Tinubu, Bode George and conciliation

 

AFTER notable Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leader and former Ondo State governor, Bode George, threatened to go on exile should President-elect Bola Tinubu win the presidential poll, few people expected there would be any kind of conciliation soon after the polls or days to the swearing-in ceremony. But instead of setting a date for his self-proclaimed exile, Lagos woke up last week to news of some All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders visiting Chief George to broker peace between him and the president-elect. In the delegation were Tajudeen Olusi, a prince and head of the Lagos Governance Advisory Council (GAC); Ishola Olorunnimbe, a former judge; Adejoke Adefulire, a special assistant to the president; and Sen Kofoworola Bucknor-Akerele. The delegation made a huge impression on Chief George, but it is unclear they thawed the ice.

The former Ondo governor has been a strident critic of the president-elect, and has sustained the fusillade since the Supreme Court quashed his conviction over alleged corruption during his time as Chairman of the Nigeria Port Authority (NPA). He had seized every opportunity, reasonable or otherwise, to attack Asiwaju Tinubu since then. He kept up the tirade all through the election period, strafing and bombing the president-elect with all verbal cannons he could lay his hands on. Since he is fecund in the use of language, and boasts some learning, it has not been difficult for him to assail the president-elect with incomparable effusions. 

He slashed Asiwaju Tinubu before last year’s APC primary, lacerated him before the elections, skewered him during the polls, and concluded that there was no way the former Lagos governor could win. Mystified that the president-elect still won, and suddenly aware of the cost of fulfilling his threat to go on exile, Chief George has begun to hem and haw. Instead of his unequivocal statement to leave the country should Asiwaju Tinubu win the presidential poll, an outcome that initially seemed so far-fetched that it made political pundits refuse to hedge their bets, Chief George immediately began qualifying his threat. 

The president-elect had not won yet, he groaned. The threat to go on exile, he explained curiously, was contingent upon the winner being sworn in. When he gave wing to this mystifying explanation, there was already a groundswell of activities promoted by former president Olusegun Obasanjo and many others in the Labour Party (LP) and the PDP to launch street protests intent on undermining both the poll results and swearing-in. And when it finally dawned on him and other agitators that the swearing-in could not be abrogated, Chief George has been at sixes and sevens.

The Prince Olusi team of peacemakers, it appears, is a reprieve for Chief George. No one has come out clearly to say whose bright idea it was to find a common ground between the cantankerous Chief George and the long-suffering Asiwaju Tinubu, nor who is being reprieved, the malignant attacker or the benign victim. But characteristically, the former NPA chairman and PDP leader has spoken tentatively about the prospect for peace between him and the president-elect, a prospect his visitors and himself had equated with peace in Lagos. The Olusi team, which Chief George admitted he respected so much, leaned on their host to congratulate the president-elect to signpost an end to skirmishes. He demurred, naturally, perhaps not to be seen as being too eager to make peace or desperate to seek an escape route from his self-inflicted wounds. He would respect the president-elect as Nigeria’s president after the courts had declare him legitimately elected, 

Chief George said. He was careful to avoid committing to himself.    Unexpectedly, reported the social media, which Chief George is yet to corroborate, the former NPA chairman’s wife threw a spanner in the works when she announced that she would resist any attempt by her husband to congratulate the president-elect. Clearly, if the statement attributed to her is true, the old animosities have remained unaffected by any peace moves, and they clearly run far deeper than anyone supposes. Regaining his wits too, Chief George himself was quoted on social media as saying that his children were unimpressed by any attempt to make him congratulate the president-elect, regardless of what the courts say. The PDP leader is thus perched precariously on the horns of a dilemma. He may respect those who had tried to reconcile him and Asiwaju Tinubu, and may even be at bottom desirous of ending more than a decade of animosity, but he seems surrounded by hawks adamantly opposed to any rapprochement. How would he walk the tightrope in the weeks and months ahead?      There is on the one hand the option of making peace with the president-elect and on the basis of a favourable court decision congratulating him; but there is also on the other hand the noxious option of swallowing his pride and heading for exile to honour his word spoken in a moment of rash and radical posturing and expectation. Neither option, it seems, is really pleasant. Both are galling. But he will have to embrace one, even if it kills him, since he can’t have his cake and eat it. Compared to his dilemma, the Greeks would fare far better sailing between Scylla and Charybdis than Chief George would do opting for an alternative.

The only honour evident so far in the noisome transaction between the APC leaders and Chief George is that no one can say unequivocally that the peacemaking was at the behest of Asiwaju Tinubu or Chief George. Indeed, Prince Olusi and his team admit responsibility. At the moment, there is, however, nothing to suggest that Chief George is eager to leave the country; he made his rash exile statement at a point when, all things considered, nothing indicated, except to the most sanguine, that Asiwaju Tinubu would win the presidential poll. But having made the statement, and poised to be hoisted with his own petard, the eminent Lagosian and PDP leader may in the end issue an anodyne statement neither congratulating the president-elect after the court processes nor suggesting he intended the rhetorical war to continue. It is unlikely that in his twilight years as an active PDP leader and politician, the opposition party will give him cause to declare or prosecute any kind of bullish war against President Tinubu. This may sound like defeat to him and his supporters, but his future reticence, if not lethargy, may be the only compromise he is capable of making to stave off exile and humiliation.