By Farooq A. Kperogi
The late Muhammadu Buhari wrested power from Goodluck Jonathan in a never-before-seen political upset of an incumbent in Nigeria precisely because of the northern establishment’s strategic coalition with the Southwest political establishment led by Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And Tinubu is president today because of the North’s requital, sort of, for Tinubu’s gesture.
I qualify the requital with “sort of” because Muhammadu Buhari, the chief beneficiary of the coalition, along with a significant number of the cabal that puppeteered him, didn’t want Tinubu to be president. That was the spark for Tinubu’s famously impassioned “Emi lo kan” speech in Abeokuta.
However, northern governors’ collective, full-throated, unambiguous support for Tinubu and denunciation of Buhari and his cabal with the slogan “The North remembers” compensated for Buhari’s treachery. Plus, 63.6 percent of Tinubu’s 8,805,420 votes came from the North.
That is now beside the point. Since becoming president, Tinubu has governed as if only the Southwest voted him into power, or as if the 25.9 percent of the votes he got from there is more significant than the 63.6 percent he got from the North.
I have pointed out in several past columns that Tinubu hasn’t been able to transcend his Lagos-centric and Yoruba provincialism. That’s why he still rules as if he were the governor of Lagos and not the president of Nigeria.
Tinubu is, in many ways, worse than Muhammadu Buhari, who held the record as the most narrow-minded and provincial president Nigeria ever had. In spite of Buhari’s manifest preference for northern Muslims across different ethnic groups, which I characterized in past columns as “undisguised Arewacentricity,” he ceded some power to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and left control of the economy to the Southwest.
Buhari formally transferred presidential powers to Osinbajo at least five times in his first term, if we count every Section 145 handover in which Osinbajo was to perform presidential functions or serve in an acting capacity while Buhari was outside Nigeria.
I am aware that some people count only three because they focus on the longer or more politically consequential acting-presidency periods, especially June 2016, January-March 2017 and May-August 2017, but the wider point is that Buhari trusted a Yoruba man enough to transfer power to him on many occasions.
By contrast, Vice President Kashim Shettima appears to have been marginalized in Tinubu’s presidency. Despite Tinubu’s frequent health-related trips to France, he has never transferred power to Shettima, even for a day. Instead, he seems to time his returns to Nigeria just early enough to avoid the constitutional requirement to hand over power, only to leave for France again a few days later.
Major economic and financial levers of government were held by southern figures, including Southwesterners. Osinbajo coordinated the economic team, Godwin Emefiele controlled monetary policy, Kemi Adeosun headed Finance until she resigned over the NYSC certificate forgery scandal, Babatunde Fowler ran FIRS, Udo Udoma led Budget and National Planning, Okechukwu Enelamah ran Trade and Investment and Ben Akabueze ran the Budget Office.
By contrast, under Tinubu, even the constitutionally recognized economic role of the vice president appears to have been hollowed out. Kashim Shettima may chair the National Economic Council on paper, but the commanding heights of economic policy are firmly in the hands of Tinubu’s Southwestern circle, leading to the increasingly plausible joke that Nigeria’s economic fate can now be decided entirely in Yoruba.
It used to be said that the only truly powerful and influential northerner in Tinubu’s administration was National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu. He appeared to enjoy Tinubu’s confidence to a degree that went beyond the normal.
But with the duplicative appointment of retired Major General Adeyinka Famadewa, from Osun State, as Special Adviser to the President on Home Security, there is a widespread feeling in the North that Tinubu has finally purged the last vestige of northern influence in his government.
There are many reasons for this perception. First, home security is a subset of national security, and no past government has ever seen the need to establish a separate office for a Special Adviser on Home Security.
In any case, the National Security Adviser is a constitutionally recognized office in the presidency and is part of the National Security Council, which advises the president on public security and agencies created for the security of the federation. It is responsible for the “leadership, management and capacity development” of Nigeria’s security architecture.
It’s hard to justify the creation of the office of SA on Home Security to focus on terrorism inside Nigeria, banditry, border vulnerabilities, intelligence coordination, critical infrastructure protection and inter-agency response when Nigeria already has the NSA, the Ministry of Interior, the DSS, the police, the military, the NSCDC, the Immigration Service and the National Counter-Terrorism Centre under ONSA.
The Ministry of Interior’s own mandate includes internal security and related services, while the NCTC is already housed in ONSA to coordinate counterterrorism efforts.
Second, Famadewa worked as the principal general staff officer to the NSA during the Buhari administration from 2015 to 2021, where he established the Intelligence Fusion Centre. The skills, experience and associational capital he is bringing to his new job as SA on Home Security are all derived from ONSA.
In other words, without being clearly subordinate to, or carefully coordinated with, the NSA and limited to domestic-security implementation, he is merely a Yoruba NSA. At least that’s what it comes across as.
