Dino Melaye, a disgrace to the Senate - Tinubu

Vanguard, THURSDAY, JULY 14, , 2016 –31
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Osinbajo commits
political apostasy
VICE President Yemi Osinbajo
has lived the life of the quintessential
vice president in the past
14 months of his emergence.
There is an old American anecdote
that portrays the Vice Presidency
as a particularly “irrelevant”
post in a presidential democracy.
It tells of how one Unlce
Tom “lost” two of his sons: “one
joined the Navy, the other became
the Vice President”.
Perhaps, that is American sarcasm
taken too far. In Nigeria,
the Vice President is important
for three major reasons. He is the
Second Citizen and constitutionally
empowered to act as the
Chairman of the National Economic
Council, NEC. Apart from
acting for the President whenever
the latter is not available, he also
carries out many assignments
given him by his boss, especially
if he enjoys the President’s confidence.
But most importantly,
though he acts the role of a "spare
tyre” most of the time, he becomes
President when the occupant of
that position becomes permanently
unavailable, as we saw in
the case of Dr Goodluck
Jonathan, former Vice President
to the late President Umaru Yar’
Adua.
Like all the Vice Presidents our
presidential democracy has produced,
Osinbajo boasts intimidating
academic and public service
credentials (dwarfed only by Dr
Alex Ekwueme’s multiple doctorates
and professional accomplishments).
Indeed, our Vice Presidents
(except, perhaps, Atiku
Abubakar and Namadi Sambo)
have tended to be academic
Brobdingnagians but political
Lilliputians compared to their
principals. Of the lot, Osinbajo
towers over Buhari many times
over: while the authenticity of
President Muhammadu Buhari’s
School Certificate (with which he
joined the Army to rise to the rank
of Major General and Head of
State) remains in doubt, Osinbajo
is a Professor of Law and an epoch-making
former Attorney-
General of Lagos State during the
tenure of Chief Ahmed Bola
Tinubu as governor.
When Tinubu submitted his
name to Buhari, the presidential
candidate of the upstart All
Progressives Congress, APC, as
running mate in 2014, the party’s
famous (or infamous) propaganda
machinery was immediately
deployed in his favour.
Osinbajo’s position as a pastor of
the Redeemed Christian Church
of God, RCCG, was tweaked and
burnished to prove that Buhari
who accepted him as his VP was
not a religious extremist. It is up
to you whether Buhari has proved
his critics wrong after 14 months
as President.
Again, Osinbajo’s wife, Dolapo,
is a grandchild of the Father of
South West politics, Chief
Obafemi Awolowo. As soon as he
was picked as Buhari’s VP,
Osinbajo, accompanied by top
How could Awoism
be accommodated by
Buhari’s reactionary
Caliphate fundamentalism
(Fulani/
Muslim/Arewa-centric
interests) which
favours the
centralised Federalism
that the military
foisted on the nation?
APC chieftains, went to his
mother in-law, Chief HID
Awolowo’s residence in Ikenne,
Ogun State, for blessings which
he abundantly got. And to fit into
the part of carrying the Awo imagery
with him to Abuja, Osinbajo
has also been wearing the type of
cap popularised by Chief
Awolowo.
It is another story whether
Osinbajo has lived up to the pretensions
he and Buhari wore like
ceremonial robes during the electioneering
days. As a pastor, he
has not shrunk from the lies often
associated with many of the APC
chieftains and figures in its Federal
Government, all aimed at
demonising the former ruling
party, the Peoples Democratic
Party, PDP. For instance, Osinbajo
openly lied that the regimes of
Yar’ Adua and Jonathan never
built “a single road”. And he
made this false claim at a pastors
and leaders retreat of the Fountain
of Life Church, Ilupeju, Lagos
on February 26, 2016. The truth
is that the Jonathan regime
constructed roads in all the six
geopolitical zones, including the
beginning of the total reconstruction
and widening of the Lagos-
Ibadan and Apapa-Oshodi
Expressways. What a place and
occasion to peddle faslehood so
brazenly!
Osinbajo has, again, trounced
the legacies of the Awolowo vision
and philosophy which he leveraged
on to get the votes of the
South West electorate by saying
that Nigeria does not need to restructure
in order to move forward.
In a lecture at the Elizade
University, Ilara-Mokin, Ondo
State, on Saturday July 9, 2016,
Osinbajo declared that Nigeria
needs the diversification of her
economy, not restructuring, to
move forward. He was obviously
responding to calls by APC chiefs,
former Vice President Atiku
Abubakar, Governor Akinwunmi
Abode and some regional leaders
of the South East, South-
South and South West who echoed
the call for true federalism and
restructuring as the only way to
make Nigeria work.
This is a clear political apostasy
for a political leader whose core
political platform climbed on the
back of Awoism to buy over the
South West electorate. The leader
of Osinbajo’s faction of the APC,
Tinubu, won the governorship of
Lagos State and maintained his
hold on it till date by posturing as
a neo-Awoist. He even wears the
Awo trade mark cap and round
lenses. Tinubu successfully fought
off rampaging President
Olusegun Obasanjo’s quest to
“capture” Lagos because he
firmly rooted his resistance on
Awoist rhetoric.
Again, the Tinubu wing of the
APC, which was the arrowhead of
the Buhari Presidential Campaign
Organisation, promised the
restructuring of the country as
one of the programmes an APC
Federal Government under
Buhari would immediately implement
on assuming power. However,
observers (including yours
sincerely) wondered how oil and
water could mix. How could
Awoism be accommodated by
Buhari’s reactionary Caliphate
fundamentalism (Fulani/Muslim/Arewa-centric
interests)
which favours the centralised
Federalism that the military
foisted on the nation?
At what point would Tinubu and
his group begin to pressure
Buhari to implement true federalism
to prove that, indeed, APC
was a properly negotiated political
marriage? I have posed this
question several times in the past
one year. Tinubu’s camp remained
mute, though Governor
Ambode spoke out for it recently.
The APC appears confused on this
matter, as everybody is speaking
discordant tunes.
But Osinbajo’s unsolicited disavowal
of restructuring and true
federalism, and his trumpeting of
mere “diversification” of the
economy appears to have made
it clear that the Tinubu political
group has abandoned Awoism in
order to be accommodated within
Buhari’s Caliphate presidential
dispensation.
It is a sellout, and we have taken
note. One more promise has been
broken. Next item?
FRSC, crying more than the
bereaved?
THIS piece begins with a testimony
titled, “The many tyres I have seen”.
Events leading to the testimony span over
a 37-year period during which I owned
many cars, in good times and in bad.
I had some terrible ordeal with my car
tyres that space will not permit full
narration. The FIAT, Land Rover and the
Peugeot 504 Saloon, all came at a time
when tyres were the scarcest of all the
essential commodities of that era. People
knew a pregnant tyre when they saw one.
We made friends with virtually all the
vulcanizers in town as we were dealing at
the critical level of condemned tyres.
In my Honda Prelude, a journey from
Benin City to Lagos, which ordinarily took
about three hours at the time, took two
full days. Between Okada Junction and
Ijebu-Mushin, a distance of some 70
kilometres, I experienced four tyre bursts,
with the last burst occurring at Ijebu-
Mushin around 7.30 p.m., when
vulcanizers had closed for the day.
I slept in the car on the roadside till the
following morning when I went to Ijebu-
Ode to buy another fairly condemned tyre
to continue my journey.
This type of journey would have been
undertaken in public transportation but I
was relocating to Lagos after politics
collapsed during the June 12, 1993
debacle.
The relocation eventually paid off. The
Lagos pastures became greener than one
expected. Cars and tyres were no longer
problems. When issues arose, I had a
choice between changing the car and
changing its entire tyres. Affordability was
no longer an issue.
The only time I had a near-fatal accident
was under “the good tyres regime”. It
occurred on the Benin-Agbor Highway
after a heavy downpour when I ran into a
deep pothole and lost a front tyre, a rim, a
gearbox and other vital accessories. Many
have perished even from smaller accidents
but I emerged unscratched. TO GOD BE
THE GLORY. [End of Testimony]
What we find here is a paradox – bad
tyres don’t kill but good ones do. And so
paradoxically did former President
Goodluck Jonathan once assert that bad
roads don‘t cause accidents but good roads
do. The logic is simple: The latter cases
provide opportunity for the motorist to
press down the throttle. Much as
Jonathan’s stance might have been largely
No one in his right
senses would prefer
expired tyres to the
unexpired ones where he
can afford the latter; last
September, I spent about
N80,000, including fixing
charges, in changing the
five tyres of my car
escapist, our only stipulation here is that
bad tyres are not the sole causes of road
accidents. It is speed that kills. Campaign
against over-speeding must be sustained.
Suddenly, the Federal Road Safety
Commission, FRSC, is coming up with a
policy of NO EXPIRED TYRES on our
roads. FRSC is currently engaged in an
intensive sensitization of motorists on the
dangers of expired tyres. We hear they will
soon begin to impound vehicles with
expired tyres only to release them after due
remediation.
Undoubtedly,
FRSC means
well. Everyone
knows the
importance of
tyres as the only
contact that
vehicles have
with the roads.
No one in his
right senses
would prefer expired tyres to the unexpired
ones where he can afford the latter. Last
September, I spent about N80,000,
including fixing charges, in changing the
five tyres of my car. How many motorists
can afford that in this distressed economy?
And if it costs this much to change the tyres
of a car, how much would we expect to pay
for tyres on commercial buses, trailers
and other heavy-duty vehicles?
Times are hard. It does not take any
advance psychology to see that there is no
conviction even on the faces of the FRSC
officials engaged in the sensitization
exercise because they know what things
look like out there. In all conscience, how
many of them with cars can beat their chest
that all their tyres are unexpired?
Again, because of systems failure, the two
major tyre manufacturing companies we
once had in Nigeria – Dunlop and
Michelin – have virtually closed shop and
moved to friendlier environments. And
that’s how Nigeria has since become a
dumping ground for all sorts of
condemned and expired tyres.
Evidently, every expired product is bad.
There is no doubt that expired drugs and
expired food items are more dangerous
than expired tyres. Yet, in its wisdom,
NAFDAC goes after the manufacturers of,
and dealers on, fake and adulterated
products. Why is the FRSC now shifting
the onus to the motorist instead of facing
the importers of, and dealers on, expired
tyres? We are yet to see anyone arrested
for buying fake drugs. Why, then, must the
motorist be punished for buying expired
tyres?
Why is the FRSC crying more than the
bereaved? Whose life is the Commission
really protecting? We cannot remember
when the motorist lost his right to selfdetermination.
Even assuming that
expired tyres are instant killers (and they
are not!); if a coherent and understanding
adult chooses to die through expired tyres,
who are we to insist that he must continue
to live against his will?
Elliot Slater is essentially right in
maintaining that: “A man’s life is his own
and if we say it is not, we are saying that he
is a slave and not a free man. Slavery is
still slavery even when it is the near and
dear ones who are the slave masters”.
Nothing in the foregoing should be
misconstrued as our total surrender to
condemned and expired tyres. FRSC must
continue its campaign on the dangers of
bad tyres. Their role should, however, not
go beyond this advisory level. They must
stop over-regulating the poor!
Government must resist the urge to
continue to make obnoxious laws that are
insensitive to the plight of the people; and
laws that are clearly unenforceable
besides their propensity to provide
veritable avenues for bribe collection by
overzealous enforcers.
If all vehicles with expired tyres were to
be impounded, FRSC would be virtually
left with no time for thorough safety checks
on other parts; and we would have to
devote a substantial part of our annual
budgets to providing parking lots for
impounded vehicles. Is that what we want?
C
M
Y
K