What Tinubu Learnt In Chicago.

The public record of Bola Ahmed Tinubu's controversial life and times tells us that in 1975 he went to America and enrolled at the William J Bogan Junior College in Chicago. In January 1977, after the death the previous December of Chicago Mayor Richard Joseph Daley, the college was renamed in his memory. Daley was a five-term Mayor of the Windy City, leader of the Democratic Party machine in Illinois, indispensable ally of Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys, and the patriarch of a family that has come to dominate Chicago politics, and define its cityscape, across two centuries. Daley's son, Richard Jnr, became Chicago Mayor for twenty- two years; another son, William, was Secretary of Commerce under Clinton and White House Chief of Staff under Obama. The position of Committeeman for the 11th ward of Chicago has been held, uninterrupted, by a succession of Daleys for over sixty years, essentially a family heirloom. America, founded in bloody, resonant opposition to monarchic excess and hereditary rule, has nevertheless found politically irresistible the magnetism of the Daleys, the Bushes, the Kennedys, and even the Clintons. It is as well that Mike Royko's seminal, irreverent biography of the elder Daley was titled simply, tellingly, Boss. Droll as ever, Royko wrote that Daley's parents- in law had lost a daughter but gained an employment agency, so rife with Daley relatives were Chicago's municipal payrolls. In Nigeria,much has been made of the contrast between Tinubu and Awolowo, but it can be surmised, on the total evidence of his overt career and his palpable covert endeavours, that while in letter he may be an alumnus of the Richard Daley College, in spirit Bola Tinubu is a good old boy of the Richard Daley school of machine politics.

Like Richard Daley, Bola Tinubu worked his way up from modest beginnings, even though in the latter's case, narrative elisions and biographical black holes preclude a fuller account. Like Daley, Tinubu has succeeded in politics despite a lack of oratorical skills. Just as since 1955 it has been typical to speak of Chicago politics in terms of the Daley machine, with its powers of patronage and vote-raising, since 1999 it has been impossible to describe Lagos or Southwest politics without mentioning the Tinubu name. He has shown uncanny skill in the acquisition and grooming of protégés and proxies, advisers and admirers, waterboys, fixers and shills. Tinubu has achieved this by sheer force of personality, by his eye for talent, by his ability to cede visibility but not control, by resilience and intelligence, by generosity of spirit and wallet, and by knowing each man's or woman's price. He has vast reserves of that very American virtue, chutzpah, known on the streets of Lagos as ' open- eye'.

In his own time as governor of Lagos he exercised absolute power, sidelining and skirmishing with a succession of deputy governors, from Kofo Akerele-Bucknor to Femi Pedro. Out of office he has wielded phenomenal influence on the levers of government and politics, installing his three successors in the governor's mansion, securing for his daughter, Folashade the role of Iyaloja( literal Yoruba for ' matriarch of the market', and for his wife, Remi, a third consecutive term as Senator for Lagos Central. Governorship and local council elections in Lagos have merely seemed to ratify his irrevocable personal choices, and the furtherance of his much- vaunted, near-scriptural 'masterplan'. His house in the upscale district of Ikoyi has become both a vatican for political stratagems and a mecca for political wayfarers. As catspaws in the governor's chair Tinubu has cannily favoured bright technocrats like Babatunde Fashola, Akinwunmi Ambode, and Babajide Sanwo- Olu, with no natural political constituencies or power bases of theirs. He is the guiding light, and grand patron of the Mandate Group, the shadow government- cum- APC caucus which serves as a clearinghouse for just about every crucial elective and non-elective office in Lagos. To have secured the imprimatur of the Mandate Group means that one can the prospective electoral candidate can start shopping for the celebratory aso-ebi. A demonstration of the Mandate Group's muscle was seen in September 2017 when, in the face of Governor Ambode's quest for a second term in office, they were able to secure a party nomination form for Babajide Sanwo-Olu, and ensured that he, not the incumbent Ambode, became the APC nominee. Ambode, having had office thrust upon him, found himself harshly overtaken by events, finding that he had only been granted the illusion of actual power. In office he had become allegedly too big for his agbada, and had cut off perks and sinecures traditionally reserved for party grandees and ward bosses, like the lucrative municipal waste disposal contracts. By some accounts, he had even stopped answering the phone calls of his erstwhile benefactor and godfather, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. It was a lesson in the fickleness and vengefulness of political bedfellows, and a degradation rite unprecedented in Lagos politics. In 2010, when Fashola was Lagos governor, and had dared a similar rebelliousness against the grey eminence, he had found himself buffeted by a shadowy group calling itself ' The True Face of Lagos'. This group took out paid adverts in the major dailies, hinting at underhand deals and dark goings-on in the governor's office. Many saw in this very public act of blackmail… The impeachment of Governor Fashola was a real possibility, given that the members of the House of Assembly owed their loyalty to Tinubu.. Once the terms of a rapprochement were reached, ' The True Face of Lagos' slunk back into the shadows of the urban jungle. If, like Richard Daley in Chicago, Tinubu is often credited with having transformed Lagos into a modern megacity, it must be admitted that much of the work took place after he had left office. It was no accident that Babatunde Fashola's campaign sobriquet was 'The Actualiser'. What should have been Tinubu's signature acheivement, the expansion of the Lekki-Epe expressway, only began in 2006, a year before he left the governor's office.

In Chicago, Richard Daley maintained power by simultaneously holding the positions of Mayor and Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, being, in effect, both star player and utterly biased umpire. He could, and did decide, who became Governor of Illinois, or indeed who could become President of the United States, owing to his ability to corral crucial electoral college votes by means fair or flagrant. When JFK won the 1960 Presidential race, it was plausibly alleged that ballot stuffing and rigging in Chicago - Third World, banana republic antics - had delivered the deciding votes. The Democrats had exercised such absolute power over Chicago politics that one of Daley's mayoral predecessors, Edward Kelly, is said to have handpicked his own Republican opponent in one election.

It was instructive, and politically ironic, that in the preamble to the 2015 elections in Nigeria, a group presumably affiliated with the then ruling PDP produced an American-style attack documentary titled 'TheLion of Bourdillon'. It was aired by AIT in March 2015, and rehearsed unsupported claims that had been floating online for years. The documentary purported to list Tinubu's many alleged underhand acquisitions and investments, and the way that Lagos had literally become his fiefdom. Its very title, half admiring, half resentful, suggested a grudging regard of Tinubu's antagonists for a figure that had become, steadily, one of the big cats of the Nigerian political jungle. That Tinubu, and not the presumptive APC nominee, Muhammadu Buhari, should have been the target of such a pseudo- forensic expose, suggested just where his adversaries thought power would lie in a likely APC government. Or perhaps it was merely an attempt to tarnish candidate Buhari by association. Much of the cosmetic surgery and spin doctoring that Buhari's image underwent between 2014 and 2015 had been bankrolled by Tinubu. The Vice Presidential running mate was, after all, a former Lagos attorney- general and member of Tinubu's coterie, Yemi Osinbajo. The APC itself, in one of its former incarnations as the AD, had been largely funded by Tinubu. The putative national chairman at the time, Bisi Akande, was not seen as his own man, but purely as an avatar for the grey eminence on Bourdillon. The same was thought of the party chairman in Lagos, Henry Ajomale, who seemed to have been chairman forever, but was considered insufficiently independent of mind.

Part of Bola Ahmed Tinubu's appeal, part of what may equally infuriate his opponents, is that he has actually been a Pimpernel in plain sight. He has always been able to maintain what Americans call ' plausible deniability'. The defining image of the 2019 elections in Nigeria was of two bullion vans lurching through the gates of Tinubu's Ikoyi mansion on the eve of the polls. During that same 2019 election season, after his wife Remi Tinubu had stood for and won reelection into the Senate, his public comments were that he hadn't wanted her to go back. Party loyalists in Lagos had insisted on her candidacy, and being a loyal party man, even to the point of sacrificing conjugal warmth, he had had no choice but to relent. There are constant allusions to his generosity, aided of course by wealth that seems to have emerged, apparently, by immaculate conception. Noblesse oblige is a constitutional and cultural necessity for Nigerian politicians. The Polish- British sociologist, Stanislav Andreski, who spent time at NISER in Ibadan in the 1960s, recalled that Ahmadu Bello used to go on political tours with his robes stuffed with wads of currency, to be doled out to importuning constituents. Tinubu was selfless and altruistic enough to have sold a London house in the 1990s in order to fund NADECO's anti- Abacha struggle, when the absence or unlikelihood of recompense made it all the more worthy. He was also selfish enough to have acquired, through his governor's office, the compound of the Lagos College of Education in Ikosi-Ketu, in order to house his radio and television station. He was a longtime advocate for fiscal federalism and restructuring who nevertheless vehemently opposed the Jonathan government's feints in that direction when the APC seemed poised for federal power. Tinubu emerged as a political figure in the 1990s, part of the movement that coalesced around Moshood Abiola and the annulled June 12, 1993 elections. To be considered a progressive then one simply needed to be against military rule, and for a return to procedural democracy. If one had been forced into exile, like one of Lenin's deported intellectuals, then one was doubly progressive, having suffered for one's convictions. In the 1990s, when I was a university undergraduate, Tinubu's unthreatening drawl used to waft out from the shortwave broadcasts of the anti-Abacha pirate station, Radio Kudirat. He was part of a band of politicians and dissidents who had fled Abacha's iron- fisted rule, and had banded together in London and other Western capitals.

Upon his return to Nigeria in the aftermath of General Abacha's death, it was recognised by party fathers of the Alliance for Democracy in Lagos that Bola Tinubu had suffered much, and deserved to be rewarded with the governorship. Over the years he has sacrificed even more, laying down his wallet and his bullion vans, foregoing conjugal solace, holding in check his own ambition while helping others ascend to the ultimate echelons.

Were he to succeed in his 'lifetime ambition' of becoming Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, kingmaker and power behind several thrones, lion of an ecosystem of ward bosses, fixers, and bullion vans, meister of machine politics , would have vaulted over his biggest hurdle yet, and secured his greatest triumph. Richard Daley would be proud.