The Accused Holds the Match
In 2015 the APC unseated the PDP and has governed Nigeria ever since. That is eleven years, which in political terms is not so much a tenure as a tenancy with squatter’s rights. Mr Tinubu spent the first eight as the party’s national leader, with Osinbajo, reportedly his nominee, installed as vice president. Since 2023 he has been president, with Kashim Shettima beside him. Whoever invented the phrase “continuity of government” clearly never imagined it applied this literally.
So when the vice president tells the nation that it was teetering on the brink of collapse before his principal arrived, the discerning citizen reaches for the legal maxim that no man may be judge in his own cause. Here, the man is not merely the judge. He is the architect, the contractor, the site manager and the landlord, and he has now arrived to complain about the state of the building.
The Road to Caracas
According to reporting on remarks made after the vice president represented Tinubu at the UN General Assembly, Shettima said the economy was teetering on the verge of collapse and that Tinubu saved the nation from falling into pieces. Warming to his theme, he added that “We were on the road to Caracas”.
A traveller on that road, you will notice, was an APC government. Whoever was driving for the preceding eight years, it was not the PDP. One would think that a ruling party announcing that its own stewardship nearly ended in ruin might attract a modest confession. Instead it attracts a medal. This is the first recorded instance in Nigerian jurisprudence of a defendant tendering the charge sheet as evidence of good character.
The Poor Man and His Poor People
Then comes the plea that Nigerians should be generous to “this poor man”, delivered while the president was recuperating on vacation in Europe. The poor man holds the most powerful office in West Africa and has the Presidential Villa for a lodging. The citizens asked to be generous to him include those who, by the Gazette’s account, watched food, fuel and essentials soar in price while the naira went into historic free fall. That is a remarkable inversion of charity. Normally the rich are urged to be generous to the poor. Here the poor are urged to be generous to the poor man in the villa, and the invoice for the reforms goes to the household that cannot afford the reforms.
The government’s own defenders add colour. The Information Minister has claimed that some 27 states could not pay salaries before May 2023 and were rescued by the reforms. Perhaps so. But these were states governed in large part by the same party, a detail that sits in the claim like a fly in the soup, visible to everyone except the waiter.
The Conveniently Forgotten Chapter
Memory, we are told, is the first casualty of politics, and the APC is a model of efficient demolition. It was Tinubu’s own party then, the ACN, that sponsored the national Occupy Nigeria protests when Goodluck Jonathan tried to remove the fuel subsidy in 2012. Eleven years on, the same man removed it, and the vice president now asks the public to see the sacrifice as salvation. One man’s protest is evidently another man’s reform, provided the portrait on the wall has changed.
Nor should we forget the origin story. Tinubu himself argued in 2022 that it was his turn, repayment for delivering Buhari’s election in 2015. Consider the logic carefully. He made the president, he handed the nation to the president, the nation then edged towards the abyss, and he then returned to rescue it. That is not a hero’s journey. That is a man selling you the umbrella he stole from you, in the rain he arranged.
The Verdict
Gaslighting, properly defined, is the art of persuading people to doubt what they have lived. A government can survive criticism, but it cannot easily survive having its own record read back to it. If Nigeria was near implosion by 2023, then the question for the vice president is the one any court would put to a witness: where were you, and whose signature is on the paperwork?
Nigerians owe their leaders a fair hearing and a sober accounting, not a standing ovation. The collapse the vice president describes was not a natural disaster. It happened in the APC’s own house, on the APC’s own watch, and gratitude is rather hard to summon for a rescue from a fire the rescuers have been tending for eleven years.
