BY OCHEREOME NNANNA
A popular legend has it that some leaders are born, while others are made. Those born to lead already have their place of privilege reserved just for them at the top the moment they breathe their first lungful of air at birth. Prince William knows that one day, everything being equal, he will be King of England.

Leaders who are made are in two categories. There are those who have leadership thrust on their laps by sheer acts of fate or providence, such that even they do not know how they come by it. President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan is a principal example of this.

There are others who plot their way to the top from the scratch, building block-by-block , often from humble beginnings. Many of our legendary nationalists, such as the Great Zik of Africa, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe; Chief Obafemi Awolowo, former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida and others, belong here.

Weighing into this charmed circle as Vanguard Newspaper’s second choice for Man-of-the-year 2010 is Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu, the democratically elected Governor of Lagos State (1999 – 2007) and leader of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), now Nigeria’s second largest political party and the most ascendant one as we bend into the 2011 electoral season. He lost the first place as Vanguard Board of Editors choice by only a very slim margin.

Tinubu is truly the foremost political figure of our nascent democracy, which was re-launched in 1999. He is the only politician who can call a meeting of his political party and four state governors, Mr Babatunde Raji Fashola of Lagos (SAN), Comrade Adams Oshiomhole of Edo, Dr Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti and Engineer Rauf Aregbesola of Osun, will turn up because the Leader wants them to drop everything and attend.

Today, most watchers of the politics of South Western Nigeria reckon that the two states in the zone still outside the reach of Tinubu – Ogun and Oyo States – which are still in the grip of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP), will likely join the fold after the elections of April 2011, especially as the prospects for a more credible election are brighter now than previously.

The people of Ondo State may not feel the need to join the bandwagon. Dr Olusegun Mimiko’s Labour Party (LP) is in charge there and will always enjoy partnership with the ACN. Tinubu has successfully snatched the zone from Obasanjo, who used crude executive powers of incumbency to give himself a strong home base during his eight years as the President of Nigeria.

Having temporarily lent the zone to their son, it would appear that the Yoruba mainstream wants to return to familiar turf as “progressives”, what with an able political engineer in the person of Bola Tinubu providing the needed leadership.

Tinubu’s political sagacity can be seen in the fact that he did not have any known roots with a previous political godfather or mentor or platform. Unlike people such as Alhaji Lateef Jakande and Chief Ebenezer Babatope, Tinubu was not a close disciple of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, though it is quite evidnet that he was inspired by Awo’s leadership style and mission in politics. Unlike his peers who came into prominence in the thick of military rule and became godsons of top military officers, Tinubu identified, from day one, with the orthodox political culture of the South West.

When he quit his job at Mobil and hit the campaign trail en route to the Senate to represent  the largest senatorial district of the state (Lagos West) in 1992 he announced: “I do not intend to lose this election”! That has been his story every since. He has never lost any election in Lagos. He weathered every antic spruced up during Obasanjo’s days at the Presidency, when the battle to “capture” Lagos was like a military challenge to Obasanjo.

Tinubu’s greatest political challenge came in 2003 when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) website briefly posted the name of his main challenger, PDP’s Engineer Funsho Williams, as the winner of the governorship poll before the Commission apparently changed its mind and gave the official victory to Tinubu. This, and Tinubu’s ability to impose his chosen candidate, Fashola, on his then fledgling Action Congress (AC) and get him elected as governor, were proofs positive that this man had more than the average politician when it came to playing the powe
r game at the hot button level.

Having secured Lagos, Tinubu was able to shake off what appeared like a mild rebellion by Fashola, who was initially goaded by his own supporters to toe the general trend in other states and shove the godfather, the Asiwaju. Today, Fashola has been “tamed” to mind his business as a governor and move on thereafter. Tinubu also funded the election of Oshiomhole, Fayemi, and his former Commissioner for Works, Aregbesola. He not only provided the financial support for their battles at the Electoral Tribunal till the very end he also gave them the necessary moral backing usually required of a leader.

Tinubu towers over his peers. All those he started politics at the same level are now his followers. For example, in Lagos, he went to the Senate with Senator Tokunbo Afikuyomi, who later on had to return to Lagos as a Commissioner under his leadership. Before Tinubu entered the political fray, the star of Alhaji Ademola Adeniji-Adele was already shining brightly as he was being touted as the next elected governor of Lagos way back in the early 1990’s. Adele later ended up in Tinubu’s cabinet as a commissioner.

As governor of Lagos, he had others, such as Olusegun Osoba of Ogun, Lamidi Adesina of Oyo, Niyi Adebayo of Ekiti, Bisi Akande of Osun and late Adebayo Adefarati of Ondo States as peers in the Alliance for Democracy (AD), the party that emerged from the activities of the defunct National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) and seized power in the South West in 1999. Today, Tinubu has become their leader in the ACN, even though they had refused to accept his plots to lead the party in the early 2000’s.

What made the big difference between him and his fellow AD governors was that while the others compromised their political party’s principles on the altar of ethnic solidarity to back up Obasanjo (which gave the latter the opening to dismantle the Awoists and create a home base for himself in the zone) Tinubu saw through Obasanjo’s ruse and dumped the AD for the nascent Advanced Congress of Democrats (ACD). Thus started the war of attrition between him and Obasanjo, which led the then president to freeze Lagos State local government funds and create a quasi-militia within the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) to checkmate every effort of the Tinubu administration in Lagos State.

Tinubu took on Obasanjo’s forces and came out with landslide victories such that today, the PDP seems to have almost given up on the state. With the South Western part of the country well within his grasp, Tinubu has become a major stakeholder in the larger Nigerian politics. No president can go into any major scheme without consulting him. Even if he does not run for president in the near future, Tinubu has nurtured a political platform that may help in redefining the balance of power and conventional wisdom in power sharing in Nigeria. His family name is a famous fixation in Nigeria’s ancient history when it comes to the Lagos aspect of it. Bola has made the name famous in the modern chapter of Nigeria’s history.

His political family is about the only one that has enjoyed genuine continuity, building on the vision and the foundation put in place by the Tinubu administration to the one of steady actualisation which is unfolding under Governor Fashola, whereby Lagos is being ambitiously remodelled into a modern mega-polis befitting an emerging 21st Century economy.

Born in Lagos on March 29th 1952, Bola Tinubu was educated at the Richard Daley College, Chicago, Illinois State in the USA, where he graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. When he returned to Nigeria with a rich working experience in Financial Management, he joined Mobil Producing Nigeria as an Auditor and retired in 1992 as the company’s Treasurer.

Nigerians are likely to see more of Tinubu, playing, initially as the new towering figure in South West politics and, may be, as one of the hands that will shape the future of politics and leadership in Nigeria and beyond in the years ahead.