TINUBU’S PLEA FOR FORGIVENESS AND THE POVERTY OF REMORSE
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, by asking Nigerians to forgive him if he has sinned against them, is attempting to reduce a record of calculated misrule to a matter of personal error.
That plea was not an act of humility; it was an act of evasion. It sought to reframe deliberate policies as unintended consequences and systemic cruelty as mere human imperfection.
But Nigerians know better.
Tinubu’s governance is not defined by mistakes. It is defined by intent.
Every major policy decision taken under his watch—especially those that have plunged millions into deeper hardship—is neither accidental nor unavoidable.
They were carefully chosen, fully anticipated, and ruthlessly executed.
The mass impoverishment of Nigerians is not collateral damage; it is a weapon. Poverty is engineered to weaken resistance, silence dissent, and make citizens too desperate to challenge power.
Hunger has become a tool of control.
This misrule also follows a familiar and dangerous pattern: divide and rule. Tinubu’s politics thrives on fragmentation—ethnic, regional, and social.
By privileging one group – his Yoruba ethnic group – while marginalizing others, he has deepened fault lines in Nigeria, turning diversity into a battlefield rather than a strength.
National cohesion was sacrificed on the altar of political convenience.
Worse still is the systematic corruption of institutions.
Under Tinubu, public systems are not strengthened; they are captured. Accountability is weakened, rules are bent, and offices are converted into private instruments of loyalty and patronage.
Governance becomes less about service and more about consolidation of power.
This strategy is not new. Nigerians have seen it before—most clearly in Lagos State, where Tinubu’s political grip has endured long after his tenure, shaping outcomes from behind the scenes.
Lagos became the blueprint: capture the state, dominate its institutions, control its politics indefinitely.
Nigeria, today, is being subjected to the same experiment—on a far more dangerous scale.
It is therefore dishonest to ask for forgiveness without remorse, and impossible to grant it without accountability.
Forgiveness presupposes regret. Regret presupposes acknowledgment of wrongdoing.
Tinubu has shown neither.
What he offers Nigerians is not repentance but public relations—a plea designed to soften criticism while leaving the machinery of exploitation intact.
A leader who truly feels remorse changes course. Tinubu has not. Instead, he persists—mean-hearted in policy, unyielding in power, and morally bankrupt in outlook.
Nigerians are not dealing with a president who erred. They are confronting one who calculated.
And history will not confuse the two!
