Ode To The President-elect

By Mohammed Adamu
With
Lisa Olu Akerele

PREAMBLE
His name has always been as household as the ‘report of fashion in proud Italy’; and as if to live up to the billing of his political couturé, he has maintained an all-free-size poise: meaning that -figuratively speaking- he is shaped for all fabrics, cut for all measures and he blends perfectly with the hues and textures of every ramification; he is Master of the political game;

He is Sen Bola Ahmed Tinubu, President-Elect of the Fed Republic of Nigeria; the Jagaban of Borgu kingdom; the Asiwaju of Lagos (nay, of Yoruba Land); he was once Leader of the APC Opposition, and defeater of PDP’s incumbency; was crowner of kings, anointer of vicegerents; and now the ‘Masquerade’ himself, is about to ascend to the throne of his own toiling.

THE BRIDGE BUILDER
And who will deny that the Asiwaju has been an excellent builder of geopolitical bridges and a great restorer of broken alliances? From his Southernmost of the South, right up to the Northernmost of the North, and from the orient to the occident, Tinubu has built enduring political alliances across tribes and tongues, and beyond religion and geography;

And for a man -who, like wine in the cask- gets better with every age, the Jagaban has literally lived up to the reputation of his famed political acronym, ‘BAT’, because there is not a night so bleak, or a day so dreary that the proverbial ‘bat’ has not seen or lived through; so call him BAT yes, because you mean the one with the power of echolocation, to see where others don’t;

His politics defies the painter’s single brush or the blend even of a rendezvous of colors; an all-rounded politician and a round-the-clock tactician; he is his own blacksmith, tending to countless irons in the political fireplace, thus making him also his own proverbial cat’s paw, adept always at pulling his and his allies’ chestnuts out of the political fireplace;

To say that he is not overwhelmed by exigencies understates the mystic of his vigilance; rather he overwhelms exigencies; nor is it ok to say that he ‘sets forth at dawn’, because he has to go to bed first, to ‘set forth at dawn’; for a Tinubu who hardly sleeps, he is ‘set forth’ already even before the coming of dawn; making he, the overwhelmer exigencies;

Nor does the Jagaban have to lose sleep to keep watch over his political Vineyard; the denizens of his Manor, being by nature and by mentorship congenitally faithful, loyal and honest, it thus obviates the need that the Boss should worry the least about rumblings in their midst, of internal dissent, or jostling for the preservation of hierarchy or balance;

Tinubu’s galaria is an open sesame of free willers; so that although it is a come-one-come all, those who abide therein must be prepared to ‘give and hazard all that they have’; because the Manor at Boudilon has no place for empty headed, do-nothing political pilgrims, migrants or wayfarers of necessity; it tends only to the Einstein-brained and thinkers outside the box;

He holds no court; he receives no tributes or patronages; Tinubu is simply his own political Shaolin Master; adept at his politics and deeply marinated in his art; he runs an open class where competence acquits and even novitiate just-Commers grow to spar with the Master; there are no sputum-lickers here; the king and his horseman chew the same tobacco.

MENTOR OF MENTORS
The Jagaban distinguishes himself as a lone leader of leaders; Mentor of mentors; a rare builder of men and an exceptional groomer of talents; his pond is a nursery always of eggs and of fingerlings nourished for the ultimate pool of political governance; it is an estate where goals are set, targets met, and records broken; it is no place for tomfools or harlequins;

He is called Asiwaju or Jagaba, as in, the one who commands from the front; who dares to brace with his chest, the heat and the chill of all battles; here, he acquits himself like a Knight of the royal Garter: valiant and virtuous, full of courage, such as is grown to credit by the wars; not fearing death, nor shrinking from distress, but resolute in all extremes;

Behold the Jagaban, petit and unassuming; modest often as the dove; temperate always as the morning; and for patience, he has proved a second Grissel; his words are bonds and his oaths, oracles; his truth as always the truth of Martin Luther King: ‘Marching on’; and his code of battle as mosaic as Malcolm X’s: to forerun woe with woe -‘By Any Means Necessary,

His has been courage always mounted with occasion; and although he is not a political war-monger, yet the Jagaban is not averse to readiness to parley or to war; and which is the essential stuff that true ‘courage’ is made: that although great men must not be mutinous in peace yet when the occasion demands they must be bold at war;

He did predict, in 2015, the decapitation of the ruling dynastic PDP; in bits of limbs, trunk and torso he said; and it did come to pass that he provided every obstacle has odds to which it must yield; because “many strokes” as they say “though with a little axe, will fall the hardest timbered oak”; he was indeed a prophet of his time; -a voice in the wilderness of our politics;

DAVID WITH A SLING
“The blood stirs more”, Shakespeare said, “to rouse a lion than to start a hare”; but who dares to rouse a lion must have more than a mortal’s blood! Tinubu is no more the scourge of oppositions; now he’s the nemesis of enemies of State; for device he’ll prove to them another Hercules, for “grim aspect”, Hector, and for tactic, Hannibal; he’ll thus be Hector, Hannibal and Hercules all in one!

“When Fortune means to men most good”, Shakespeare said, “she looks upon them with a threatening eye”; Tinubu did not walk the paved or gilded roads to the hill station of today’s renown; he has braved the dry and dusty weathers of Fortune’s threatening stare first; and now he’s the “theme of Honor’s tongue, Sweet Fortune’s minion and her pride”;

History bears witness, that in all of these battles, the Jagaban had not only stirred as the time, he was fire for fire, he had threatened the threatner and outfaced the brow of bragging horror; the Jagaban had put on the dauntless spirit of resolution; glistening like the god of war when he intendeth to become the field; he did become the field, and the commander of it;

Behold the Jagaban, the biblical David with the crooked sling; the one who has plucked the eyes of vaunted pride and broken the jaws of ethnic arrogance; he has left the two eastern grandstanders comatose; one a giant heap of a Goliath bleeding a-ground, the other, a sorry sight of a boastful clown, still attired in his Knight Templar’s habiliments of war.

When the jagged fields of battle were emptied, they attested to your deeds of dering-do: blood hath bought blood; blows answered blows, and strength matched with strength; many had cowardly fled the ground, not having struck one strike; but you said to the enemy loud and clear: ‘A CROWN or else a glorious TOMB; a SCEPTER or an earthly SEPULCHRE’;

it was that courage of conviction; that steadfastness in the face of danger, which stand you today, above the chin of your competitors; it is the reward for selflessness in advance of the interest of your loyal friends, that you bountifully reap today; and happily a crown it will be, not a glorious tomb; a scepter, come the 29th, and not an ‘earthly sepulcher’.

EPILOGUE
You are now the King; because by the laws of war, being last on the field of battle, you have thus become the Lord of it! Now the whole nation is thy Manor; and not just a part of it; be our avenging angel, right out nation’s wrongs; be our Sword of Damocles, secure us from enemies of state. Long live the King! Congratulations Mister President-Elect!!
-End-
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