Yemi Osinbajo, a professor of law, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and Nigeria’ Vice President turned 65 last week, precisely on March 8. He was born on International Women’s Day (IWD). And, hey, he’s at home with women. Married to beautiful Dolapo (née Soyode) Osinbajo, a granddaughter of the legend, Pa Obafemi Awolowo; and proud father of two daughters and a son, Osinbajo is truly the ladies’ man.
But we do not celebrate him for sharing same memorial date with women. By the way, IWD took its origin first in the US in 1908 and later assumed revolutionary momentum in Russia in 1917. It has become a global memorial to draw global attention to the plight of women as well as to celebrate them for their invaluable contributions to humanity. And women have done a lot. From being the vehicle for procreation and sustenance of the human species, to medicine, leadership, space science, technology, politics, entertainment, and others, the clock of humanity would long have stopped ticking but for women. They deserve all the applause.
And so, does Osinbajo. For hitting the 65th floor on the tower of life and in good health. That’s God’s grace. For that, he deserves all the confetti and banquets. But for this writer, there is a deeper essence why we should celebrate Osinbajo. It’s for what he represents at these times and what he is capable of representing in the years ahead.
At 65, Osinbajo is a cross of the young and the old. A bridge between two worlds. For someone who became a law lecturer at the University of Lagos, at age 23, he also packs experience. Duty and workplace experience. As deputy to President Muhammadu Buhari at such a time as this when the nation’s economy is most challenged, his experience in commercial law, in business development, international law and administration as well as human capital management should count. Or indeed, ought to count. And that is the essence of this article: to canvass a wider berth and more active participation for Osinbajo in the twilight of the Buhari administration.
Any ombudsman on the Nigerian public space cannot help but feel sorry for this country. Whereas Nigerians had cried ‘away with corruption’ under the 16 years of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which from available indices was a party that frolicked with corruption and in some cases romanced with crass incompetence, the current Buhari government is not only frolicking with corruption, it simply assumed the dour colour of corruption and morphed fully into a fully formed motif of graft.
But this was never the intendment of Buhari. When he declared war against corruption at his inauguration in 2015 in line with his campaign promise, he did not factor his ill-health and his now obvious ignorance of the dynamics of governance in a democracy. He did not reckon with the fact that this is not the military era when one man could issue decrees and everything would fall in place. He underestimated the situation. The result is the thieving bazaar that attends his government, which trickled down to the states and local governments. President Buhari simply did not correctly read the dashboard of power. He failed to understand that the Supreme Military Council (SMC) which he headed under military rule is not the same, in content and form, as the Federal Executive Council (FEC) in a democracy. Command and control was easier in the SMC. It’s not possible within the FEC, especially with a legislature birdwatching every step of the Executive.
The net effect? Despite Buhari’s good intentions, he was always on the fall each time he attempted a kick. His personal aides and cabinet members, some of them plain selfish crooks who ought to be in jail (quoting Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a man who himself still owes Nigerians some explanations on how he managed the rain of petro-dollars during his eight years in power) simply took advantage of Buhari’s old age and ill-health to design and implement their own templates of leadership deeply marinated with the condiments of greed and corruption.
Our Buhari is old and weak. He admitted as much. Nigeria is just crawling out of the hell-hole of fuel scarcity (diesel, petrol, aviation fuel etc). The case of petrol was because some persons, knowing that nothing will happen to them, decided to import adulterated petrol mixed with abnormal volume of methanol. As you read this, nothing has happened. Those in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the entire value chain of petroleum products importation are still keeping their jobs. No contrition from the syndicate of criminals. No punishment from higher authorities. It’s all in a day’s job. It’s just normal for the abnormal to happen. I wager that Buhari does not even understand the hardship his citizens have had to face these past weeks.
Just another example: over 45 million bank accounts with deposits in excess of N1.2 trillion have no Bank Verification Number (BVN) attached to them in 2022, a good eight years after BVN was introduced by the Goodluck Jonathan administration in 2014. Till this day, we’re still dancing round those accounts. A responsive government should have frozen those accounts and the money used to execute special projects, especially infrastructure. A Buhari of the military regime would long have acted. But here we are, begging and pleading with obvious criminals to do what is lawful. Some Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) are even reported to be hoarding huge cash in some banks which they have refused to remit to the Treasury Single Account (TSA). The Buhari government is replete with many such abuses. And sadly, the President may not be aware of them.
This is why he needs to get Osinbajo more involved. Give him the economy to run in an executive capacity, not advisory. Osinbajo is a democrat. That’s a given. But he does not permit the democratization of criminality, brigandage and lawlessness. He has proven that if given the opportunity, he can lead and lead well. He did it in August, 2018 when he was officially the Acting President. He sacked the Director-General of DSS, Lawal Daura, a kinsman of President Buhari after masked personnel from the DSS barricaded the National Assembly, preventing lawmakers, staff and journalists from accessing the complex; an action many interpreted as a coup. Osinbajo did not only restore order in the polity, he also gave a booster jab to the naira and it improved in value against the dollar. During that small window, Nigerians felt leadership.
If Buhari wants to finish strong, he would need to engage Osinbajo more actively, including giving him the power to institute a culture of probity in the Executive. And if Nigerians want a better tomorrow, they must begin to think Osinbajo at such a time as this. He knows the way and he has the skills-set to drive the vehicle of nationhood. As they say in Nigerian Pidgin English parlance: Follow man wey sabi road, meaning: Follow the man who knows the way. Osinbajo is a man that knows the way. Plus, he has both the courage and intellect to lead the people through that way: the road to greatness.