Balling with Bola Tinubu at 73, by Lasisi Olagunju

(Monday lines 1, published in the Nigerian tribune Monday 31 March 2025).

The Nigerian presidency is an energizing elixir. He has shown that he is very effective in breathing life in dry bones. To old creaking engines, it gives deep cleaning; It replaces worn parts and updates the lubrication system. OlustaGun Obasanjo went there and turned from a stork imprisoned with a clean -shaped women’s little woman. Since then Balogun Owu has refused to age. Muhammado Buhari entered the Peaky Villa, sick and sick. He left his place with his engine and the reinvented frame. His successor, Super Rich Lion of Bourdillon, broke the internet with gaffes, slips and falls during the 2023 countryside. He hasn’t spent two years yet in the villa, but he also had a dramatic Tam (turn maintenance). The fallen at the minimum, the vibrations and the fire fires all disappeared. Its cooling system is now fresh and constant. These and many others are what the man celebrated two days ago when he officially turned 73 years old, robust and rounded. He had many beautiful things about him from those who seek (or already have) his mercy and his favor.

Where life expectancy is less than 50, having seventy years more is an advantage. William Shakespeare refuses the passionate properties of age and pampers the liveliness of youth. In his “passionate pilgrim”, Shakespeare leaves lines of contrasts on aging for us to read and reflect. He writes that “elaborate age and youth cannot live together”. And he explains why: “Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care; youth like the summer morning, ages like the winter climate; youth like courageous summer, age like naked winter. Youth is a sport, the breath of age is short; youth is agile, the age is zoppo; youth is warm and daring, the age is cold; the youth is wild. It is tamed. ” Shakespeare ends those parallelisms with a scream of refusal and acceptance: “Age, Aborgo; young man, I love you”.

Now, who is old, who is young?

People in the sciences say that each person is two ages. They call a chronological age (number of years that a person has lived); The other who say is biological, the functional age of a person. Yoruba have a third category; They call him Autan (years after death). Short or long, the first is guaranteed for everyone; The second is a makeshift factor and choice; The third is largely determined by how we spend the first two. Very few are blessed with all three.

Less than two minutes from a city called Iragbiji in the state of Osun it is called another called Ikirun. About ten minutes from my Eripa. Oba Lawani Adeymi of Long Gone was Akinrun of Ikirun. The OBA has collected fame through Yorubaland for the audacity of its longevity. He thought it was his right to live for a long time and claimed him strong. When the courtiers and all those who courted his mercy they wished him a long life, Oba Adeymi’s standard response was “dandan” (is mandatory). At over 70 years, the people of Adeyemi did it OBA in 1945. His enemies already thought of him in the starting room. They said that he would soon leave the space for them to carry out. There are legends that say that the actual death of the voices has arrived with every voice of his death. Nobody soon warned anyone before they stopped wanting the death of Oba. While the years turned in decades, the enemies of the OBA dried, those still alive became his friends. They had to; Ó di dandan.

Adeyemi remained on that throne until 1989 when he bowed in silence. His people still celebrate the years in his kingdom not because they were unusually long, but because they were largely positive in the life of the community. He was the years, he was functional. Even more important, he had Aturi. The OBA had many children; He did not spoil them with the booty of the building. They do not need an irregular honorary doctorate from back universities to stay high. The OBA has trained all his children in such a way that the deceased king continues to live much after his death. His nephew was a head of service of the Federation; Another is one of the richest in 2025 Ibadan. The rich did not need paternal taxation before becoming the “babalja” of his trade. President Tinubu knows the Crystal Hospital of Akowonjo very well in the area of ​​the local government of Alimoso di Lagos, belongs to one of Oba Adeymi’s children. One of the youngest is a veteran in the Osun State Assembly House.

Where do I come from, we rejoice in the joyful, which is why I join in congratulating our president for his 73rd birthday. But while celebrating that occasion with a pomp on March 29 – one day by the sumptuous villah of Villa, I hope it has reflected on what its presidency meant for the official Nigerian powers outside. Many are blocked on the rough and dusty road for survival. They trace their misery to the leader’s joy; their poverty for the pleasure of the president. They think that their agony is the servitude of power. It’s not fun.

A democracy that repairs only the leaders is a state of the arcade. Yet while we tell all these things, wisdom requires that we march seven steps near the king and six shades. In Alex Danchev’s “Waltzing with Winston (Churchill),” we are told that “the loyalty that focuses on number one are enormous. If on the road, it must be supported. If it makes mistakes, they must be covered. If you sleep, it must not be disturbed by a disturbance. (But) if it is not good, it must be a cap.” Literally, for the Astra of pole it is to attack, hit or fall with or as if with a poleaxe. This is the price that all those who support “number one” must pay when they don’t behave well.

The president predicted the sacrifice for his birthday, but his birthday table showed an assorted, sumptuous surplus, everything. His Wongheeded policies that he described as “the right thing to do for the future of our nation”. His wife is a shepherd, he should blow in his ear that only the living praises the Lord. Can a leader whose subjects wallow in desire to be blessed by their prayers? Among the Bantu of Eastern, central and southern Africa there are a people called mashona. The anthropologist Denys Shropshire in a 1931 magazine article tells us that in that place there is a bird called Mukaranga Wa Mambo. The narrative says that this bird “begins by making excited cries, acute and chatter until it was treated, after which to fly with chirps happy with a branch branch, brings the traveler to the honeycomb promised”. A hungry and marginalized citizenship has neither honey nor applause for insensitive and banqueting sovereigns.

The vulture is Yoruba’s longevity totem; A symbol of death and rebirth. Yoruba says that Igúnnugún (vulture) would not die if it is not old. But they celebrate more than years. What a man has put in his age is more important than the years. This is the reason why I find Yoruba’s opinion on aging and old age somehow intriguing. There is an ambivalence here. They despise the ugliness of the advention but they crave the duration of the duration of vulture. They say why the vulture does not die young, they too have to live longer than life. But they qualify it: the years must be years of peace and abundance. They divest what they see like vulture’s longevity, but not its unpleasant totality. They want a long life but do not age with the debibility that connotes. They ask if you’ve ever seen a sick bird set. They want life without his comorbilities.

The Nigerians see their government as a colony of vultures. In aging and eating, the vulture is a bird of patience. Do not breastfeed the sick health. Instead, wait for the hungry to die; It insists that the march meat is a good food. Vulture is also a bird of opportunity. Nigeria is a vulture field. Ask why? I ask myself and I ask the biologists of vultures (ornithologists). They tell me that the vultures approach the dead or dying beings from openings: mouth, eyes, nostrils etc. And Nigeria has many of these gaps. Our vultures begin to sell off from courage, then they go to other internal organs for lunch. They move to the muscles and tear the fabrics. For dinner, they access smaller spaces for the tendons, chew other parts of the body; They clean the carcass and pass to the next meal. When their land completes its annual revolution, they launch the drums to celebrate their victory over their people and earth.

When the vultures surround you, be sure to stay alive, don’t die. The Nigerians really tried not to die for the vultures of the power to rejoice. Now, if the food avoids the vulture, what will vulture eat? The human being called Yoruba says in a proverb that when what is edible is not available, what is not edible becomes edible. The vultures feed on vultures if this is the only carrion available. What you feel in the rivers, Lagos and Kano are hungry vultures that surround the weak vultures for food.

We celebrate the president at 73 years old. He will live his life longer than his presidential mandate. But we must tell him that his government maintains his paintiness; The description of the member of the NYSC Corps of his kingdom as terrible was appropriate. The city is bitter; The city is unpleasant.

How can we bring back our country – if we have ever had one? I’m not the only person asks this question. But I will risk adding that if you are not satisfied where they took your feet, the rational direction is walking for change. Ask those who know the ways of the vultures. If you do not want vultures around you, the effective way is to show them what scares them: the effigy of a dead vulture.