President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration has elevated propaganda over wholesome administration. It has been committing the greatest sin the late Harvard Professor Barbara Tuchman identified in her book ‘The March of Folly’ (which pointed out the mistakes governments have been making for 3,000 years – from Troy to Vietnam). This terrible mistake is that the leader knows it all. Every other ill that could befall an administration grows from that. Very few humans have had the experience Dr. Henry Kissinger had in high office.
So, we should take him seriously when he warned that ‘the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office. There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance’. That came from the book
‘Henry Kissinger, White House Years: The First Volume of His Classic Memoirs’. The meaning is that they use the intellectual ideas formed in the past to overcome new and different challenges. The more the troubles prove intractable and demand new ideas, the more those leaders would hunker down in their bunkers that they have dug for themselves, instead of seeking new ideas.
That tragedy is playing out right now as the President Tinubu’s administration has so far proved Kissinger right. For two years the President Tinubu’s administration has been acting like it could do no wrong and its critics must be deluded.
Unfortunately for Nigeria, even the National Security Adviser (NSA) to President Tinubu, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, appears to have also embraced propaganda. Just a few months into this administration’s life, Ribadu fluffed away the chance to keep the military on its toes in the fight against terrorism. He hailed the military instead. The newspapers reported that the NSA ‘lauded the Armed Forces of Nigeria for the successes being recorded in the ongoing fight against insecurity across the country’ during the Chief of Defence Intelligence Annual Conference 2023 with the theme: ‘Leveraging Defence Diplomacy, and Effective Regional Collaboration for Enhanced National Security’.
He said of the military leaders: ‘They have done an amazingly good job without talking and I believe that with the support and the resolve of the leadership we have today in our country; things will only be better. We are just four or five months old, but certainly things have changed and we believe that what they are doing, they are doing it right’.
The military leadership Ribadu praised to high heavens less than two years ago failed so miserably on the security score that even the United States government wants to intervene to save Nigerians from terrorists. If the military leaders were so effective, then why did President Tinubu sack them recently and appointed now service chiefs? So, on which indices did Ribadu base his thesis? Answer: Ribadu said that the ‘improved security in the Niger Delta region had led to an increase in oil production from 900,000 barrels per day about a year ago, to about 1.7 million barrels per day presently’. Finish! Really? Did Ribadu forget that the late President Umaru Yar’Adua granted an amnesty to the Niger Delta militants and Nigeria’s oil production creeped upwards immediately?
Oh, many swear that the terrorism afflicting Nigeria is not religious and directed against Christians. Please ask such people why Miss Leah Sharibu, one of 110 Dapchi Government Secondary School students kidnapped in 2018 by Boko Haram, remains in captivity, because she refused to renounce her Christian faith and convert to Islam?
14 May 2025, Leah Sharibu turned 22 years old. She was 14 when she was abducted. Nobody in government remembers Leah Sharibu as they don’t mention her in any speech. Ah, Nigeria failed Lear Sharibu the way no other government in the entire world has failed any citizen. Back to propaganda; in a report of 19 December 2024, Ribadu claimed that ‘the nation has achieved significant progress in its fight against insecurity, as the security agencies recorded 80 per cent success against kidnapping’.
Yet, just a day before Ribadu’s chest-beating in Jos, the BBC reported that Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) published the 2024 Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey, showing that kidnappers received about N2.2 trillion from Nigerians as ransom money between May 2023 and April 2024 – 1.41 billion US dollars or £1.16 billion pounds – and bigger than the N1.64 trillion Nigeria budgeted for Defence in 2024. For exactitude’s sake, I asked the internet this little question: ‘What is the terrorism rate in Nigeria?’
Answer: ‘Terrorism Index in Nigeria increased to 7.66 Points in 2024 from 7.58 Points in 2023’. And Ribadu became NSA in 2023!
As Kissinger observed, ‘High office teaches decision-making, not substance. On the whole, a period in high office consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it’. Kissinger himself brought new ideas to solve new or old problems, so he was decrying the same ill Barbara Tuchman had identified, he wasn’t praising or recommending it. In the 1970s and ‘80s Nigeria and the United States clashed often over African affairs as Nigeria, following new ideas formulated by Prof Bolaji Akinyemi while at the Institute of International Affairs or as the External Affairs Minister, offered real leadership to Africa in the anti-apartheid struggle. And Nigeria defeated the mighty USA and her mighty Kissinger. Today, Nigeria can neither lead nor follow.
Under President Tinubu, Nigeria ‘dey role like one yeye ball wen one yeye wind dey blow put for one yeye corner’. That was Fela the Afro-beat king’s decrying in pidgin English Nigeria’s rolling like ball blown aimlessly by the wind, into a nasty corner- like a rudderless ship.
