What do Nigerians do with the Tinubu documentary? -By Abimbola Adelakun

In January, a documentary about the All Progressives Congress’ presidential candidate, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) aired on a private television station, the African Independent Television. Since it surfaced weeks before the elections, it was obviously calibrated to destroy his image before the voting public.

If it were possible, I would have demanded a refund of my time from the producers because the material turned out to be vapid. It was a waste of resources and facts of history; a half-hearted effort by someone who could not wait to be paid.

The producers were so lazy they could not even search for concrete evidence but relied primarily on secondary sources. Since the documentarists are likely working for the incumbent government, what stops them from raiding official files to expose hitherto unknown yet damaging facts about Buhari? Bland as diet soda, “The Real Buhari” said nothing new and could not even repeat his old things with gusto.

Now, they – the same faceless documentarists and the AIT – have found another moving target and that is the former governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu. They woke up from their Rip Van Winkle sleep to share an amazing piece of information: That Tinubu is corrupt!

It is funny Tinubu is threatening to sue them for N20bn. No, he should be paying them because from the very rhetoric employed to narrate the stories of his alleged corruption, to the facts presented, the entire package is a lionisation of the man and his politico-economic activities. They even juxtaposed him with Roman emperors and described him as the “biggest landlord in Nigeria.” Such a deployment of language is not as damaging as it is a valorisation and celebration of an individual – without the benefit of state invested powers – who runs through a loose system and leaves the actual holders of political power reeling and wondering what hit them.

We know this is all about the coming elections. It cannot be otherwise because Tinubu has been walking free for years, without fear of being pursued for all he is accused of. This effort is clearly not about social justice; this is not the pursuit of the cause of democracy; nor about purging the intestines of our society of destructive corruption. No, this is an attempt to shift public opinion of the man who personifies his party. We know he is Buhari’s main backer and if the Buhari documentary has failed to slow down his momentum, the next sensible thing is to remove the stick that props him.

Unlike “The Real Buhari”, however, I have a different reaction to the documentary on Tinubu – titled, “The Lion of Bourdillon”, because this is an accusation about an offence that charges at the very soul of our society. The documentary on Tinubu is not an incoherent account of a dictator’s unsavoury past; it is about the present and of course, the future. This is about – if the facts in the documentary were true – an individual’s expansionist tendencies which should not be overlooked simply because we want to send an inept government packing.

I have some questions for the makers and sponsors of this documentary: What should Nigerians do with the Tinubu documentary? What action are they trying to stimulate from the populace? Do they want us to carry placards and march on the Third Mainland Bridge? Or like ancient Jews, tear our clothes and pour ashes on our heads? Or simply reject him and his candidate at the polls? If we take the last path and vote out the APC, so what? What does that singular action translate to for our democracy in the grand scheme of things?

My point is the man has been out of power for almost eight years now. He has no constitutional immunity that prevents him from being interrogated by the law enforcement agents and if he is corrupt (or is merely stealing!), he should by now have been arrested, prosecuted and, imprisoned if convicted. If the state cannot use the instruments of democratic processes to curtail him, why transfer that responsibility to the public? The documentary even lamented that it is a “mystery” how he has been able to colonise Lagos and “hold down everybody’s dreams.” Precisely, what stops the Police, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the courts from unravelling this “mystery” since this is why they are being paid to exist? Unless of course they are arguing that the man uses supernatural power to blind Lady Justice to his activities.

Let’s not forget, in 2011, Tinubu faced the Code of Conduct Tribunal and none of the charges against him stuck. I remember seeing pictures of him in court acting “cool” over the whole mess. Three governors in his party, then Action Congress of Nigeria, travelled to Abuja to lend him moral support. I recall seeing the governor of my state among the “owambe” lot, laughing heartedly as if it was his daughter’s wedding day. Something died inside me that day. I interrogated myself over why a similar outrage when Bode George – who, in the mother of ironies, had a cameo appearance in the documentary – turned his court trial into a carnival. We all pontificated about the “Aso Ebi” wearing crowd as a metaphor for collective societal failing that allowed such communal display of defiance of socio-cultural mores. The preachers and puritans who wrote tomes lambasting George quietly looked away when it got to Tinubu’s turn. Why, I wondered, is the concept of morality so notoriously fickle and subject to negotiation when we switch personalities but leave the context intact?

Well, Tinubu walked free from that pretend trial in 2011 leaving some of us wondering whether the whole affair was not a charade staged to exonerate the man from his obsessed accusers; a staged “Thank you” for delivering his constituency during the year’s elections.

Now, a question for the “faceless” documentarists: If Tinubu is guilty of any crime, why not subject him to legal processes? That, in case they are unaware, is what democratic processes recommend. They are not supposed to join the masses to lament one man “holding down everybody’s dream.”

Let me state this point to the Peoples Democratic Party- and those who are using the documentary to publicly prosecute Tinubu. There is a description for that kind of behaviour: Impotence. If the man is truly guilty of the crimes they have tagged him with and they refuse to use the law to deal with him, but instead chose to hide behind silly documentaries, then they are testifying both to his invincibility and to their administrative incompetence that allows corruption to become a phenomenon. I am not sure that is a prudent move on their part.

By the way, the speed with which they come up with these documentaries is amazing considering that they have not even been able to produce a manifesto of what Nigeria stands to gain if the PDP is re-elected. It should be a scandal but shame died for them a long time ago.