The adventures of "Sunday Gbokugboku" by Tunde Akande

President Tinubu still has the opportunity now to repent and rewrite what he is going to tell the Almighty. Let him cushion the pains of the oil subsidy removal, let him reduce the cost of government.

Sunday Gbokugboku is the moniker given to a diminutive man who worked at the General Hospital in Lagos Island, Nigeria, about forty-five or fifty years ago. Gbokugboku is Yoruba, which translates as one who works as a mortuary attendant. His work is to carry corpses. To be a "gbokugboku" is to be one whose duty is to carry the dead. Sunday Gbokugboku was made popular by a Sunday Times weekend human interest story of the work this man did and his experiences doing it.

It was the days when newspapers were newspapers in Nigeria, when they brought stories that relaxed you and made your weekend a pleasure. It was the days of creative journalism. Sunday Gbokugboku may have joined the dead he carried, and it is possible he is still alive; nobody has deemed it necessary to follow him up since then. He became so popular then that some rich men funded his marriage. His story and work brought to the vivid imagination of Nigerians what it is for a man to be with the dead for at least eight hours every day. He told the story of how he used to slap beautiful women who were dead in their buttocks, telling them, "you are now at our mercy, when you were alive you make "yanga", (pride) we couldn't touch you but now you are within our reach and you can't do anything for us". His work gave privileges he didn't ordinarily have.

Those adventures of Sunday Gbokugboku were relived recently not by a lowly person like the original "gbokugboku" but by a very high personality: the president of Nigeria, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, when his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, died in a London clinic. President Bola Tinubu was away at Saint Lucia, a Caribbean nation tucked away in one corner of the earth. While the president chose to go to that tiny country is still not known but he was there. Former president Buhari chose to die at this time when President Bola Tinubu was perhaps relaxing on the Island. France had been his country of relaxation, but perhaps because prying eyes needed to be avoided, the president chose this tiny Island. His aides said he went there because of a cultural tie to that country. But trust Nigerians, ever a doubting Thomas, they will not allow any leader to take them for a ride, they refuse to believe. At the end of the visit to the island State, President Tinubu flew to Brazil to participate in the 17th Summit of BRICS in Rio de Janeiro,.

Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu's spokesman, a great wordsmith, made a press release well crafted in the usual diplomatic style announcing the presence of the president in the country, back from his travels to bury his predecessor. But soon came another release, unsigned, which announced that President Tinubu had ordered his Vice President, Kashim Shettima, to lead a team to London to follow the corpse of the former president back to Nigeria. The word "order" was unpleasant. Has it become a relationship of master and slave between the president and his deputy? Or was it an overzealous member of the huge Tinubu publicity team who was making great and visible effort to demonstrate the greatness of his boss, Bola Tinubu, people speculated. Ilya Gandu, who announced himself as a Muhammadu Buhari biographer, quarreled with Bayo Onanuga, whom he thought wrote the release, accusing him of using a word that was inappropriate to describe the relationship between Tinubu and his deputy, Kashim Shettima. One thing nobody can accuse President Tinubu of is a lack of a grandiose attitude. He likes to do his things in a big way; he was the first president in the history of Nigeria to assemble a grandiose team of ministers even in an austere economy; Tinubu refused to admit he inherited a collapsing economy from Buhari until he got to Saint Lucia where he admitted for the first time that Muhammadu Buhari ran down the economy doing nothing. Tinubu has a 54-member cabinet. He also has over two dozen staffers in his information dissemination department. It seems that everybody whom Tinubu must give political patronage was brought into that department to the extent that there are clashes of nomenclature. It must be one of them that must have pushed out that offending release that made his principal look like a dictator who orders his deputy around. There has been no correction from the presidency. So, Buhari has a biography that Ilya Gandu co-authored. Buhari himself had denied Nigeria direct access to his inner recesses when he said he would not write any book. His reason was that he didn't want to insult the feelings of the children of those whom he might accuse. But he denied Nigerians a vital part of their history, the role played by Buhari in his ten tyrannical years, two as a military dictator and eight as a lover of only his Fulani ethnicity. In those years, Buhari's security agents, by acts of omission or commission, killed and maimed many Nigerians. Also, he changed the currency of the country abruptly and put many Nigerians in trouble as they had no money to spend. Some stripped themselves in open banks while some committed suicide or died in the struggle to get some money to spend. Tinubu believed that the currency recoloration was targeted against him so that he could lose the 2023 election.

So it was a surprise that President Tinubu became the "Sunday Gbokugboku" in those one week of Buhari's burial activities. Kashim Shettima indeed piloted the corpse in a Nigerian colored jet from London, assisted by Tinubu's Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila. Tinubu was on hand to receive Buhari’s remains at Katsina, the capital city of Katsina state. From Katsina, after an elaborate military parade, Tinubu took Buhari’s remains to Daura, Buhari's town, a town that became suddenly transformed with beautiful houses built by his political appointees from the town, all from monies suspected stolen from the government. Buhari himself built a modest house in Daura long before he became a military head of state, and where he lived till he travelled to London, where he died. At the burial ceremony in Daura, Tinubu was so close to the corpse, holding his chest with his right hand, staring straight into Buhari's eyes. What could be happening there? Was it a national salute? Was Tinubu speaking to Buhari? It was no longer Buhari but a corpse. The transaction at Daura became known when Tinubu addressed a team that visited him at the presidency a few days after the burial of Buhari.

The president complained aloud that since he buried Buhari, he had not slept well. During the Africa Women's Championship held in Morocco, the president was captured in a video asleep while watching the game on television. It was not Bola Tinubu watching the television; it was the television that was watching Bola Tinubu. But who was audacious enough to get that footage out of the presidency? Or was it planned as a publicity stunt by the presidency? After all, Garba Shehu, a former special assistant (Media and Publicity) to President Buhari, has told the nation in a book that he wrote that he told a lie to distract the nation away from the real issue of the sickness that assailed his boss in office. So we know that political operatives do lie. President Tinubu told his audience that while he was in charge now, he would not always be in charge and that one day he would give a report to the Almighty God over his service to the nation. How did he know that he would report back to God? He is not so religious; although he claims to be a Muslim, some Muslims claim that he can't recite elementary prayer chants of their religion. Some even doubt he prays at all except when he joins public prayers. The president said he got weak after the burial. But why did he have to make himself into a "Sunday Gbokugboku"? And why did he have to order his vice president and chief of staff to rush to London to accompany the corpse back to Nigeria? Doesn't Nigeria have a foreign mission in London that could undertake that function? Why did he have to put himself through that stress? Some think the 12 million votes in the North that Buhari kept for so long were behind the mind of Tinubu. Even though he didn't get the 12 million votes in his 2023 election because Buhari did not support him, or because Buhari himself had lost a big part of those votes because he did not perform well or because Tinubu was not a Fulani and so could not secure those votes. Tinubu still gave his heart to the burial of a tyrant that the majority of Nigerians, except his tribe of Fulani, did not like.

Buhari acknowledged his wickedness. Before he left office, he asked Nigerians to forgive him if he had done anything wrong to them. To drive it home that he needed that forgiveness very badly, he was reported to have urged his wife, Aisha, constantly to ask Nigerians to forgive him whenever he was being lowered to the grave. Buhari knew he did wrong; what about the blood of those innocent youths at Lekki Tollgate in Lagos that he spilled? Buhari knew he may not make it to Aljana, and so his reasons for asking for forgiveness. That is accepted in Islam. Tinubu, seeing a helpless corpse of Buhari, might have momentarily feared God. He told an audience that he would report to the Almighty God one day. He might be thinking Buhari had nothing but wickedness to report to the Almighty God. A journalist of high repute, Sonala Olumense, called Buhari a pretender-patriot. Tinubu was visibly angry with the governors. He had been improving the revenue of the government and had been transferring this money to the governors who had not been taking care of the people. He didn't tell his audience that he had been overburdening the people by overtaxing them and by removing the oil subsidy. He has been doing exactly what Solomon, a significant ruler of Israel, did to his peril.

The complaints of Tinubu have another angle to them; it shows that Nigeria is not well structured. If each federating component is structured to allow them to control their finances and spend them and be responsible to their people and not to a central government, Tinubu or whoever becomes president after him will not have to fear what to report to the Almighty when he becomes a corpse, as Tinubu saw Buhari become. Some people are optimistic that Buhari will make Aljanah, but many are not. I'm one of those many. President Bola Tinubu still has the opportunity now to repent and rewrite what he is going to tell the Almighty. Let him cushion the pains of the oil subsidy removal, let him reduce the cost of governance. It is amazing the amount of money Tinubu has mopped up from the people. They are meant to provide for the people, as the president himself said, but they are not being so used. So what's happening? Somebody somewhere is "eating" the money and laundering it abroad. The fear that entered the heart of Tinubu will soon vanish; it doesn't take time to lose such occasion-provoked fear of God. So while it lasts, Tinubu should take time urgently to restructure Nigeria. This is the only way to let the governors be responsible to their people. President Tinubu should also put more effort into agriculture. Remove hunger, and you solve the problem of the people. He should also take urgent action on the health of the poor. Most of the thinking now on health is concentrated on the upper class. These are the things the Almighty God will ask when you get to him. Mr. President, this will be your greatest advantage from your "Sunday Gbokugboku" adventure over Buhari.

First Published in METRO

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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.