Taxis, cows, shoes and Nigeria’s grass-to-grace politics

On Saturday, September 18, 2010, Goodluck Jonathan stood at Eagle Square, Abuja, and told Nigerians what would become the rallying cry for his campaign in the 2011 elections.

“In my early days in school, I had no shoes, no school bags,” he told a crowd of supporters, adding that he carried his books in his hands, walked miles and crossed rivers to get to school every day.

Four months earlier, President Umaru Yar’Adua had died after an illness that left the country rudderless for months. Jonathan became Acting President only through the National Assembly’s “doctrine of necessity,” and inherited the office.

As northern power brokers insisted it was still their turn under the PDP’s zoning arrangement, the soft-spoken man from Otuoke tiptoed away from the noise and presented himself to Nigerians with his touching story.

The reactions that followed vetoed internal party computations, thanks to the viral I-am-Goodluck-Jonathan campaign. In April 2011, he beat Muhammadu Buhari by over 10 million votes.

Four years later, the man Jonathan defeated rode on an even humbler story to turn the tide in his favour. Among other things, Buhari claimed not just humble beginnings but present-tense poverty.

In October 2014, Buhari said he had to call his bank manager for a loan to buy the APC’s N27.5m presidential nomination and expression-of-interest forms. Weeks later, he declared, “I have around 150 cattle because I am never comfortable without cows.”

He listed a house each in Kaduna, Kano and Daura, all built with borrowed money. With a few humble houses, a few cows and a name synonymous with anti-corruption, the voting public rallied behind the tall General and flung him into Aso Rock in February 2015.

Last Wednesday, President Bola Tinubu wrote on X that when he first arrived in the United States as a young man, he drove a taxi to pay for his education and postponed school for months to save enough. He would go on to study at Richard Daley College and Chicago State University.

Tinubu tied the story to the student loan scheme, NELFUND, which he said has disbursed over N372bn. Arise TV’s Rufai Oseni even called it “a new one,” in the many stories the President has told us of his past life.

He recalled that Tinubu had told the BBC during the last election that he inherited substantial real estate from his parents. However, Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, came to the President’s aid, saying he had met Tinubu’s classmates in the US.

Grass-to-grace stories are not new. In politics, they are a dime a dozen. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva reportedly sold peanuts and shined shoes as a boy, and lost a finger in a factory. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he sold tea at a railway station.

In Kenya, President William Ruto hawked chickens by the roadside and won his 2022 presidential bid as the nation’s “Hustler-In-Chief” or champion of the “hustlers.”

Although the hustler image got Ruto the job, the ‘fantasy’ flew out the window pretty fast when Kenyans felt shortchanged by his 2024 Finance Bill. Jonathan’s shoeless-schoolboy story won him many hearts in 2011.

But after four years in office, hardship had hardened those hearts. Voters want more than inspirational stories. They want a track record that validates a second tenure. After all, one good turn, they say, deserves another.

The best of stories cannot, on their own, do the job of credible development records. Nigerians do not need to see themselves in the president’s life as a taxi driver. They want to see their lives improve tangibly as his presidency taxis them to prosperity. And where a leader has both a humble story and a strong performance record, he should dwell on the performance record even more.

To his credit, Tinubu’s Student Loan Scheme has disbursed over N372bn to over 1.6 million students nationwide. Nonetheless, students make up only a fraction of potential beneficiaries in the Renewed Hope Agenda.

Meanwhile, the President has taken his gospel of renewed hope to the South-South over the weekend.

In Uyo on Friday, he commissioned a cluster of projects delivered under Governor Umo Eno’s administration, including a new airport terminal, airport hospital, an aviation village and several roads. On Saturday, he was in Port Harcourt for the APC rally, his second since he flagged off his campaign in Kaduna last month.

The main opposition, on the other hand, had cause for shock. On Thursday, the Federal High Court, Abuja, declared the David Mark-led caretaker committee of the ADC illegal and voided its actions, including the primary that produced Atiku Abubakar as presidential candidate.

The ADC has vowed to appeal, citing a July 2 judgment by another judge of the same court that affirmed Mark’s leadership. Atiku has since called it a calculated attempt to weaken the party and frustrate his candidacy, insisting that no court ruling can keep him off the 2027 ballot.

Maybe he can tell his own story about how he went to school against his father’s will as a boy, and hustled his way to success in real estate and the transportation business.