By Douglas Anele

Inasmuch as one is not omniscient to know hundred percent the contents of another person’s mind, a reasonable conjecture concerning Bola Tinubu’s volte face or change of mind regarding Muhammadu Buhari’s presidential ambition in 2015 is that it was motivated largely by Machiavellian selfish interests based on a clever but despicable political calculus or quid pro quo.

In other words, Tinubu probably believes that by helping Buhari become President, Buhari would in turn assist him to the same post when he (Buhari) might have completed his tenure -it had absolutely nothing to do with objective assessment of Buhari’s capacity to perform.

To be clear, Buhari, in my opinion, should not have been elected President in 2015 let alone be re-elected four years later because of his fragile health, poor understanding of the imperatives of leading a democratic country, educational level and revanchist parochial Islamist mind-set.

This conclusion is amply justified by his nightmarish tenure as a military dictator which lasted for about twenty months aptly characterised with dripping negative terms by Brigadier Joshua Nimyel Dogonyaro’s speech on August 27, 1985 announcing his removal from office.

Another aspect of Tinubu’s hypocrisy is his ludicrous attempt to project himself as the Awo of contemporary Yoruba politics whereas in actual  fact he is bereft of those intellectual and moral qualities that made Chief Obafemi Awolowo one of the most respected politicians to emerge from Nigeria.

Mimicking Chief Obafemi Awolowo by wearing round-rimmed spectacles and rounded native caps in addition to empowering lackeys in the South-west and elsewhere cannot transform a Tinubu into an Awolowo in a million years. Thus, serious-minded Yoruba should ignore his political sleight-of-hand methods and do something concrete fast to retire him from politics for good.

President Buhari deserves a gold medal for hypocrisy. To begin with, he has always presented the contrived image of a poor man who prefers frugal Spartan lifestyle to sybaritic ostentatiousness,and of a patriot totally committed to One Nigeria. Buhari’s ardent supporters also parade him as an incorruptible man of integrity with zero tolerance for corruption.

Of course, the President is indeed a poor man whose children not only attended expensive universities abroad, his son owned a multi-million naira powerbike. As a candidate vying for the presidency, Buhari promised to reduce drastically the number of aircrafts in the presidential fleet,minimise waste in running the government, and lambasted top government officials for medical tourism abroad instead of improving health facilities at home.

Now as President he seems to have forgotten his promise to run an efficient and prudent administration; his family members fly presidential jet to attend private functions, and he has become the medical tourist-in-chief of Nigeria. Media reports in the last six years indicate that this present government, particularly the presidency and National Assembly, is probably the most wasteful in Nigerian history.

That is not all. When his immediate predecessor, Jonathan, attempted to remove fuel subsidy early 2012, Buhari led the loud chorus of prominent hypocrites in his party (APC) who opposed the move, alleging that it was a ploy by prominent PDPmembers in government to siphon money abroad.

Yet, in the same year while responding to questions from journalists, he pointedly denied the existence of fuel subsidy with the deceptively bold quip, “Who is subsidising who? Since he became President his government has spent much more than those of his predecessors on subsidy. And even after his former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu,announced the removal of fuel subsidy in 2016 which led to increase in the pump price of petrol from N86.50 to N145, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) still sneaked subsidy into the national budget with the dubious label of “under recovery.”

A comparative evaluation of Buhari’s claim that he would fight insecurity and official corruption better than his predecessors vis-à-vis the Hobbesian state of nature spreading across the country and the quantum of corruption attributed to members of his inner circle as President reveals one troubling fact, which is that Buhari and his party deceived Nigerians just to take power from Jonathan without a well thought-out plan for efficient governance.

They succeeded, of course, but success, like everything else in the human world, is always a mixed blessing. As I argued in this column some time ago, had Jonathan won in 2015, hypocritical journalists and members of the elite would have ruefully described Buhari as “the best President Nigeria never had since 1999.” A plausible case can be made that given the undeniable failure of this government in various aspects of our national life, APC’s electoral victory over six years ago marked the beginning of Buhari’s irreversible demystification which has blown his phantom reputation as a Spartan, anti-corruption disciplinarian and man of integrity into smithereens.

Hypocrisy amongst the elite is not restricted to religious and political matters only, it is also manifest in the social domain. Last July, a young Igbo businessman, Obinna Iyiegbu alias Obi Cubana, buried his mother in his hometown, Oba, Anambra State. The ceremony was lavish, ostentatious and trended in the social media for several days.

Expectedly, some commentators posturing as guardians of morality, “class,” and decency in the society scathingly criticised what they saw as crude exhibitionism and glorification of materialism at a time when an increasing number of Nigerians are trapped in the thick mud of poverty and unemployment. Several critics of Iyiegbu and his friends are guilty of the fallacy of hasty generalisation by creating the impression that Ndigbo generally are given to excessive and wasteful noisy display of wealth.

Surely, one can criticise with good reasons loud and extravagant display of opulence at funerals especially during pervasive hardship, but those that expressed one-sided negative views on the lavish burial conveniently forgot that Obi Cubana and most of his associates who attended the event are into entertainment and hospitality business in which razzmatazz, showiness and exhibitionism are deliberate strategies to attract attention and potential customers.

Besides, there might be a whiff of unconscious Igbophobia and selective moral grandstanding in some of the criticism. For instance, Dr. Reuben Abati and other co-anchors of the “Good Morning Show” in Arise Television did not see anything positive in the event and went ballistic with their vaporous indignation as if they have an axe to grind with Cubana and his associates without recognising that many people benefitted from the event at Oba.

Abati, in an opinion essay, compared the Oba phenomenon to the burial of Aigboje Imoukhuede’s mother which took place the same day. He prefers Mrs.Emily Imoukhuede burial attended by the well-heeled members of the establishment because it had “class,” forgetting that “class” in this context is basically an aesthetic term dripping with subjectivity and that several attendees to Mrs. Imoukhuede’s funeral contributed to the impoverishment of Nigerians due to bulimic greed and corruption.

The main thrust of Abati’s riposte and others like it belongs to the category of the establishment’s preference for what one of my colleagues called “responsible hypocrisy,” that is, acting immorally in a covert but “classy” manner. I believe that spending extravagantly to bury a corpse is a waste of time from the perspective of the deceased.

Yet, people are free to do so as long as the expenditure is from their legitimately earned income. That said, whether Cubana’s mother was celebrated by her son before she died or saw the kind of money displayed at her funeral is not anybody’s business.