I saw a Governor in Fashola—Tinubu’s wife
Today, we continue this excerpt from FASHOLA, A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY by Mike Awoyinfa and Dimgba Igwe:
Tinubu was billed to attend the closing ceremony of 2006 COWLSO conference. “I normally address the closing ceremony,” he said, “so I asked Fashola to write my speech. This was the first time I would give him that kind of assignment. I begged my wife that I wanted to watch how Fashola would perform at the event to enable me make my decision.”
But that meant that Tinubu would have to be represented by his Chief of Staff, an idea Oluremi found unacceptable at first. As it turned out, everybody Tinubu had mention the idea of Fashola as a candidate to had told him it was going to be a hard-sell, perhaps an impossible one. Except that the more Tinubu’s confidants were unenthusiastic about it, the more the idea persisted with Fashola’s sterling qualities playing out in his mind more and more. Tinubu began to feel that perhaps, the idea was not so heretical after all, that perhaps, it was indeed, doable. But then, he still needed the final push one way or the other—which made the COWLSO event far more critical to him than was ordinarily warranted.
“I begged her passionately because she would not agree for me not to show up. Eventually she agreed that Fashola should represent me,” Tinubu recalled. The First Lady reluctantly agreed only because it was going to help him make this crucial decision. “Well, just because it would help you, I would excuse you,” she said.
Meanwhile, Tinubu got Lagos Television (LTV 8) to record the entire event. “I wanted to watch the video; I wanted to watch the reception to see how Fashola was interacting with people in a public event.” After the event, Tinubu ordered for the tape from LTV 8 but before the tape arrived, he sought the verdict of the First Lady. “Oh, fantastic!” she gushed. “In him, you have a son, you have a brother, you have a successor.” Perhaps, she was too enthusiastic with her verdict. She should have paced her verdict slowly.
“You are biased. It’s because he is the Chief of Staff.”
What Tinubu was imputing was that the First Lady was biased because it was the Chief of Staff who ran the governor’s life and home, providing things that were needed and all that. It would have been easy for a good Chief of Staff to worm his way into the heart of members of the first family simply by responding promptly to their whims and caprices. But for Oluremi, this was an unfair cut. She was hurt and angry. “In that case, don’t ever ask me any question again if you think I am biased.”
The matter almost degenerated into a quarrel and Tinubu couldn’t understand why his wife was so testy about it. “You asked me to do something, now you are accusing me of bias,” she fumed. The fact was that for Deaconess Oluremi, she went through a spiritual epiphany. As Fashola spoke to the audience, she said, “I sat there and I saw a governor. Right there! For me, it was a spiritual thing. We have been praying about it. If you had been in exile for almost five years and coming back and being given the opportunity to serve your people in the capacity that my husband did, you will know the futility of most of life’s struggles. The passion for us is not about the position but about trying to make things happen…And when Fashola stood there and talked, I felt something. It’s through things like this that you can see somebody who can be a leader right there. Before giving the responsibility of leadership to somebody, the first thing you really have to have is the ambience of leadership. Ambience! And then, it has to come with the night of birth when you see somebody who can take the reins of power and the burden of governance. Then you will now look at the rest of the qualities.”
When tempers cooled, Oluremi tackled the biggest question on Tinubu’s mind: Is he marketable? “I saw in Fashola a marketable product,” she affirmed. But beyond marketability was a more crucial question for her. She asked Tinubu, “You have brought him out tonight, is that your choice at last?”
“What do you think?”
“I’ve told you, he is OK. But do you trust him?”
“Yes, yes,” he said without even thinking about it.
“For me, that is the most important thing: do you trust him? I don’t know him. You work with him. Do you trust him? Because whatever it is, trouble would come. But it is your problem. Trust is very, very important.”
But why is Tinubu’s trust so crucial to the First Lady? Trust in the context of Nigerian politics is a double-edged sword that connotes both noble and pejorative purposes. Trust can become a blanket to cover a multitude of sins or the noble fiber of integrity that is becoming rare in our climes.
To Tunji Bello, if all Tinubu wanted was just a successor who would cover his misdeeds in office, any of the disciples like Kasali or Gbaja would have done that even better than BRF because many of the aspirants are even less independent-minded and more likely to obey Tinubu than BRF. On the other hand, Oluremi saw trust in the context of carrying on the mandate as articulated in Ten-Point Agenda. It was a question of, Do you believe in this journey?” she insisted. “Because it is a journey with a destination.”
She likened the case of Fashola to the biblical story of Prophet Samuel anointing David as king while rejecting all the other distinguished siblings that seemed more deserving but God didn’t want them for reasons beyond man’s comprehension. In the Bible narrative she cited, it was not until after the senior siblings of David were paraded and none was chosen that Samuel asked the crucial question, “Don’t you have another son?”
“OK, he is with the sheep,” came the answer from Jesse, the father of David. In relating this narrative to the choice of BRF, Oluremi said, “For me at this point, everything began to unravel. We were looking outside for a successor and he was right there inside the house. And you didn’t even know it. And suddenly, it clicked. Now I get it. And to me, I just thank God for that. The next challenge—the first thing—is that we have to be comfortable with the choice before you start presenting it to the public. Then whatever comes, you are able to stand with it.”
For Oluremi, the matter was settled, her spirit had found peace, but for Tinubu the politician, there were still consultations to be made with the crucial stakeholders and selling of the candidate to close circuit of leaders Tinubu had great respect for. Some of them are party leaders, others are non-partisan but moral authorities exerting influence on him and a section of the society. From most of these leaders, he reaped a harvest of objections for choosing a dark horse.
