EXPRESSO_PRESIDENCYWatch>>>By Steve Osuji
President Bola Tinubu’s era as leader of Nigeria has to be remarked outright as THE AGE OF IDIOCY!
Everything taken together, there is no other way to capture and frame this time in Nigeria’s epoch.
This column had determined from inception that Tinubu lacked the requisite mental or physiological capacity to function as a president or manage a country, not the least, Nigeria.
To start with, Tinubu didn’t win the 2023 presidential elections. He manipulated the process through the instruments of the electoral body, INEC. He stole the mandate and the judiciary ratified it.
He suborned and compromised the system in his fiendish ambition to be president. It didn’t matter to him and his supporters that he’s a mere popinjay who is possessed of neither brains nor wits nor energy to manage even a supermarket.
He’s also aged – having lied about his age, and every bit of his life; having no tenable biometrics – and seriously ailing!
And the question the whole world is asking Nigerians today is: what’s such a fellow like Tinubu doing pretending to run a country? Whatever happened to all the great people of Nigeria?
RIGGING ELECTION IS EASIER THAN RUNNING A COUNTRY: It’s two years after Tinubu stole Nigeria’s ballot. Today, the he country is in utter mess. The citizens are being subsumed and consumed under hurricane Tinubu.
But the real worry is that he doesn’t even know that he has failed woefully on the job. You can wangle your way to the presidency, but you cannot wangle away existential problems of the people.
Two years on, Nigeria is almost 100% worse than Tinubu met it. But strangely, he doesn’t seem to be aware of the situation or the realities of his current environment.
The presidency, and indeed, Nigeria seems being run by proxy.
His vile propaganda machine led by a veteran journalist, Bayo Onanuga, and comprising a team of about a dozen hounds, churn out stuff, sometimes very stupid stuff, purportedly done or being done by the president.
But the president does nothing, almost absolutely nothing. It’s just so much theatre and drama.
At best he is propped up to read written speeches which are recorded and played over for Nigerians.
The president of Nigeria in 2025 is not capable of making an impromptu speech or granting a live interview.
Tinubu has the attention span of a butterfly. Everything he did, said or promised during his years of jousting for power, he has forgotten them all.
He once said he would drop the price of fuel; but he did exactly the reverse jerking it up to the sky on his first day in office, pandering to the soulless Bretton-wood gang.
He once said he would achieve 24-hour power in four years; but the country has had more electricity grid collapses in two years than in the eight years of his immediate predecessor. Power generation has remained static, the way Goodluck Jonathan left it.
Everything bad at Tinubu’s ascendancy has become worse.
To illustrate this, the price we pay for ONE BOTTLE OF BEER today (N1,500) is what we paid for ONE CARTON before Tinubu’s time.
The price of ONE SINGLE EGG today (N300) is nigh the cost of a CRATE OF EGGS a few years ago.
Five litres of fuel was about N1000.00; today, the same quantity is about N10,000.00.
These about encapsulate the inflation rate Tinubu has engendered and the degrading of the lives of the average citizen.
The truth is that Tinubu is all about power, and lucre. He neither understands much about the economy nor does he care. He is bereft of neither emotional nor social intelligence quotients.
For two years consecutivelly, Nigerians have been thrown into the mire of hunger and slow deaths due to ill-thought out policies, but he doesn’t backtrack or change course. He keeps saying things will get better while nothing is done to that effect. You don’t have to be an economist to know that Nigeria’s economy hinges on fuel price and her exchange rate.
THE CORRUPTION OGRE: Tinubu cannot fight corruption, he can’t even pretend like Mohammadu Buhari because he personified every bit, every facet of systemic corruption. Have you ever seen a country locked in the vice grips of corruption developing?
Nigeria cannot grow or improve; Tinubu can never succeed as president because he’s utterly corrupt.
Take for instance, the oil sector where Tinubu imposed himself as minister (like some of his predecessors did), the oil wealth has been sequestered in the hands of a cabal led by Tinubu and Dangote.
Today Nigeria’s oil business is the most opaque business in the world.
Consider the paradox enabled by the pervasive corruption in the sector: Nigeria has about the biggest refinery in the world yet she still imports refined products. She’s among the largest crude oil producers, yet she imports crude oil!
A raging, iniquitous corruption has held Nigeria’s oil sector spellbound, disabling it and hampering the people from enjoying the benefits of a mammoth new refinery and unleashing the economic growth derivable from the legacy infrastructure.
Under Tinubu, corruption is now a bazaar. Right from inside the presidency to the last ministry. There seems to be a profane stampede to loot Nigeria’s treasury.
Consider the currently trending budget paddinggate. An estimated N7 trillion added to Tinubu’s budget and he signs off on it! No questions asked. Funds probably already taken out of the system by rogue legislators and their collaborators in the executive arm.
A MONEY DOUBLER PRODUCES NOTHING: Tinubu merely joggles taxes and currencies; he hikes levies and tariffs. He also draws foreign loans almost every quarter – all according to the dictates of the West.
He doesn’t understand production and he has no stomach for it. With the removal of so-called fuel subsidy, the system is awash with cash and most of it is frittered away between the presidency/executives, the governors and the legislature.
More baleful is that the presidency, ministers and legislators are living in obscene opulence: Rolls Royce, interminable stretch of convoys, raucous parties, private jets, while citizen Joe cries of hunger…
Latest World Bank report says 75% of Nigerians in our villages are poor. But Tinubu tells us tomorrow would be better. How? He doesn’t say, he doesn’t know!
While Buhari banned importation of numerous items produceable locally, Tinubu has thrown everything open and Nigeria’s local producers are being trounced by the technological edge of their foreign counterparts.
Since last year, the federal government has been releasing trillions of naira for the importation of staple foods like rice, maize, cowpeas and wheat.
On the other hand, the federal government has promised to improve commercial agriculture through the National Agriculture Development Fund (NADL).This has been mere rhetoric. The avowed move to procure 10,000 tractors is tale by moonlight.
For a government that devalued her currency, so drastically, pushing exports would have been top priority. Zilch!
NOTHING GOING ON BUT POLITICS: The only thing that makes sense to Tinubu is politics. Petty, ruinous politics. This is what our airwaves are awash with. There’s currently a roguish intent to cajole, co-opt or coerce every politician into the ruling party in order to create an evil one party state.
IT’S INDEED A STATE OF IDIOCY: After two years of Tinubu, nothing concrete to report, no serious work or thinking is going on. Insecurity is worse than Buhari left it. Nigeria is being balkanised by assorted non- state actors who vanquish and humiliate our military. No strategic approach to the fight; it all hit and pursue!
Malnutrition is wiping out infants in the north. In all these, veryone looks on like morons. Nobody is thinking. But for UNICEF, it would have been outright infanticide out there!
It’s monumental failure all round yet Nigerians carry on like zombies. We never had a worse president. And given even 18 years, Tinubu cannot lift a finger… This is already recorded in history as the age of idiocy!
*Osuji was editor at The Guardian, Thisday and NewAge.
*Feedback: steve.osuji@gmail.com
*OSUJISTEVE/29.05.25
