The matter of the moment in the last couple of days has been the rift between the Osun state government and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission EFCC. While Nigerians have continued to comment on the subject, a major gain of the nation is the people’s realization that if their president is careful and observant, he can easily become personally conscious of public opinion. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu passed that simple exam of the week by intervening in the EFCC-Osun rift. The strategic intervention has not only soaked the political tension in Osun; it has dramatically converted the tension into a debate for all comers sending political jobbers back to the drawing board to find new controversies to create. Tinubu must take advantage of the gain by staying away from relying on only the version of a story told by allies, aides and supporters. For each controversy, a leader must seek to comprehend all the dimensions of the stories he is told. Before Tinubu, a few presidents relied on the one-sided story at the expense of their image. For example, President Jonathan should not have relied entirely on a supposed technical advice to change his plan to personally visit Chibok. If a president who is armed to the teeth is dissuaded by men of technical and security expertise from visiting a troubled spot, what does he expect the public to feel and into what use is he expected to put his gamut of security convoy? We submit that there is always a difference between technicality, law and politics. It is against this backdrop that the decision of President Tinubu to put a pause on EFCC’s action in Osun state ought to be interrogated. I have watched many colleagues on national television marshalling several points to disagree with the intervention. Some of their arguments especially the legal options they have raised are no doubt quite persuasive but President Tinubu’s intervention was not designed to deal with a legal topic. The argument that he should have left the matter to his Attorney General establishes clearly that the commentators had made up their minds that it is only through law that matters are resolved which is not true. I want to believe that whereas the commentators were looking at the letters of the law, the president was thinking of the spirit of the law. Law to my mind is useless if its handling cannot prevent the dismemberment of society. Those of us who think Tinubu’s intervention was not bad are not in any way suggesting that EFCC was pursuing any hidden or illegal agenda. Indeed, we are strong among those who have found cause to commend the current leadership of that reformed anti-corruption agency. So much has changed there; prosecution has improved, convictions have increased while it has embraced an effective inter-agency synergy that is yielding great positive results. We also agree with the argument that the EFCC was acting within its legal mandate in its Osun mission. The point to be made therefore is that it is simplistic to see the president’s intervention as evidence that the EFCC did some wrong. What appears to have unsettled the president was not EFCC’s work but the public opinion that the agency was being used to destabilize a sitting state government so as to empower the political party of the president to take over the state. Almost every Nigerian believes this which the state concerned has helped to amplify across all digital media organs. Even the EFCC would be shocked to learn that some of its staff do not only feel so but may have confirmed it privately to their friends and family. What this suggests is that most people must have imagined that it was the president who may have directed the EFCC to do the hatchet job on Osun state especially as he was quoted to have said recently that all is fair in politics. With only a few months away to his own re-election bid, there is no way Tinubu would have adopted the option of ‘silence is golden’ and allow the damaging public opinion to take root. The president actually has many more interventions to make to reduce the unduly high degree of politicisation of Nigeria. In the last decade, the only industry flourishing in our country is politics. It has become so attractive that people are prepared to kill to get into office. Painfully, threats are carried out using the privileges of public office. Members of the ruling party at the national level are usually able to access the instruments of coercion to perpetrate violence. The president must therefore intervene to halt the trend whereby people in government often seek to overwhelm members of the opposition. That is not democracy It is worse when the opposition in a state such as Osun is seen by the public as strong enough to overpower a state government – a development that is likely to happen only through the help of federal power. If the same overpowering opposition party in a state wins the next election, no one is likely to believe that
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