Sometime in 2022, when it became clear to me that Tinubu would win the APC presidential nomination and go on to win the presidency, I shared my thoughts with an acquaintance from Southwest Nigeria who lived in the US.
After our back-and-forth dialogic contestation, she seemed to give up and resign herself to the inevitability of a Tinubu presidency.
Then she startled me with a wail of utter, disempowering despair: “So, Remi Tinubu will be Nigeria’s First Lady? God forbid!” Or words to that effect.
I was taken aback. I had assumed she would be more troubled by the prospect of Tinubu, whom she disliked, becoming president than by Remi assuming the informal, unconstitutional role of First Lady.
I asked why Remi’s First Ladyship worried her more than Tinubu’s presidency.
Her answer was blunt: Remi’s arrogance, she said, was already insufferable. She appeared to know Remi up close. Elevating her to First Lady would catapult that arrogance into the stratosphere. She added other unflattering observations about Remi.
I never quite grasped the sheer terror that the thought of Remi’s First Ladyship inspired in my acquaintance.
For more than two years now, I have watched and waited for signs of the unbearable arrogance she warned me about.
I saw none until the now-trending video of Remi impetuously ordering Osun State governor Ademola Adeleke, in full view of the cameras, to wrap up his speech within five minutes or risk having his microphone cut off.
She paced back and forth before the podium like a wounded lion, barking commands at a sitting governor.
For me, it was not so much what she said that was concerning. Governor Adeleke can be annoyingly flippant and unserious. It was how she said it. The ice-cold contempt. The imperious airs. The evil eye. The barely suppressed rage.
My acquaintance is probably not surprised. If she remembers our conversation, she is likely saying, “Farooq is finally seeing what I told him three years ago.”
Perhaps Remi is only now acting out her true self in the presidency. As Michelle Obama once observed, the presidency does not change people; it reveals who they really are.
