho. Welcome Tinubu, at least until the new priest asiwajus out. They are at his worship. They embrace it because it does not, for the first time in seven years, feel like they are outside the mainstream. They are not falling foul of the law, not howling from the fringes. They have Ahmed Tinubu as their man. He is mainstream. He belongs, not to Sunday Igboho, or Adeyinka Grandsons’s assembly. They can say they have a legitimate tribe and rhetoric. They may pretend to love Nigeria. They may claim to embrace INEC, cling to a political party no one in the police or DSS will harangue.

But that is where it stops. They have transferred the temperament of their former master into the new. And they have not spared any incoherence, any lack of finesse, and threats and tantrums, any show of rabid, primitive cants, or any ululations. They have abused, cursed, thrown imprecations. They have hugged lies about their candidate. They have pelted lies about others. They have distorted material.

Tinubu has turned out to be an excuse for even closet Oduduwa’s to betray open emotions about Oduduwa without being accused of it. This includes intellectuals who did not show mercy to him while he reigned in Lagos as a pharisaic chief executive. It is like wearing a colour beneath another colour. Tinubu has become a shelter for both miscreants and activists of the crowd.

Tinubu knows this. He is happy to be their catharsis, to be their excuse for unfurling their bile at the system, for acting like revolutionaries. He is playing to it by acting as though he is the saint of Nigerian politics. Perhaps the purists of the Oduduwa cause are unhappy, and they unleashed a past video clip of Tinubu on the social media. In it, a bullion van was seen entering Tinubu’s residence on Bourdillion Road in Ikoyi, with Tinubu claiming “I keep money anywhere I want”. His so-called BATist know this. But it counts for little.

They also know that this is the same Tinubu, in April 2007, after the general elections, but before the governor-elect Babatunde Fashola had taken office, the Federal Government brought Tinubu before the Code of Conduct Bureau for trial over the alleged illegal operation of 16 separate foreign accounts. His supports and Igbophobes such as Sam Omatseye know this. But it counts for little.

They are familiar with the state capture controversy is Tinubu’s forfeiture of about $460,000 to the United States government in 1993 as a result of a case asserting that the government had “probable cause” to believe Tinubu’s American bank accounts held the proceeds of heroin dealing; reporting showed that Tinubu had served as a bagman for two Chicago heroin dealers in the early 1990s. They know this. But it counts for little.

This is the man they call Jagaban because he dared to spend on himself and his family, and his touts. This is the man who is speaking from both sides of his mouth for maintaining multiple offshore accounts while a governor. This is Tinubu, who claimed he saved Lagos, while Lagosians live at the mercy of an ever rising sea level.

I can excuse those who think that being extravagant is good for the economy because they are looking at how they run their family and personal finances. But no economy works in history by lavishing money. It crumbles the economy.

But this essayist can understand why Tinubu knows that the crowd that adores him will not question him. He is therefore using religion and ethnicity as bait. He is now on a weekly pilgrimage to mosques and states screaming: “E mi lo kan”. It is his turn. Buhari did the same. The Imams, ever opportunistic, see him as a darling. He is trying to push himself as the Muslim candidate of the south and north while his messengers praise the air with sanctimonious screams about Muslim-Muslim ticket. I am sure Adeyinka Grandson will chuckle in his cocoon, especially when he contemplates what he alleges as his sinful romps in hotels.

There is a divide here. He is pushing himself as a southern candidate. His core followers are advancing him as the Muslim candidate. But how do we reconcile the Oduduwa with a Tinubu, who even Grandson, will deny has anything to do with them? Tinubu is taking a Machiavellian attitude to the matter. If Oduduwa impulse will propel him, he will take it. The Oduduwa on board believe Tinubu is their best revenge on the Nigerian state.

But this psychology is nothing new. The private man and public man may not always cohere. In their huts, they are Oduduwa. On the frontlines of battle, they are Tinubu. It is like Mr. Mani in A.B. Yehoshua’s novel who calls himself a Jew but does not believe in Jehovah. He embraces the culture but renounces its mystery. One of 20th century’s top philosophers, Hannah Arendt, obsesses over this schizophrenia in his opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism. The Tinubu followers accept Oduduwa but reject Nigeria. They abandon the mystic of the cause, Sunday Igboho, and have followed Tinubu, its inauthentic saint. It is the pragmatism of the cause. Adeyinka Grandson is the unarmed prophet, sulking behind bars. Tinubu is out in the open, a bird in hand. Machiavelli warned against the unarmed prophet, who fights without power. Elijah was armed against his foes. So was Jesus until he was crucified. They see Tinubu as armed with electoral quest. It is their own version of the Trojan War. Tinubu is the Greek Gift that they will ride in the battle for conquest.

They have now evangelised others from outside the southwest to give a regional legitimacy to their cause. They call themselves Batist but they obey only one call: the sound of the west. Those in north-east have been seduced as by the cooing of Tinubu’s voice as by evangelism of Oduduwa. Mind you, they have not abandoned Grandson and Igboho. But their icon has no power for now. Tinubu is like Herbert Macaulay, Grandson like Benjamin Adekunle. One is a flair, the other a flare.

While Tinubu hops from mosque to states and beclouds the hypocrisy among political Imams, the nation watches as his sectional army taunts and harangues others. But Tinubu will do nothing to restrain his rabble because he knows they are doing a good job in keeping the faithful within their own bubble where they reinforce their own self-delusions. That will last until their last call at the polls. This is not the time to properly interrogate in details the false intimations of Tinubu’s agenda and hypocrisies. But it is safe to say one thing. Before he asiwaju’s out and hurtles towards an electoral Ahmed-geddon, the country knows the content of the crowd and its origin. They are a caterwauling group trying to seduce, without much success, those outside its ethno-religious tent of touting.