Tinubu: The challenge of moral leadership

The report recently that one Seyi Tinubu, son of sitting President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, took a plane in the presidential fleet to attend a private function in Kano is sufficiently improper to be condemnable.

But the deepest import of this is that it impugns the moral high ground that the president must necessarily stand upon if he is to lead this country aright. As a former U.S. President F. Delano Roosevelt (FDR) is quoted to say, ‘the Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That is the least of it.  It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.’

Seyi, who is not known to be a public official elected or appointed, who to date not been established to be in the service of government or in public service in any way was, according to the news, in Kano to watch a Polo game, an event that cannot be reasonably proven to add value in any way or form to good governance by the Bola Tinubu administration. The story captioned, appropriately it may be said, ‘Tinubu’s son abuses public assets, flies presidential jet to watch polo’ also noted that the young Tinubu was ‘received at the airport by some officials of the presidency, the Kano State government and the Kano Polo Club.’ He is said to be a polo game ‘enthusiast’ and even ‘the patron of STL Polo Team in Lagos.’  Very well.

But how an expensive public resource such as a presidential jet can be justifiably appropriated to serve Seyi Tinubu’s personal enthusiasm for his favourite game defies understanding.  The hourly cost to fly a plane even within the country include fuel at the current exorbitant price of aviation fuel, the wear and tear on the hi-tech plane, personnel and victuals for passenger refreshment. Why scarce public fund must be expended to service Seyi Tinubu’s joyride demands an explanation from no less than the President on whose back he is riding to do this. It is to be noted that his father is widely reported to own at least one private jet that he could have used.

Does the act to (mis)appropriate a public resource for personal use and interest constitute an act of illegality? In general principle, yes it is.  It is, in its many manifestations that are rife in the Nigerian polity, generically tagged as corruption.  However, in the particular case of Seyi Tinubu, lawyers are generally of the opinion that there is nothing specifically stated in law against it. As they are wont put it, whatever is not expressly prohibited in law is permissible. But the matter can be correctly in the realm of morality and appropriateness. Many Nigerians, except those in the present government, expressed disapproval of what amounted to an abuse of the mere privilege to be the son of a sitting president who, by virtue of his position, has easy access to utilise state resources albeit in public interest.  Admittedly though, in the work of high public officials, personal and public interest do cross paths once in a while.

But these can be discerned, defended, and tolerated by reasonable people. Seyi Tinubu’s trip in a presidential plane cannot be reasonably defended nor tolerated. Indeed, it speaks strongly for what Mr. Femi Falana (SAN) terms a ‘privatisation of the presidency of Nigeria.’

This behaviour is however not new to citizens used to brazen misuse of authority and power. There is an embarrassingly inglorious precedent in the Buhari years. In 2020, the daughter of  President Muhammadu Buhari took a presidential plane as reported  by a national online news medium, ‘on a “study tour” of Bauchi Emirate as part of her fieldwork for her ongoing Master’s programme in Photography at a UK university’. A public affairs commentator aptly described this as ‘unprecedented abuse of presidential powers.” Mr Buhari’s spokesperson defended the action as part of the entitlement of the president’s immediate family.

Nonetheless, the point must be made that all these are simply indicative of the terrible degradation over the years, of a sense of propriety of high public officials. First, there was a time in this country that public officers, irrespective of rank, were not permitted by the rule book to use official vehicles for private purposes, and certainly not to be used beyond a certain time of the day except by special authorisation.  Second, the story is told that First Republic Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa, severely sanctioned a close and senior official in his government for approving the use of  a government-owned plane to take Balewa’s homesick mother home. Indeed, the Prime Minister reportedly had not used the official plane because he travelled out of town for a convention of his political party, not government business. But these examples are from the days when there was an honourable public service worthy of pride and leaders worthy to be so called.

The successors of Balewa cannot claim to have no good example to follow. But it is a matter of personal choice as defined by character.  As the saying goes, a man’s behaviour under any circumstance is only as good or bad as his character. Put differently, a man of character, entrusted with immense authority and power, will, in the spirit of moral principles and personal honour, exercise discernment to refrain from a certain course of action, nay will not even conceive it.

To be continued tomorrow.