Tinubu grains: A Nuhu Ribadu advertorial, by Sonala Olumhense
In case you missed it, here is the video of National Security Adviser Mr Nuhu Ribadu, last week, advertising a fake product.
A lifetime ago, it seems, Ribadu served as the pioneer Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, a Federal Government agency that now appears only to be a branch of Nollywood.
The brash, outspoken Ribadu was seen as the voice of hope.
That was when his name was first linked with that of another gentleman named Bola Tinubu, the first governor of Lagos State in the Fourth Republic.
In “Nuhu Ribadu, Then And Now,” published in August 2014, I delved into his serial transformations. Among them; In his official report in 2006, Ribadu had accused several governors of corruption, characterising Tinubu as being of “an international dimension.”
In that same 2006, as chairman of a presidential Joint Task Force on corruption, he listed Tinubu among 15 governors, including Mr Goodluck Jonathan, who had breached the code of conduct for public officials. They were recommended for prosecution
But time wounds all heels, as they say. Ribadu would soon be kicked out of office and find himself in exile. By that time, he had become a celebrity.
In May 2006, he appeared before a sub-committee of the International Relations House Of Representatives to address “Nigeria’s Struggle with Corruption.”
In January 2010, a PBS reporter called him “Nigeria’s Relentless Corruption Hunter” with Ribadu describing how “grand corruption” had overrun Nigeria.
“We are back to square one,” he said. “Corruption has taken over the engine of government in Nigeria.”
By 2010, Ribadu was back in Nigeria and trying to parlay his considerable popularity during his EFCC chairmanship into a political run.
His platform: Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria — which I have described elsewhere as a proprietorship “owned and managed” by Tinubu—but even the ACN states voted not for him, but for PDP.
Ribadu then decamped to the same PDP to run for Governor in his state, Adamawa, attracting the ridicule of Jonathan after he made a remark: “It is only a shameless man that will turn around and accept to be the political lackey of a man he once openly accused of corruption at various times between 2004 and 2007.”
Curiously, Ribadu last year accepted Tinubu’s appointment as National Security Advisor, with Nigeria at its most insecure since the civil war.
Al Jazeera called it, “The rise, fall and rise again of Nuhu Ribadu,” describing how his integrity became an issue when he began to bond with political tradesmen he had previously criticised or prosecuted.
In terms of insecurity, Nigeria was in a terrible place before Ribadu became NSA.
At a Chief of Defence Intelligence Annual Conference exactly one year ago on “Leveraging Defence Diplomacy, and Effective Regional Collaboration for Enhanced National Security,” he said Tinubu had inherited from Muhammadu Buhari a “bankrupt country.”
With Tinubu having said that his was an unapologetic continuation of the Buhari administration, and given that almost nobody was being held accountable, Ribadu did not say why there was no outrage about how their administration would do more with less.
Predictably, Nigeria has become even more uncertain and insecure. The only profitable business is reckless executive spending.
There is neither heart nor soul in policy making or direction.
Consider, for instance, that all the hot air in July 2023 about the Presidential Economic Coordination Council and the Economic Management Team Emergency Taskforce has vanished.
Similarly, as a nation, Nigeria is a distant noise around the world, her ambassadors recalled in September 2023.
The naira has collapsed. Kidnapping and terrorism continue to flourish and Nigerians can not afford food. There is no electricity, and many middle-class Nigerians are now cooking with firewood. People can not afford medication.
President Tinubu’s choice of Bianca Ojukwu
Strangely, to all of this, last week, Ribadu directed his anger at critics. “We’ll shut you up!” he thundered in his fake reality he called “Tinubu Gains.”
He described a fictitious place where, among others: Hundreds of bandits are killed today, everyday… You move everywhere now, free of fear…Tinubu gains.
This Lakurawas: they are making a mistake. Nobody ever dares Tinubu and wins. Nobody…Nobody has ever defeated Tinubu…we will kick you out of Nigeria.
This is a Nigeria of 2024…where I can assure you the critics will be quiet, one after the other…
The naira will be stabilized…Tinubu Gains.
We are not jokers. Tinubu is a success. It has never been a failure with him.
The focus of Ribadu’s anger, it seems, are his old friends and colleagues – the critics. Except for his mischievous misunderstanding that they are no longer just a few people with microphones or pens but Nigerians everywhere – hungry, deprived, deceived, and angry.
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As a streetwalker myself, I have been with them on the streets, in markets and in street corners. They are farmers and market women and teachers and nurses and drivers and students and job-hunters. To shut them up, someone is going to have to show them governance, integrity, seriousness, work, and results.
And grains. Tinubu Grains, perhaps.
Not Tinubu Gains or Tinubu’s Grains, but food for starving stomachs.
“Tinubu Gains” without—or in place of—“Tinubu Grains” is a joke. “Tinubu Gains,” for a government that cannot find the courage to probe the Buhari kleptocracy is Hopelessness. It is Nigeria Betrayed.
But let us also remember that Ribadu spoke in the same week that the US said of the Nigerian people, in connection with Tinubu, something that nobody on earth can even whisper about Americans.
It began in September 2023, in Chicago, when Tinubu begged a judge for an emergency hold on another judge’s order for his Chicago State University records to be released.
His reason: “Severe and irreparable harm will be done,” his lawyer pleaded on the very day that CSU had been ordered to release the documents.
CSU eventually released some of Tinubu’s academic records, as did the FBI later of some of its 2500 documents relating to Tinubu.
Tinubu had at the time come under considerable scrutiny for his role in a case in the 1990s in Chicago, in which he was named as the owner of several bank accounts that were used to launder money for a heroin distribution network.
That led to his famous forfeiture of about $450,000 to the US government, but while the members of the drug ring were criminally charged, Tinubu was curiously not.
Still, there was nothing in the precincts of “severe and irreparable” harm in any of those records.
So, what had thrown the Nigerian leader into such panic?
Last week, it seemed that a plausible answer was forced into the open in the ongoing FOIA disclosure case about Tinubu’s drug trafficking records seeking to have the redactions removed from some files, with the CIA, FBI, and DEA appearing to confirm that the Nigerian leader is an asset requiring protection.
And they did it not in what they did not say, but in what they said: “We oppose full, unredacted disclosure…because we believe that while Nigerians have a right to be informed about what their government is up to, they do not have a right to know what their president is up to.”
Can you imagine anyone on earth telling the American people such a thing to protect an ordinary foreigner?
Neither can I. So yes, Ribadu, A New Nigeria is Possible. But not like this.
Sonala Olumhense
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