[OPINION] Seyi Tinubu and the love that money buys

By Abimbola Adelakun

By now, you have probably seen Seyi, the president’s son, at presidential meetings and functions where he, ideally, has no business. Remember, his father had to ban him from attending the weekly meetings of the Federal Executive Council, saying his access was “undue.” Undeterred, Seyi still showed up at the swearing-in ceremony of Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun as the Chief Justice of Nigeria. While his meddlesomeness has spurred some people to wonder if he has any other job besides being “daddy’s boy,” I have also wondered if he is just another self-unaware member of the Nigerian political class or is intentionally shaming his father.

Since his father got into office last year, Seyi has been doing public charity and ensuring he is seen doing so. Through his associates, he has given out relief items to people involved in a fire disaster in Nasarawa, gifted “palliatives” in Abuja, and sponsored some medical outreaches. In September, he donated N500m to victims of the Maiduguri flood. Seyi flew to Borno with a team of associate-sympathizers and was received by the state governor, Babagana Zulum. If Nigeria were not a place where even governors have been thoroughly emasculated into subservience, why would the governor set aside his official duties to host the president’s son? The president’s son is unrecognized by the constitution, and Seyi has no business interloping in official affairs.

Anyway, one of the striking parts about Seyi’s visit was not just the money he donated but the speech he gave. It was more thoughtful than the perfunctory one his father had delivered a week earlier when he too visited. Seyi also assured the victims of the flood that he—or his foundation―would be further intervening until they were back on their feet. But in what capacity would he be making this “further” intervention when, as the son of the president, he is neither a private individual nor possesses an official designation? He cannot claim to be a neutral observer who is merely concerned about people’s welfare because the basis on which he does what he does is his filial connection to the president. If he were not the president’s son, Zulum would not have rolled out the carpet to receive him in Borno. Yet, it was not his place to intervene in the Borno crisis. He has no business doing any of these things.

Just last week, Seyi announced that he would once again be saving Nigerians from a bad fate. A foundation he had founded said they would be alleviating the financial hardship Nigerians face while procuring prescribed medication by creating a drug bank that would serve over 10,000 indigent people in 60 hospitals around the country. Just like in Borno, Seyi’s speech, read by a representative, as the scheme launched was compassionate, better than the yawnfest his father reads on national television on the few days in a year he deigns to talk to people. Seyi’s speechwriter managed to throw in all the right phrases about the burden people face accessing life-saving medications. This drug bank, they say, is more than medicine but a “commitment to dignity, to equality, and to the fundamental human right to healthcare.”

Now, that is where the problem lies. It is not enough that the president’s son is taking up initiatives that should be carried out by designated government officials—and in the process spending a humongous amount of money no one knows where he gets it from—but he also subtly disrespects his father in the process. Because there is no way Seyi is talking about the necessity of his drug bank initiative and the “added weight of crushing financial hardship” people confront without indicting his father whose poorly wrought policies have so impoverished the populace that they now need the son’s charity.

A couple of days ago, Seyi also shared bags of rice branded with his visage to some poor women who were then pressed to pray for him for his generosity. You know that it was not those women’s prayers he needed; he just wanted to be seen as a benefactor. Look, if Seyi truly cared about those women, he would not give them rice. He would face his father and tell him to take his paws off their destiny.

One can, of course, argue that Seyi has a prior record of charity, but still doing it especially while his father’s administration is falling apart gives the impression that Seyi is trying too hard to be seen as the successful son of a failing man.

Seyi’s adult life has been tied to his father; everything he has ever achieved professionally was muscled for him through daddy’s totalitarian politics. Given how that same father is diminishing in value and therefore unlikely to hand over valuable political capital to his children as their inheritance, the hope of a dynasty on which politicians’ scions calibrate their future political ambitions is tanking. The son seems to have read the handwriting scribbled everywhere and wants to cut loose to build something apart from daddy. That is why he jumps from Maiduguri to Ibadan, trying to prove he has the compassion—even if not the capacity—his father sorely lacks.

Seyi’s struggle to win the hearts of the folk even as his father is losing them is not exactly a political patricide—it is doubtable if he is even gutsy enough to even dream of attempting that—but impressioneering a better image for himself and generating some social capital, that while can be related to Tinubu, is still not Tinubu. While the savviness is consistent with the character of high-stakes politics, Seyi is not doing anything excitingly different from the jeun sókè jeun sápò political calculations that made his father. One would think a man that young would depart from his father’s politics of orifice that swings back and forth between mouths and agbada pockets, to try something refreshingly new, but Seyi seems wedded to the old and, frankly, boring methods of giving people a mere 0.000000001 percent of what has been stolen from them.

His aspirations might be legitimate enough, but there are challenges ahead. There is a good reason dynasties hardly hold up in this part of the world. First is the issue of the competitors. Far too many people want what Seyi’s father has, but since they know they will not get it, they have settled for subordinate positions. While they may have submitted to Tinubu’s powerful grip after serially losing in the power game against him, they are somewhere seething, raging, and biding their time. When the time comes to bid for the throne, they will easily oust daddy’s boy. They are far more desperate and more practiced in the Game of Thrones, and he is no match for them. Besides, our people too get tired of serving successive generations. When that time comes, they will remind him that they cannot serve his father and still serve him. Whatever they owe their family patriarch must be considered paid off at some point.

Second is that money, the basis on which the public relates to the Tinubus is the flimsiest of all the grounds on which one can build a lasting relationship. Love that flows with the tide of money will ebb when it ebbs. The Tinubu family is one that nobody will love if not for their money. That, of course, includes Mrs Tinubu who needed to hand out huge sums of money just to stimulate interest in her farming and fabric projects. Even now that she has had a Nebuchadnezzar-sized statue carved for her, nobody who has not been pre-paid will bow before her graven image. So, yes, Seyi too can try his desperate best but the love he will get will come with a receipt.

Culled from The Punch