In the music world, three major groups have been linked with the song, which has the lyrics “Now that we’ve found love, what are we gonna do with it?” The original song with the chorus “Now That We Found Love” hit the waves in 1973. It was produced by The O’Jays and written by Gamble and Huff. That was followed by the 1978 version of the Jamaican reggae band, Third World. Their chorus equally sounded: “Now that we’ve found love, what are we gonna do with it?” However, the music is famously associated with Heavy D & The Boyz, featuring Aaron Hall. They featured “Now That We Found Love” in their 1991 hit album, titled Peaceful Journey. It was regarded as a major pop/hip-hop/reggae-infused track that samples and interpolates the “Now that we’ve found love” chorus heavily.
Though some would see that the content dwells on the ephemeral, music itself is life. But the message is not just about the heart’s desires of a man or woman. It is equally adaptable to politics. After a politician has realised his ambition, what next? The answer should be straightforward-legacy- but we shall come back to this in not-too-distant time.
This Fourth Republic has produced five presidents thus far, and each has come with his own style, politics, and strategy. President Olusegun Obasanjo was more of the bully, the militician, so to speak. Old soldiers never die, so they say, and he really infused military tactics into democratic governance between 1999 and 2007. He took his opponents by surprise, and he was bullish about security, where he had to. He showed himself a patriot who brooked nothing other than the unity of the country he swore to defend with his life, having fought in the 30-month civil war, which ravaged the country between 1967 and 1970. He was reputed to have taken the surrender of the breakaway Biafran Republic. The man was respected and called Baba. At a stage, he became more of a bull in the China shop, especially when the third-term agenda broke. The governors and senators of that era feared he could undo many of them if they allowed him a third term. So many of them conspired to do pro-third-term by day and anti-third- term by night, and the agenda died. Then we had Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. A supposed gentleman who started by probing into the predecessor’s investment in the power sector instead of building on the foundation that yielded 10 power generation stations under Obasanjo. He lost the initiative to reset the nation’s electricity supply travails but set up the machinery to review the electoral laws, which was built upon by his successor, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan. The Ijaw man came in as a civil president, who insisted ‘My electoral victory was not worth the blood of anyone’. He practicalised that by putting in place an independent INEC, and one that failed to work for his electoral victory. He standardised the voter register and introduced some form of integrity in the elections. Maybe Jonathan came into the Nigerian scene before his time because much of the civility he introduced in managing political opponents and inter-party relations got reversed immediately he left office as his successor, Muhammadu Buhari, was more interested in regime stability than election integrity. That gave rise to the phenomenon of vote buying as an electoral legacy. Under him, it was believed that the electoral commission, INEC, came under some form of pressure, and he refused to assent to the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2019, which his caucus believed might not guarantee his victory.
He failed to produce a desired successor as Bola Ahmed Tinubu, an aspirant for the presidential ticket of his party, outsmarted the sitting president and took the ticket.
Now, Tinubu is a study in the Fourth Republic Presidential power game. Here is a man who started as an enthusiast in activism and a philanthropist in chosen causes. He joined the struggle for the actualization of the annulled June 12, 1993, election, led by the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), and went into self-exile. On his return, he wanted to get back to the Senate, perhaps to finish the task that got aborted in the 3rd National Assembly, when General Sani Abacha sent the lawmakers packing with his coup of late 1993, but the leaders of the Pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation, Afenifere asked him to contest the governorship of Lagos State, after the group’s leader in Lagos, Alhaji Ganiyu Dawodu, (GOD of Lagos) declined to take the position. No one knew he had an expansionist project until he emerged as the governor in the Centre of Excellence. His Justice Forum became an avenue to harness an organic political structure, which kept expanding until he registered the Action Congress (AC), following the fall of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) in the aftermath of the strategic annihilation of its political control in five of the six South West States, with Tinubu’s Lagos the only survivor. The AC became the foundation for what we can today call the Jagaban footsteps to power.
Some years back, a respected political leader, who is now a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) said he was one of the people who advised Tinubu on his return to Nigeria at the start of the aborted Third Republic that if he wanted to thrive in Nigeria politics, he must have a strong hold on the media and maintain steady pool of academics (egg heads) as strategists. Looking at where he is today, you will easily conclude that the man imbibed that doctrine and got embedded in it.
From the Governor’s office in Alausa, Lagos, he built a structure that has now become trans-Nigeria. Signs that Senator Bola Tinubu had adopted the said advice started showing from the early 2000s. Every December, you saw him play host to notable academics from the Diaspora. I used to see Prof Segun Gbadegesin, who was a leader of the Afenifere in the Americas, and other eggheads join up with him in those days, and they were housed in some of those Ikeja chalets. Then, his media structure started growing with an agglomeration of the big names, comprising the first, second, and third generations. And he succeeds in keeping all happy. That’s quite unlike some politicians with a far smaller crew of media friends who would, within months, start playing one section against the other.
A politician who maintains strategic media, political, and intelligence teams would most likely remain ahead of his peers in strategy and execution. Perhaps that was responsible for why the Buhari camp failed to stop him from emerging as the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2023. Again, the song props up: “Now that we’ve found love, what are we gonna do with it?” Now that Tinubu has attained a lifelong ambition, what story is he leaving for history to compose? That’s another way of putting the lyrics. Tribune columnist and Professor of Mass Communication, Farooq Kperogi, said in his column Notes from Atlanta on Saturday that Tinubu was applying Abacha tactics to sustain himself in office and ensure re-election. I won’t totally agree with the professor. I would say that the Nigerian opposition has been busy providing Tinubu with the tools he needs, and even those he doesn’t really need to succeed in annihilating them. If Tinubu has been maintaining the different layers of strategic teams since the early 2000s, and he has kept growing them over the years, which of his colleague politicians is doing something similar? Atiku’s media office was huge and strong from 2005 to 2007, while he engaged President Obasanjo in the power game, but it has diminished over the years. The political parties hold their meetings, and their leaders retire home without a strategic team combing the field for reviews and previews or what they call environmental scanning. Are there strategic teams that keep working on the outcomes of their meetings after all the public shows? Why do they keep harbouring fifth columnists who readily sell their agenda to the opposition, or is it the sitting government? The chairman of a party is in the pocket of another opposition leader, as is the secretary and organising secretary. So, how do they hope to withstand the government in power? Why does our system allow people to do political 419 and get away with it? Veteran journalist and former governor of Ogun State, Chief Olusegun Osoba, once said that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was one of the earliest politicians who adopted strategic media engagements and that he was part of a team that regularly met with the sage in Ikenne. He said that the former Premier never missed any of the appointed dates. Many of today’s politicians make themselves easy prey of the opposition when they go about with the thinking that the media and the academics know nothing about politics. Now that President Tinubu has found love, his next search should be for a legacy that endures. History is the custodian of today’s truth and the lies. He needs to work for the welfare and security of the people so as to create a bigger name. He needs to avoid the praise of the Bretton Woods agents and seek genuine applause from his own people. Our people may look foolish when they gulp stomach infrastructure rather than demand social infrastructure, but they still have the capacity to discern good governance. That’s why they still sing the praise of Awo, more than fifty years after he left power. And he was in government for eight years.
(Published by the Sunday Tribune, March 22, 2026)
