Last week, the nation had a lesson in optics. Or, shall we say, in optical illusion. What we see is important, but we know is better. But what do we know from all the optical histrionics around the APC presidential candidate when he flew to London?
The social media turned into a challenge in eyesight. They said Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was dead. They said, he was on catheter, his bald head shining beneath a benevolent nurse trying to raise him from his bed. She might even, in the eyes of the czars of human sight, be raising him from the dead. They said he had cancelled his campaign. He had turned over his campaign to his deputy. APC no longer had a candidate.
They quoted Reuters, the great news agency, for authenticity. Phone calls rang. Some media outfits limped in searching for facts. No basic journalism rules. They did not question but voted with their silence.
Nor was fact going to win out in certain circles. Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu’s spokesperson, revealed the optical delusion and mischief of the manipulators of human sight. They stuck to their bald vision. The bald was bigger in size than Tinubu’s bald. His paunch was bigger than Tinubu’s. His face, broader and younger, was made from another tissue of DNA.
So, when the candidate responded with his own optical matter, the drama cruised to another scene. He was on a gym bicycle. But they say he was not on a gym bicycle, or he was on a gym bicycle but it was not last weekend. It was many years ago when he had good health. It was him riding a Fan Milk cart. Fan Milk must thank the APC candidate for an unsolicited online sway and gain. They milked Tinubu for mischief. The company must be in a milky way of profit.
A newspaper that had once gloated over his health situation responded with a dramatic headline: “Tinubu roars back.” Even then, it turned from a visual matter to an audio script. His voice also hummed in the video of another gym shot. Tinubu became a universal man of many Hollywood parts. He was in fainting fit, he was still as a corpse at the back of a bike, in a truck, etc. They made morbidity into a joke at a human being’s expense.
Then he seemed to be turning the joke on them. He appeared in a suit, a dapper guy like a CEO or diplomat. Then later, he turned out with two children, a boy and girl bubbling with the solicitude of their grandfather.
The London trip was over. The spry fellow materialised here in Nigeria, at the airport, in a blazer, his face afire with smiles as he hugged Kashim Shettima, Simon Lalong, Adams Oshiomhole, et al. At the end, mischief bowed to the chief. He won out with the sheer physical vitality of his swagger.
This whole issue began even before he had a knee surgery. Then he had it. They wished him a cripple when he had it. Ironically, when the vice president – bless his soul – had a similar surgery, they prayed for him. When Tinubu returned from his surgery, they lingered with malignant doubts. In their eyes, he was still not fit to run for president. They did not say Osinbajo was not fit to continue as Nigeria’s number two citizen. Talk about pharisaic morality.
He ran for APC ticket. He did not sit at home. He was around, in the air and on the road. He even undertook a night ride from Sokoto to Zamfara, where he inspected the arboreal serenity of the northern backwoods. He was on television all the way. He even boasted in one of the states about his physical prowess in visiting every part. Not once did he falter. Not once did he faint. But prejudice must see what it must see.
Hence, they would turn the visual brio into infirmity. Some have said he should show his medical records. We should have a special medical council to reveal candidates’ health. I wonder in what planet they are inhabiting. If they cannot believe the facts of their eyes, is it the report of a shadowy committee? Those who hate Tinubu need no evidence to hate him. They just need him alive. Even if he dies, they will regret it. It would echo the lines of poet Walt Whitman, “My enemy is dead. A man divine like myself is dead.” When Nixon left office, he quipped, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” But he was still alive for kicking.
Those in the vanguard of Tinubu fake news are actually southerners who do not want to have a Yoruba candidate to support for 2023, especially if that candidate is one Bola Tinubu. They have been in the rear guard of anti-Buhari vitriol, especially because of his hegemonic policies. How could they live with a PDP that has hoisted a Fulani candidate in Atiku? To resolve their moral crisis, they saw a candidate, and viola! they found a hero. He is supposed to save them from hegemonic crisis. So they made common cause with the ethnic renegades who formed his core followers.
Such persons will not hear that he was mediocre as governor, that he divided tribe and faith under his watch, even repatriated non-indigenes, that he lies about what he achieved, that he fattens on statistical apocrypha, that he built a company while in office with one of our biggest supermarket. Even now that he is soliciting funds from his followers, no one remembers they regarded him as the no shishi candidate who is now milking them for chin chin. They won’t ask him to submit his offshore account. Let him make a sacrifice for his country. No. He must turn it into another entrepreneurial bombshell.
His followers, even those who call themselves intellectuals, would question every Tinubu claim, every ounce of success and doubt every evidence or even if he ever governed Lagos. Maybe Lagos is a myth like Atlantis. A newspaper reported his Chicago qualification. In spite of that, they are calling the university hoping to hear what they want to hear. As far as he is concerned, whatever he says, whatever he does, does not need the test of facts, but the poison of a cynic. They forget they have PHDs, or are professors. They are like the crowd in the Acts of Apostle, that “stopped their ears and charged forward.” Or Asahel, the soldier who looked neither right or left. It is one of the most potent stories in the Bible that few of our so-called prosperity and healing-obsessed clerics will never mine. A columnist who took him to Golgotha as chief executive is now his choirmaster. Another one who wrote a book to gospelise a sectional president has fraudulently tweaked the book and title for him. What a shame!
The protest against Tinubu is not about his health, or his ideas. It is about fear, not fact. But that other candidate’s followers and intellectuals so-called would not subject the man to facts, because it is not about what we want as a nation but who we should hate. It is not about him. It is against the man in Bourdillon. Many of them, in south-south and southeast, love Lagos but will not credit him. It is what psychologists call the fear of gratitude. They will not ask of their own states what they demand of Lagos.
In his crowds, we see less love than opprobrium. It is what Elias Canetti, the writer of Crowds and Power, attributes to religions that cry over a slain god. The Nobel laureate sees the crowds as originating from a “religion of lament.” He attributes it to faiths like Christianity. But critics have elaborated them to even secular crowds. Just as we are seeing today. Lament as a pathway to salvation.
As the campaigns warm up, let us follow what the Bible says, to prove all things and hold fast to that which is good. Not the twist of facts for tendentious mischief, like Bertrand Russell warned when he defined philosophy. He wrote that a square table can be looked at from a different angle and make us conclude that “there is no table after all.”
Henry Kissinger wrote a book titled: The Age of AI, and lamented how human nature, facts and civilisation are in crisis. Those who can read should pick up a copy. The 99-year-old set the world thinking. Maybe the czars of human eyesight can learn from this. It’s one thing to see, and another to know and then another to understand. In the words of poet Shelley, we need the power to imagine what we know.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with the Nation Newspaper
