Many explanations have been given for the undeclared political separation, if not divorce, between the two reigning sweethearts of Lagos. Part of it is how Akinwunmi Ambode, the sitting governor, is a lone ranger. He is accused of playing the team game of politics like a lonesome missionary among crusty natives. In other words, Ambode is a kind of a haughty colonialist rajah.
Of course, there are other analyses of how it all went wrong. But there is one that nobody is talking up. It is that all systems made by men or of men are subject to a shelf life or best-by date iron lore. Beyond that date, no contraptions of man is of any use even to itself, save it is reinvented.
Now, if you went into a pharmacy or food shop and bought some items, the labelling comes with best-by dates. It all means that the products you just paid for can best serve you within a stated time window. Beyond that, it becomes toxic, poisonous, almost like Ambode, in the eyes of his frenemies. Ahiazuwa.
Of course, relationships are not thought of as commodities, but they are. And this includes political relatedness and relationships. Additionally, they are man-made and are like pharmacy prescriptions, consumables. And in being that they are biodegradable. That is, even in the “absence of human” interventions, the elements alone will ensure that these relationships unravel or atrophy on their mere beingness.
In fact, a physicist friend who commented on my first draft spoke of entropy, as the near physicist equivalent of best-by date notations. According to him, “Entropy is the general trend of the universe (and I suspect political relationships) toward death and disorder.”
In other words, there is nothing exotic in the collapse and disunity of the Ambode-Tinubu political knot. It is in the nature of things. Their political “bromance” has had its shelf life.
Let us do the simple arithmetic. For Tinubu to be the capo he has become, it means the following: he ruled for two terms of four years each. That gives him eight years. He chaperoned the Fashola eight-year reign. That adds up to a 16-year vice grip on power. Now, Ambode has just “done” four. That gives Tinubu a 20-year imperial lien on Lagos politics. Given a generous lifetime of 70 years of which active adult years are about 30, it may be safe to say that Tinubu has curated Lagos by the jugular for 2/3 of his active adult life. That adds up to 2/3rd of a generation. And new generations, by iron lore, call for change or disruption.
In other words, the system Tinubu built is bound to suffer accumulated entropy. That is to say, Ambode could not have done any better, even if he killed himself for Tinubu. It is just that the system Ambode inherited is in heat for disruption. It’s only that it is all happening during Ambode’s tenure. This is not to say Ambode has done well or not. It is just that there are other more potent forces at play.
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So, the question suggests itself. Will the new Tinubu man, Sanwo-Olu, do better? The answer is, of course, no, save the system is revamped. No power systems survives generations without a revamp. This is an iron lore. It happened to globalisation, to Marxism and others. We only need to recall, for instance, that there was a time globalisation was hotter than fire. Today, like the Ambode-Tinubu tango, globalisation is unravelling. It is not about the persons, a Trump, an Ambode, at work. It is about the forces, the elemental forces, at play. And no man can stop an idea whose entropy has come.