It would not be fair to describe Hon. Patrick Obahiagbon (IGODOMIGODO) as a bombastic person. But the bombast bombardment in his speech can be confusing but amusing.
In this chance interview, Hon. Obahiagbon, who also went round the country with Tinubu’s Presidential Campaign team, says the President’s frontal assault “on subsidy is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. (What he means is that Tinubu’s decision on subsidy is great). There are many more of such bombastic words. But he believes that Tinubu will deliver and take Nigeria out of the woods.
As you read this interview, we have tried to deal with his grandiloquence by putting in brackets a simplified version.
Excerpts:You campaigned vigorously all over the country for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to become the President of Nigeria. Are you fulfilled that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the President of Nigeria today?
My sense of fulfillment can be announced at mountain Olympus. The presidential campaign was quite enervating and mentally sapping no doubt but I was not didymusian that we were going to huzzah a political eureka at the terminus ad quem with a clinical and unstoppable presidential victory for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. (He’s simply saying that he was sure of Tinubu’s victory)
But LP and PDP are claiming that the process was flawed and that INEC Chairman did not follow through with some of what he’d committed the Commission to?
The claim by both the Labour and Peoples Democratic Party that the election was rigged falls flat in the face of a cornucopia of objective realities. So President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu had the leverage of rigging the Presidential election and he did not factor in Lagos state in the rigging plan? So there was a rigging agenda and former President Muhammadu Buhari who was then the Commander-in-Chief did not factor in Katsina state in the agenda? So when the Labour Party had a clean sweep in the South East and the Christian middle belt, there was no rigging? The truth of the matter is that President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu was the most politically prepared and as someone who joined other’s in managing the presidential campaigns all over the country, I can pontificate on the fact that he was not only the one who worked the most but he was the only presidential candidate that broke the shackles of meningistinal statism, ethnocentric chauvinism, gangrenous parapoism, syphilitic tribalism and all other fault lines of our national ossification and prebendalism. How could the Labour Party have won the election with no national political architecture and how was PDP going to win with its political house enveloped in a state of political topsy-turvydom and especially when it was inebriated in a Frankenstein aqua? (LP didn’t have the structure and PDP was disunited)
Where did your sense of confidence derive from?
My great sense of aplomb was situated in political pragmatism and historical realism from the point of view of the fact that it was audible to the deaf and visible to the blind that the People’s Democratic Party came into the contest corrosively decimated, performatively macadamized and centrifugally lacerated that it did not stand any chance. It was also pellucid to me that historically speaking, the Labour Party stood a ramshackle chance since it ran its campaign on the marshmallow of ethno-religious fault lines and the whirligig of the prevalent youth recusancy.
What is your reaction to the President’s position on the removal of subsidy?
Am maniacally bewildered that the righteous position of Mr President on subsidy has generated some verbal animadversion from some censorious analysts. What did the President say that was new? Mr President only gave a Presidential obiter dictum to what was already a self-fulfilling reality. It just goes to demonstrate the fact that we are our problems in this country. (Most people knew subsidy would be removed so President Tinubu merely did the obvious)
Many believe that Tinubu shouldn’t have said the subsidy is gone and that that was what created the chaos and panic.
It verges on hair-splitting and sciamachy for critiques to go to town calumniating Mr President as being culpable for the pandemonium that greeted his statement when he said at the presidential inauguration that the regime on subsidy has come to an end. He was only echoing a legal reality that the Buhari government has enthroned. Has there not been regular chaos in this aspect of our lives before Mr President’s statement? There was no basis for the chaos following his speech since this was a situation the nation was well aware of. Let us blame our mephistophelian profiteers, philistine carpet baggers and prebendal homo-sapiens. What we need right now is an audacious leader capable of providing himself as a political minesweeper and taking the big decisions. So from that point of view, Mr President’s asseveration on the subsidy indaba was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (What he means is that Tinubu’s decision on subsidy is great but we should blame profiteers for the initial chaos)
Do you believe that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will perform?
Am supremely confident he has the requisite mental pabulum, the leviathan sense of magnitude and sheer audacity to take both the right and big decisions that will lift the country from the bootstraps of economic quagmire, political phantasmagoria and social atrophy. His political history also proves that he is a political agglutinant with a gargantuan drive to provide the much-needed anodyne that would heal our pestilential and pestiferous national proclivities. (He is saying Tinubu will perform)
Some insist that we may end up with another situation similar to what happened during the Buhari years because age and his health are no longer as they were when he did the Lagos magic.
Again people are playing god here. Life and health are absolutely in the hands of the Great Architect of the Universe. In any case, with my impressions of him during the presidential campaign, he unmistakably comes across as a President that is as fit as a fiddle. Don’t forget that the Presidential campaign was one of the longest in our electoral history and yet he went through it with a eulogisable regime of mental magnitude and physical agility. I don’t worry for his health and let nobody be thrown into a state of heebie-jeebies on account of that. (Nigerians should not worry, Tinubu is fit and strong to deliver)