The Man in the Arena: Some Reflections on Femi Gbajabiamila
“Power is a social game. To learn and master it, you must develop the ability to study and understand people.” – p.xii 48 Laws of Power
By Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
From being a consigliere to playing the assumptive role of a deputy president the office of the Chief of Staff (CoS) to the President of Nigeria is not constitutionally recognized one. Yet, of all the men around any Nigerian leader since the office was established during the 1999-2007 era of former President Obasanjo none is as prominent a gatekeeper as the CoS.
Not even an incumbent Vice President (VP) that officially is on a joint ticket with a sitting President is apparently that influential. Though introduced into our political lexicon only in 1999 the Nigerian Army briefly featured that office in its organizational chart with the occupants Lt. Colonels Robert Adeyinka Adebayo (1928-2017) and Kur Mohammed (1933-1966) respectively in office between 1964 to 1966.
General Yakubu Gowon eventually decentralized the office from the Nigerian Army headquarters to the divisional levels. To understand the modus operandi of that operational nerve center Rtd. Brigadier General Godwin Alabi-Isama’s 2013 definitive biography, The Tragedy of Victory is a must read.
While not many Nigerians would vividly recall the colorless, dour and publicity shy first civilian equivalent occupant of that office under OBJ, Rtd. Major-General Abdullahi Mohammed it was not until during the Buhari administration that the intrepid Malam Abba Kyari (1952-2020) elevated the office of CoS to maximum prominence with domineering influence. An all-pervading behemoth.
The current superintendent of Nigeria’s presidential nerve center, Rt. Honorable Olufemi Hakeem Gbajabiamila (his title by virtue of being the 14th House of Representatives Speaker since national independence) needs no elaborate introduction here beyond the maxim, “The first method of estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” – Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
According to Nseobong Okon-Ekong in, “Tinubu: Die Like a Man” featured in ThisDay newspaper edition of August 6, 2021, “A Tinubu in Aso Rock will combine the rambunctiousness of President Olusegun Obasanjo and the wheeler-dealer attitudes of an Atiku Abubakar. He has the courage to get things done. And even if he does not know what to do, he is street wise enough to identify the person who will deliver excellence on the job.”
Perhaps why in the same context Mack McLarty who served briefly as onetime US President 1993-2001, Bill Clinton’s CoS for less than a year as he left office explained, “What this White House really needs is a chief of staff who can read Machiavelli in the original Italian.”
You however don’t have to read nor speak the official language of Italy, Vatican City and parts of Switzerland to understand Consigliere is now in English a loan word that embodies trusted advice and sage guidance.
All you have to do is grab a throwback copy of The Godfather written by Mario Francis Puzo (1920-1999) an epic 1969 novel that remained on The New York Times Bestseller List for 67 weeks.
A book which not only permanently etched in popular consciousness Honore de Balzac’s maxim, “Behind every great fortune there is a crime” but has sold to date an estimated 21 million copies slightly ahead of Chinua Achebe’s 20 million copies of Things Fall Apart based on the rankings of the Wikipedia List of Best-Selling Books. The 1972 film version still remains a classic watch.
The practice of politics is akin to being in the Mafia not only because, “power requires to play with appearances,” but the unbroken chain of loyalty and strict adherence of the code of “never allow anybody outside the family know what you are thinking.”
In Puzo’s book, Tom Hagen dutifully served as Don Vito’s CoS, “one of the most intelligent in the Corleone family as he turned out to be consigliere. However, he was never much of a fighter and though well-intentioned, was never brutal enough to be a wartime consigliere.”
George Anastasia in his non-fiction book entitled Gotti’s Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti and the Demise of the American Mafia (2015) describes the office of a consigliere as that of a, “vital advisor, trusted confidante and a strategist par excellence.”
Arguably, the Kaduna Mafia has finally met its match with the Bola Ahmed Tinubu political family.
Why is a Chief of Staff often perceived to be a deputy president of sorts?
According to Helen Thomas (1920-2013) one of the longest serving White House press corps members that covered 10 presidencies from Kennedy in 1961 to the Obama administration before she eventually resigned in 2011;
“I remember the morning after President Nixon won re-election in 1972. His Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, called a cabinet meeting and told the members, “You are a bunch of burnt out volcanoes,” and asked for their resignations.”
In our own clime Prof. Farooq Kperogi once claimed, “That Buhari is almost wholly dependent on Abba Kyari is no secret in Aso Villa, but it came out in the open when Buhari himself publicly told his newly appointed ministers (in 2019) that Abba Kyari is the only way to him.”
Is Femi Gbajabiamila a wartime consigliere?
The question is pertinent because political war is coming, has already come.
Any Nigerian who presumes those apparatchiki that were vehemently opposed to the Lion of Bourdillon transforming himself from kingmaker to king have just simply disappeared into the shadows of irrelevance must be living on the moon.
Recall that despite many of the political booby traps contrived ahead of the February 2023 polls on March 29, 2023 barely a month after the early hours of Wednesday, March 1 when INEC had declared then Candidate Tinubu as President-elect – ahead of his inauguration slated for May 29, a certain Peter Afunanya openly declared, “The Department of State Services (DSS) has identified some key players in the plot for an Interim Government in Nigeria.”
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Dr. Afunanya the official spokesman of DSS to date went on, “The Service considers the plot being pursued by these entrenched interests as not only an aberration but a mischievous way to set aside the constitution and undermine civil rule as well as plunge the country into an avoidable crisis.”
Quite recently the Nigeria Police has had cause to admonish, “The new slogan for 2023 and 2024 for our young ones is “No gree for anybody,” we have been informed by intelligence that this slogan is coming from a revolutionary sector that may likely cause problems across the country.”
If so, is the recent spike of insecurity around the nation and particularly in the environs of FCT a continuation of politics by other means?
Lest we forget that the mischievous attempt to make the nation “ungovernable” already has precedent in our body politic.
That Mr. Gbajabiamila is effectively in-charge of the command and control center of President Tinubu is without any iota of doubt. Unfortunately, so is the prospect of the “fall of the favorite” whenever there is political target practice;
“Franklin D. Roosevelt (the 32nd US President, 1933-1945) had a reputation for honesty and fairness. Throughout his career, however, he faced many situations in which being the nice guy would have spelled political disaster – yet he could not be seen as the agent of any foul play.
Louis McHenry Howe (1871-1936) handled the backroom deals, the manipulation of the press, the underhanded campaign maneuvers. And whenever a mistake was committed, or a dirty trick contradicting Roosevelt’s carefully crafted image became public, Howe served as the scapegoat, and never complained.”
Similarly, in Nigeria, the office of the Chief of Staff to the President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces is not for a mental Lilliputian nor intellectual dwarf.
Last December, President Tinubu dodged an Arewa bullet at Tundun Biri albeit through deft maneuvering and robust optics by VP Kashim Shettima. Though another is being loaded arising from the planned relocation of some departments at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to Lagos from Abuja: why would such an innocuous administrative decision cause any political disquiet?
Back in September 1999, then President Obasanjo similarly signed off on the relocation of the headquarters of Nigerian Ports Authority, Nigeria Maritime Authority (now NIMASA) and Nigerian Shippers Council back to Lagos against the background of similar dissent.
Interestingly, Obasanjo came into office as a northern poster boy just as Tinubu did. In the February 27, 1999 presidential election Obasanjo got a combined total of 1, 092, 216 votes from the entire South West of Ekiti, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Osun and Oyo states while getting 1, 294, 679 votes in Kaduna alone.
Meanwhile, in Katsina he got 964,216 votes compared to the paltry 143, 564 votes he got from his home state of Ogun and just 209, 012 votes in Lagos.
In 2023, the South West gave Tinubu 2,542, 979 votes whereas the North-West gave him 2,652,824 votes.
While the tally from the South-East and South-South were 127,605 and 799,957 votes respectively President Tinubu crossed the finish line with 1,760, 993 votes from the North-Central with an additional 933,176 votes from the North-East.
Why does any part re-location from Abuja to Lagos reverberate significantly in the political North?
As the Arewa reaction to the appointment of former Rivers governor, Nyesom Wike as FCT already speaks volumes, on why, the ace columnist Mahmud Jega and Bola Tinubu presidential campaign media team member in retrospect puts it that, “Another successful Northern agenda was to relocate the federal capital from Lagos, allegedly due to congestion.”
See details in From Kaduna Mafia to Caliphate published in the Daily Trust newspaper edition of October 22, 2016
Nigerians therefore don’t need a political clairvoyant to identify where President Tinubu’s main political challenge would emanate from as 2027 inches closer.
Which situates Femi Gbajabiamila between a rock and a hard place in office as CoS.
But with his principal’s “native intelligence” in politics the duo might pull it off. Little wonder why Rtd. Brigadier-General Jones Arogbofa, the CoS to former President Jonathan openly declared in his tribute to the late Abba Kyari, “The office is not a piece of cake.”
Simply put, a CoS must discern on behalf of his principal which persons to get through, which persons to embrace, which persons to ignore, which persons to push out of the way, which persons to jump over. And which persons to politically crush.
An electoral litmus test soon to come. Slated for next February 3 is the by-election for the House of Representatives Surulere 1 federal constituency seat President Tinubu’s current Man Friday resigned from to pick up his current Villa assignment.
Will there be a repeat of “Mama Chukwudi, if you will not vote for us don’t come out”?
It is an open political secret that without “spiritual” help and psychological warfare from Oro adherents the outcome of the Lagos gubernatorial and house of assembly election that took place on March 18, 2023 would have been decidedly different.
Femi Gbajabiamila, a 20-year long veteran of the National Assembly is obviously too urbane and suave for such democratic desecration particularly against the background of a host of landmark constituency projects recently commissioned across his primary constituency of Lagos.
One thing is obvious though his Legislative Mentorship Initiative (LMI) started 2 years ago, “to identify, train and equip the next generation of public sector leaders, particularly legislators,” has a long-term strategic purpose. This year already 45 fellows selected from the 36 states and FCT have already been inducted. That the CoS expectedly has a vested interest on who inherits his former seat is without any doubt.
If all is seemingly quiet on the ASUU from it is chiefly because the outgone Speaker of the House of Representatives made valiant efforts at rapprochement with our eggheads back in 2022. While the incumbent CoS’s legal training and cognate experience across 3 continents of the world must have come handy to pull it off;
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred with by dust and sweat; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”
– Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President at Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910
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