President-elect Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s plane erupted into the sultry sky and left France, whose beauty Hitler envied and where Charles de Gaulle tenanted his genius. Destination: Abuja. His return was awaited, to some for good, to others for ill. But when he came out of the aircraft, he blew a boyhood kiss and his hand transported it in a wave to the cheering crowd.
He unveiled his soul in a smile as he walked down the aircraft, followed by the incoming first lady, Oluremi Tinubu. The video seemed deceptive, a touch post-modern. Behind him were vice-president-elect Kashim Shettima. Other dignitaries in tow, including Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila and Plateau State Governor Simon Lalong. Did they come with him? No, they entered the plane to welcome him before he led them out. So, he stepped onto the tarmac in the firelight of a pageant.
Some expected him to limp. He strode. Some expected him to be lean. He was robust. For those who wanted him to look pale, he was ruddy. Some anticipated a triumphal swagger. He was folksy. While a picture of virility, some eyed infirmity. So, to many, it was an applause for a homecoming. Cynics homed in on something else. Hence, they saw a patch instead of a wave, gloom in place of a visceral cheer.
To quote Shakespeare, “Are not some whole that we must make them sick?”
Like Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Return of the Native, a homecoming is about going back to root. That was what Tinubu did. It was a return to Abuja, where he heard INEC chief Mahmood Yakubu’s aplomb voice announce him president-elect, where he had his situation room under Trojan of works Babatunde Raji Fashola SAN, where he slept at 4 am or not at all in the combustions of campaigns before victory’s champagnes popped, where he hoped and steeled himself against despair, where many pelted accusations and clerics swore.
The return of the native is not always, as Hardy’s tale shows, to a setting of unity. But it challenges the cooperative instinct of the native. The Nigerian native, that is. He who must rise above cant and cannot be a tribalist or fanatic but a fan of all. He returns as a native, not a nativist.
Hence, the first matter on the burner has been who heads the National Assembly. All kinds of views rend the air. He belongs to the executive, not the legislative branch. But once you win the election, you become not just the head of the country, but also of the party. That is the presidential way. He wears shifting hats. When some say the senate president must come from southeast or south-south, he must ruminate what is good for the country, and good for the times. He must not forget what is good for him to work as a party man, and more especially a partner as president. It is time to dispense with Rudyard Kipling manifesto, “East is east, west is west and never the twain shall meet.” That is, he is not thinking Igbo or Yoruba, but Nigerian native.
Time to rise above LP or PDP, but clutch Nigeria in the sky. He knows, as a past master, that no single formula works. He will not succumb to the semantics and polemic of a sectional intelligentsia raving without logic except those cooked to discredit their own people. Hence, he said as he arrived, that he has to consult. That is the impulse of the native just like his kiss – it blows into the air without borders.
He knows that this is a nation divided. This is where the tribe and tongues differed. Where the cleric went to church and made the pulpit a shotgun. Where phone calls about religious war belied pieties of holy men and exposed the shenanigans of men of power who wanted their black shirts to transfigure into cassocks in the credulity of their followers.
He knows that the PDP gave away its endowment in an orgy of self-fragmentation. They broke apart to break down. It was like the United States under George Bush where the Cold War lost its frostbite when the Soviet Union collapsed without a shot. It broke into many nations, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, et al. Putin looked with wistful disdain as his nation and empire kneeled on the world stage. No surprise over the war today.
So, too, Tinubu understands the hysteria over NDLEA and passports and Abuja status. A native must understand the rage of cousins, however blind. They know they are broken. They came apart to come apart. They split to be conquered. They were warned of the endgame. It is how a literary critic named G.D. Killam described such self-confidence. He called it “insistent fatality” in reference to Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things fall Apart. The ancestor was king Oedipus, who knew the fatal end but would not change course. Even the devil in the Bible knows his end but he would not repent. Ditto Judas Iscariot.
The nativist is not welcome. Hence, he arrives as the native. The native does not chew up his nativity, but eschews nativism. In a multi-ethnic society, the definition of native happens in context. If he is Afemai, he is not to deny he is an Afemain native. That is clutching his nativity. But when he is dealing with the Ijaw, he looks at him as a human first and Nigerian second, and that makes cooperative living possible.
If he is in Jos and wants to run as governor, he is nativist if he must first run as Berom or Jukun or Angas. But if he runs as a plateau person first, there will be no need to look at the tribe, but ideas and character. However, if he gathers his ethnic group as his first strength, he generates suspicion and others will do same. That is what engenders nativism. Hence, when Sunak presented himself for prime minister in the United Kingdom, he did not invoke Asia. He ran as a Brit. He was picked as a Brit. No Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi held a meeting in the party to say this is our son.
That is the root of the indigene currents in the last election. Don’t wake up nativist embers in others who only said, you are a member. The London mayor never had a majority of Indians. Neither did Obama win with a majority of blacks.
This is the lesson to learn from Lagos. Anyone should be governor anywhere if he is a Nigerian by heart, and not a face of a foreign sentiment in their own nation. The indigenes will roar and that is where we give birth to indigene-settler tension, not only in Lagos but also in a place like Plateau.
The same applies to faith. You cannot win by turning the church into a party machine. We hope Christians learned from the last election. We have to learn to make other things native to us. Be a native to ideas of 21st century, a native to infrastructure and anti-corruption, a native to the rule of law, a native to justice and good education.
The native must embrace the power of technology, with its disdain for old thinking. Software is now gradually succumbing to artificial intelligence. It is a brave new world where new jobs, new configurations of economy open new vistas for a nation as raw as Nigeria. For instance, a new job known as prompt engineer will privilege the arts, and English majors, in writing prompts that will change the face of communications. A new Nigerian native is home to this disruption of thinking.
With such thinking, we focus less on blood ties but the spirit of living together. Just as Shakespeare wrote, “In the spirit of men, there is not blood.” That encapsulates the return of the native.