NO word or concept captures a political season like love. Yet, no word is more ignored. We brandish such nuggets as “connect,” “grassroots,” “network,” “structure,” “empower,” et al. But they all disguise what the Bible levitates as the queen of all virtues.
Apostle Paul describes it as the fulfilling of the law. Jesus says it is the one quality by which others can know his disciples. For the politician, it is why they wake up and go to sleep, or do not go to sleep. They crave the peoples upraised hands, the hurrahs and firestorm of cheers. Crowd is power. In the multitude of the people is the king’s honour.
It is time for love rhetoric and embraces and handshakes. It is time to don the other’s sartorial pride and taste their cuisines. It is time to ascend their accents, to soak in their tunes and tunic, to accept their tones as tonic, and say they are all one. It is an act of generosity, and what is more generous than to listen to you, hear you, be here with you, acknowledge you, shed tears and smile with you, cheer you and for you. As French philosopher Simone Weil notes, “Attention is the purest and rarest generosity.”
So, the political season must be welcome. It makes us whole, or seeks it. That is of course to those who want it that way. Not those, in this era, who see it as a binary course, a time to divide in order to kill. We have seen a lack of love in this age, from Trump’s race-baiting to Putin’s bile at Ukraine to the xenophobia of the new leaders of Italy and Sweden. Here, Atiku Abubakar has keyed into that poison by disavowing love for Igbo and Yoruba. The optics poison, even his party has now parted ways with its nationalistic credo because of Atiku’s ethnocentric register. Atiku is showing love the wrong way or when it no longer stirs the heart. Atiku is like Shakespeare’s words in Antony and Cleopatra about a man who “never loved until never worth the love.”
That is why the visit to Kano by Bola Tinubu in the past week must attract contexts. In the past decades, it has been argued that Yoruba could never find common cause with the north. This has been traced to the age of the Yoruba Wars and the Battle of Osogbo in 1840.
When colonialism took its toll, Awolowo became the vertebral bone of the race, and historians like Richard Sklar and political theorists like Dudley described his Action Group as tarred with the regional brush.
Awo tried in vain to extend his appeal. Rather, the now south-south and southeast found traction up north. When the First Republic election polls reached a deadlock, with the north’s NPC unable to form a government, Awo asked Zik to coalesce his NCNC with his AG. He would cede the nation’s top office of prime minister to Zik while he (Awo) would be content to serve under him as finance minister. Zik pooh-poohed him and aligned with the NPC. Zik became a ceremonial leader rather than a substantive one as prime minister. He soared to bow, on the tower without power. It was a similar story with what the inimitable K.O. Mbadiwe called “accord concordia,” in the Second Republic.
In all these narratives, the west was always in the adversarial porch of the north. The civil war is often traced to the collapse of the Nzeogwu coup but it had its roots in the ambush of the west. The first person to inspire northern trust was M.K.O. Abiola, but it was a false start, if significant for having happened. The June 12 annulment turned out a northern remorse. Yet, we cannot play it down as a seed bed for a coming together of north and southwest. Obasanjo became a mea culpa. He failed but it was a necessary failure. While the southwest did not embrace him, the Yoruba acknowledged the north’s olive branch as it was nursing the June 12 wound. OBJ’s time gave the Yoruba a time to heal and reengineer its relationship with the north.
This incidentally began with Tinubu and Muhammadu Buhari. Yet the beginning was like the meeting of lovers. Like the opening line of Achebe’s short story, Girls At War: “The first time their paths crossed, nothing happened.” Essentially, it was Buhari’s third try at the nation’s top post.
But they came together again, and the APC was born. Tinubu was able to give Buhari the friendship he lacked in his three attempts: the arms of the Yoruba. That was the clincher. The former allies of the north, the south-south and southeast, had retreated from the north.
So, when Tinubu visited last week, it was also to emphasise what he had, on personal basis, been doing for most of his political life. He has been building bridges with the north, south-south and south east, reinforcing the credo of a love among our people. Love is the best of all virtues but it is not the easiest to muster. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare called it “fiend angelical, wolvish-ravening lamb…” If it works no ill against a neighbour, it calls for all other virtues to come to play. It calls for courage, but the most important other virtue that helps love is patience. Chaucer says “Patience is a conquering virtue.” Jesus says “By your patience possess you your soul.”
So, Tinubu has worked in building alliances and friendships, and his most onomatopoeic title, Jagaban, comes from the north. It is not for nothing that when the APC primaries came and the northern governors ceded the presidency to the south, the bulk of his delegates came from the northern states.
His visit to Kano and his interaction with the north, for this essayist, was, one, an act of gratitude; two, a fruit of love; three, a cementing of a once fraught and fragile tie; and four, a coalition for future. Two telling anecdotes stood out. One, his visit to the tomb of the Sardauna of Sokoto. Two, the story of his mother and her trade alliances of trust with Kano merchants when he – Tinubu- was a little boy. It was that context that informed Governor Badaru of Jigawa State’s contention. Hear him: “Tinubu is the only friend of the north. He supported five different northern presidential candidates, including Shehu Shagari, Umar Musa Yar’adua, Atiku Abubakar, Nuhu Ribadu and Muhammadu Buhari.” He therefore says it is payback time. This essayist sees it as the fruit of love.
It is perhaps what disturbs Atiku and led to his tribal outburst. Two novels about doubts and healing bear reference. One is A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, perhaps the best Arab novel ever written. The second is Booker Prize nominee, A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, a tale of a trip north after the scars and combustions of a civil war.
Tinubu’s northern saga is a metaphor of his own journey of love.
