If politics is theatre, we are witnessing the stage today. The parades, the fashion sense, the rhetoric, martial music, cheers of a crowd, a baton changing from one to another. As it ends, it is both sad and soothing. For one, a parting of ways. For the other, a new pathway, a chance to deserve a place in the pantheon of governance. A swansong ushering in a swan. A pageant of a new day.
President Muhammadu Buhari, who once stood there so Jonathan could step down, stood there again for a second term. Now, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the Jagaban, absorbs the moment. What goes through his mind when he looks at the past years. The turmoil of campaigns, the trips from state to state. He danced, he spoke, embraced fat and thin, flew in the skies, combed the highways. He trekked the rough terrain and the smooth, embraced tribes and heard tongues.
He also faced the headwinds. Few thought he had the chance. So, they mocked him. They trashed his physical endowments. A wayward band mocked his hands and legs. Others pooh-poohed his tongue. They also lied about his body fluid and dissected his body into a disease, the analysis itself becoming a bigger affliction, a mental one. As philosopher Cicero says, “The diseases of the mind are more numerous and more dangerous than the diseases of the body.”
They had their realities: He could not walk. He might fall. He could not speak. If they did not see him, he was under the weather. If they saw him, something must be wrong with the weather. But he weathered the storm.
Would he think all that as he strides onto the podium today? Or will he ponder the way his biography was rewritten before his own eyes? First, they said he did not go to school. Yet, the illiterate thought the nation how to figure its finances. He had no way to solve the security problems, yet his template is tempting.
Does he think about God? He was a target and beneficiary of prayers. But the loudest came from those who said today will not happen. The heavens were going to fall. It reminds one of the prayers against Obama by the church over the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver. The rightwing churches were praying for a foul weather, or what they described as a rain of Biblical proportion to disrupt the nomination of the first black man in a major political party. I looked up the sky that day as I covered the event. It was a kind, soft heaven. Rains did not fall until their own convention in North Carolina, and it was chaos of heaven and earth that day. So, beware of prophesy, especially from prophets that Jesus Christ said he did not know. The church panted in their prophetic fiasco.
We saw that this year. Is Tinubu thinking of that today, and how faith is not always about God and prophecies stumble? Apostle Paul said: “Although there be prophecies, they shall fail. Whether there be tongues, they shall cease.”
A young man remarked to me the other day that Tinubu’s victory is the victory of love over faith. Those who bandied faith could not please God. Faith is important, but when we play faith and forget charity – which is love – we make it of no effect.
Hence Paul said, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
So, does he contemplate those so-called mighty men of God who revel in miracles and their earthquakes of faith when they turned a political campaign into a theocratic cry? Men who did not heed Jesus’ admonition that let the wheat and tares dwell together. Jesus, who came for peace for all, and said, “Peace I live with you. The peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth, give I unto you.”
Why did he suffer such hate, and still does? Why did some turn him into a vigil monster? What did he do to them? Does he wonder? They raked up drug issues that even the government of the United States has debunked. Benue State became a state in which two clerics belonging to the Holy spirit dueled for the kingdom. The people said “yes father” to the one who won, the new man being sworn in today. Are they saying the man who lost does not belong to the Holy Spirit? Sometimes, church leaders are, to quote Jesus again, by their tradition making the word of God of no effect.
But he could contemplate his own show of love all over the country. If he had been preparing for this day for 30 years, it was a show of love for 30 years. If you went around the country, and you started dispensing love decade after decade, you must be genuine. Or else, they would have found you a hypocrite. Today reflects the fruit of that love. The church must learn a lesson about charity today. Churches have been too immersed in miracles and the wonders of health and wealth to know that the show of love is supreme.
As Jesus also said, “Love works no ill against its neighbour. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” They worked ill against him. Such lack of charity accounts for the character in Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Tender in the Night, who cannot reconcile God with the woes and injustices of life.
If they show such ill will towards him, he knows his task today. It is like the words of Abraham Lincoln when he wrote is inaugural. His immortal words must ring today and forward: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Is he not thinking in those terms today as he steps there? Is it not a time for all to sheathe swords and brandish the olive branch, and shout peace? So, it is also a time for faith, so that the nation can move mountains. It is not the faith of clans, or the faith of rage, the faith of divisiveness, the faith of fear of the man who is the man of the hour. It is the faith of love, the faith in love. It is the sort of genuine love that James Joyce describes as “love loves to love love.” It means we should be dovish, not divisive.
This is also a love over generation. Many have seen the picture of Tinubu walking behind Abiola when the billionaire publisher was seeking to be the nation’s president. It was a dream taken to the slaughter by forces of regression. The nation suffered. The Yoruba felt cheated. Today is a healing across time. As Nixon said, “time is a great healer.” History has a capacity to heal itself like the broken bone of a toddler.
This is because we had trust in spite of the tempests of our history. And love destroys suspicion, and where trust stands, it is because of love. Confucius says, “without trust, we cannot stand.” But without love, there is no trust. It is love that opens the exit door to fear and distrust. Not a time to grieve but to give.
What Abiola did not have, Tinubu accepts today. It is an honour of history. It is history come full circle. German philosopher Nietzsche writes of history in his theory of eternal return. Today, June 12 returns to affirm and heal. No sense of triumphalism, no sense of boast, no slaughter, no dead. But the nation in one supreme hug of bears. That makes today doubly significant. So, it is also a faith in history that propels today. It is an offering across generations.
But it is faith that worked on the wings of love. As Apostle Paul noted, “And now abideth faith, hope, charity; the greatest of these is charity.”
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with The Nation.
