Freudian Slip And President Tinubu's Word "Morphine"
One old man whose prerecorded speech looked to me as though it had been put together by AI to give the usually stumbling, halting Tinubu a sense of speech continuity.
By Kio Amachree
Letters from Stockholm
One old man whose prerecorded speech looked to me as though it had been put together by AI to give the usually stumbling, halting Tinubu a sense of speech continuity.
All those taxpayer-funded elocution lessons cannot cover up Tinubu’s unique-sounding bushman English, and every time he opens his mouth I wonder: how did this very ordinary-looking man get so far and convince so many people that he was the special one?
What really went on behind closed doors? Because something about this whole horror story does not add up.
For a moment, listening to the speech, I thought he was going to address the persistent rumours surrounding his health and his frequent visits to Paris. Instead, we got another speech identifying some of Nigeria’s ills and their causes while promising a whole lot of things we have heard before from presidential speechwriters.
Then came the word “morphine.”
For a President already facing continuing public controversy over old US drug-related records and litigation concerning their disclosure, allowing the word “morphine” anywhere near a major presidential address was, in my view, an extraordinary communications mistake.
Was it simply an unfortunate choice of words? A Freudian slip? Or did somebody inside his communications team fail spectacularly to understand the political baggage surrounding the President?
No serious professional special adviser should fail to notice the obvious problem of putting the word morphine into the mouth of a President whose critics are already discussing decades-old allegations concerning narcotics investigations.
It was asking for trouble.
Looking at the frail Tinubu, surrounded by the extraordinary devotion of so many political lackeys in Lagos State, I keep asking myself why this man, out of more than 230 million Nigerians, became President.
Where are the well-educated, articulate, sophisticated Nigerian men and women who can speak clearly, command a room and carry the dignity of the presidency without all this theatre?
I find the whole thing embarrassing, and the sooner Nigeria moves beyond this political generation, the better.
If Tinubu truly believes he can come and go, say and do whatever he pleases, then he is badly out of touch — and so are the people enabling him.
And the opposition needs to stop treating this like an old boys’ club.
Stop calling him “Bola” as though everybody is sitting around after dinner reminiscing about the good old days of Nigerian politics.
This is not a gentlemen’s club.
There are no niceties when Nigerians are being killed, kidnapped and terrorised.
This is not an old-school reunion between elderly politicians who have spent decades circulating around the same political establishment.
This is about the lives and deaths of millions of hardworking, innocent Nigerians.
And when ordinary Nigerians look at two old men making old-man speeches while the country burns around them, many must surely be asking the same question I am:
What the hell is going on here?
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