OSINBAJO: Staring at political extinction after violating first law

You said in your heart: “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars….Your pomp has been brought down to Sheol, along with the music of your harps (Isa 14)

By Elijah Olusegun

When the seed of that thought first landed in his heart, the ground must have been tilled well enough. So the offshoot sprang out quick. V.P. Yemi Osinbajo’s sense of self-importance and omniscience bloomed. And ruling Nigeria quickly became a matter of well-researched Power-Point and poetic presentation.

He probably figured out he needed a little politics, too, both in the long and short runs. That would help him survive the Aso Rock cabal’s firm grip on his jugular, and endear himself to President Muhammadu Buhari, hanging on his cold, shape-shifting body.

Both plans, well executed, should have given him enough pluck to dare Bola Tinubu on whose coat-tail he rode to Aso Rock.

Unfortunately, the plans bombed at the Eagle Square June 8, and flung the leading aspirant and No. 2 citizen off the cliff. He now stares down at a sure and steady plunge into political oblivion.

For months, the likelihood of that calamity was there, waiting to happen. But Osinbajo just put on his blinkers.

The lead-up to the election simmered with animosity and repining, especially from the time he declared his intention to contest against his godfather and APC national leader.

Bola Tinubu told newsmen who peppered him with questions about his son Osinbajo’s declaration. He said he has no son old enough to challenge him.

And Osinbajo gave it back to him later.

He denied he owed any allegiance to the former Lagos governor who handed him his slot as President Muhammadu Buhari’s running mate in 2014.

“I swore only to the people of Nigeria and my conscience,” the V.P. told his supporters while consulting across the nation then.

The denial even pitted him more against Tinubu and his camp, and the hostilities became so red hot he had to move his political base from Lagos to Ogun.

Osinbajo had no political base, in the real sense of it.  And it’s difficult to say the RCCG pastor-politician is without some backwind.

He could boast of his posh parish on the Banana Island, and his well-moneyed congregants; he could boast of having as a backer one of TIME’s most influential humans in the universe, his G.O. Pastor E.A Adeboye, whose shoes he could chew as a sign of respect, the respect that makes the V.P refer to him publicly as his Father in the Lord, and from whom he must have received prophecies and anointing that could help him reap where he never sowed as he decided to outshine his boss, and just become president. Osinbajo could also have boasted of a Twitter following—a bunch of hot-fingered Gen Z kids who think they are the cat whiskers. They had been giving him all the go-man-goes he needed to endure the dueling with Tinubu this far.

But for a political structure built over the years, with networks and connection and alliances and old favors—the law professor is a no-show.

Which is suicidal.

Eight years of running errands at Aso Rock, and lipping out all the nice things about your boss is no match for 25 years a juggernaut spent roughing it out, and building nation-wide structures and dynasties, nurturing loyalists, playing good, old-money politics, and cronyism. Such a contest can only guarantee one thing at the end: a kiss of death for the vanquished, obviously the puny opponent.

Ambition, however, has a way of blunting the pointed edge of fear that prods the ambitious to think twice before they take the plunge. It just did Osinbajo in. And the manner with which it happened was subtle. A slow-mo.

He lived in his own bubble all along, stepping out regularly, again, into the echo chamber his chief backers built him during their council of war. It was his protection from realities that made him dismiss the drama on the eve of the election. That Gov. Kayode Fayemi, former Minister Godswill Akabio, Sen. Ibikunle Amosun, ex-Speaker Dimeji Bankole, Prof. Robert Boroface—all challengers from the southwest—stepped down for Tinubu could have sent a signal. It should have made the future—now probably the end—clearer to Osinbajo.

But he blundered ahead into the fight. He played the religion hand; he attacked Tinubu’s money politics. Imagine the hypocrisy of it. It was on the dollar-politics the clergyman rode from his classroom at UNILAG to Lagos AGF office for eight years under Tinubu, and another 8 years as V.P. at Aso Rock. It now became a stink bomb Osinbajo’s hurled tactically at his estranged boss.  All because he wanted to win delegates from Lagos, Kano, Katsina, Adamawa, Kaduna, Ondo, Osun, Ekiti, Akwa Ibom, Jigawa.

The law professor disregarded the law of nature: You don’t reap where you don’t sow. In Nigeria’s Machiavellian politics, the political upstart belittled the law of power: Never outshines the masters.

Now his annihilation in the contest won’t just remain evergreen in the annals of the southwestern and Oodua politics, it will become a cautionary tale. It will serve as a reference point for those who think too much of themselves, their intelligence, their grace, their ego, and, for one or all of those reasons, bite the fingers that fed them.

For Osinbajo, the humiliation is going to be more. Or worse. It doesn’t matter if Tinubu plays the sportsman in his victory. The 70-year-old benefactor will never again trust the 66-year-old opportunist he gave a leg up, who then turned around, and kicked him in the teeth.

A betrayer.

That badge will stick for generations ahead.