Tinubu and the North

In the aftermath of the Kaduna rally, the Atiku folks may be undergoing some therapy. What is the ailment? It is called the fear of crowds. There is a term for it, and pardon me for breaking your jaws. It is called Enochlophobia. To make it more democratic, the other word is demophobia, a less invasive term for the tongue. That means a fear of the people.

That was the affliction when Atiku and company filled the cyberspace with distortions of President Bola Tinubu’s acts in the north. They wanted a counter-crowd. They got none. They wanted to tear down posters. Nada. They only thrived where real people did not inhabit. Cyberspace, that is.

So, when they saw the crowds on Saturday, they panted and flailed. From the airport, all the way to the stadium. They wanted power failure. They wanted boos. They craved desertions. They imagined, but reality failed them.

So, when it happened, all their contrived statistics, news distortions, hoopla about presidential neglect of Kaduna and the north fell on their faces. Hence, they must need therapy. The symptoms, as political psychologists would say, include a racing heart, difficulty in breathing, trembling, near suffocation. No casualties for public consumption. Such palpitations may be too much for a near octogenarian heart like Atiku’s. So, we must pray, if therapy is in the works. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti writes about it in his classic, Crowds and Power, especially when tyranny forbids crowds. The ADC flagbearer may want to read that book ahead of another APC rally.

A chieftain had told this essayist ahead of the rally that the crowd would be without precedent. Not since Muhammadu Buhari has that city throbbed with that crowd, the spiritual and political capital of the north, apologies to the chief mobiliser Governor Uba Sani. This contrasts with the crowd of hate that Gunter Grass describes in his classic, The Tin Drum, evoking the ritual apoplexy of the Nazi crowd.

The rally ought to put paid to the naysayers of, about and from the north. They said Tinubu could not campaign there. They said he would be booed. They said he would be stoned. Albert Einstein said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” In this instance, knowledge has triumphed over imagination. It was more fantasy than imagination. Psychologists call it phantasmagoria. The German physicist referred to the imagination of the sublime sort, not the wayward netizens of Atiku’s making.

It was the honours of Governor Sani’s eloquence on the podium to tell the deaf and open the eyes of the blind what Tinubu has done for the north. Could they deny that he had visited the state in 2022, when he travelled to Birnin Gwari, a hot spot of banditry, where the brave feared to go? He visited and promised, as the comrade governor recounted, that he would restore peace there and reconstruct the 123 kilometres road abandoned for 40 years from Kaduna to the trouble spot. Birnin Gwari was under banditry for about 10 years. Today, it is not only safe, you could travel there with “your eyes closed.” In 2022, the campaign trail went there with something of an army division. The road from Kaduna to Birnin Gwari is more than half-way done with N117 billion devoted already. Promise kept. Before, some 300 schools and 150 primary healthcare centres were abandoned for a decade before Tinubu ascended the office. All of them now operate.

Is it not true that NELFUND is a key Tinubu programme, and what region benefits more from it?. Almost 60 percent benefits northern students. That is, about 6 out of 10 persons enjoy it from northern Nigeria. That amounts to over 414,000 students, all children of the poor. He also referred to the over 34,000 young men and women now enjoying the training scholarships under the TVET initiative for artisans.

Can anyone deny what Governor Sani said of the Abuja-Kaduna- Zaria-Kano Road? About N750 billion has been spent and it is 95 percent completed. Minister David Umahi also confirmed this afterwards. Speaking as the seismograph of the north, Governor Sani noted that the highway connects 12 states in the northeast, north central and northwest. Of course, no one can gainsay the value of the Sokoto-Badagry expressway. The opposition is quiet over that. It is one progress they would that no one remembers. They have now accepted, even with their critiques, that the coastal highway has come to stay.

The campaign must not please some of the northern political and intellectual elite who are not in sync with the poor. The same thing happened with Emir of Katsina, who got a subtle jibe from campaign DG Abdulaziz Yari. The Emir could not cloak the fact that he is in bed with Atiku. He was berated by Comrade Shehu Sani for his hypocrisy. He was tongue-tied in the Buhari years. He just found his tongue now that a southerner is president. He wanted to play the noble father. But he was neither noble nor a father. He wore a partisan crown. It was convenient for him to ask for Bello Turji, but it was under his eyes that many a kachalla was eliminated, and the whole cadre of ISWAP leaders were wiped out under a joint Nigeria-US mission. Monarchs like the emir are the true enemies of the north. They want to fanaticise the Talakawa out of their own benefits. They crave the antediluvian passion of north for northerners instead of prosperity for all northerners. He needs to learn from Governor Uba Sani’s playbook. Who is for the north? Those who want more education, better road networks, liberation from fear of violence, etc? or those who would be like Atiku who has no record of doing good things for his people?

There was a festive air to the rally, but more important was the coalescence of support from governors and the party bigwigs. It reflected one voice, one mission, one battle. As Winston Churchill noted, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”

Crowds are good but votes are better. The next task is how to turn the PVCs into victory.

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