Yoruba people have a proverb that translates, “When a youth stumbles, they look ahead; when an elderly stumbles, they look backwards.” As a child, I thought the proverb was talking about how children and elders contrarily process the embarrassment of falling in public. I assumed that an elder looks backwards when they fall because it would be too shameful to look elsewhere. Growing older helped me appreciate the wisdom the proverb encodes. The youth and the elderly look in opposite directions when they miss their footing to draw upon sources of wisdom available to them.
Foundering during one’s youth is a chance to look ahead and learn from the experiences of those who have walked a similar path. There is always someone ahead whose wisdom, insight, and experience one can readily call upon. An elder looks behind them to review their stumble because they are expected to have accrued enough experience to reflect and make amends.
When President Bola Tinubu fell on his face during the Democracy Day celebrations, I briefly wondered what the Yoruba in their wisdom had to say about the direction an elderly president looks when they lose their balance.
What happened to Tinubu was, of course, a physical fall and not the metaphorical one that the proverb reflected on. Yet, tripping up on Democracy Day of all days— especially for a man who boasts he helped fight military dictatorship—symbolises his presidency more than anything else. He is a faltering leader, and I want to believe that even he knows that this presidency of a thing is way beyond his much-vaunted abilities. Forget the repeated excuse of him inheriting a bad situation (every president since 1999 has said the same anyway), this man has confronted a situation whose scale neither his administrative abilities nor the propaganda machine that propagated his managerial capabilities can possibly sustain. His second year as president has started counting, but his leadership remains as unexciting as it was on Day One.
I observed two sets of responses to Tinubu’s fall. Younger people, especially those with social media accounts, thought it was funny and were quick to restage the moment he slipped in many satirical skits that instantly flooded social media. Given the anonymity social media platforms offer, the moral accountability and cultural codes of respect that would otherwise restrain us from laughing at the pitiable sight of an old man falling down are far looser. When you are young and vibrant, I suppose an old person whose body has succumbed to the will of nature can be a comic spectacle. Even if it occurs to you that you could one day end up the same way, the possibility will still be so remote that you could laugh.
Older people, especially those closer to the generation of the president, did not think his tripping over was funny. Not only did they demonstrate a fellow feeling for the president, but they were also mortified by the irreverence of youths laughing at an elder. Despite the justified criticisms, I do not see the satirists as lacking either empathy or even good manners. The man who stumbled on Democracy Day was no random elder but a political figure already despised by a younger generation for everything he represents. Few things in life can possibly be as delightful as the irony of a person who sells their soul to acquire invincible political power losing their physical balance. It was the same reason the internet went wild when former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe tripped and fell on a red carpet in 2015.
Perhaps because I am caught between the older and younger generations, I am ambivalent at the sight of a president falling on his face. When you have seen videos of people falling on the road out of the hunger Tinubu’s policies induced, his awkward situation loses even its schadenfreude worth. Even if you want to laugh, you are reminded that millions of us are only divine grace away from collapsing either due to hunger or the stress of living in Nigeria under his leadership. Nigeria is tough at the moment; so tough that survival is a traumatising sport.
Things have reached the point where everyone is advising everyone to take to farming. On the surface, this looks like a wise counsel but it is a non-solution. How is a country supposed to survive the real challenges of the 21st century when the majority of its citizens resort to subsistence farming just to alleviate hunger? Would they also need to take up animal husbandry to meet other dietary needs? Given how much agricultural produce Nigeria wastes every year due to the broken value chain of agriculture, our troubles are not food shortages. There is food, but the majority of us just lack purchasing power. Give it a maximum of one year, and it will eventually dawn on the proponents of mass farming that the agricultural practices that led to what is called “food security” in richer nations have long gone beyond the pre-modern planting methods we are being encouraged to take up in 2024.
Tinubu himself was embarrassed by the Democracy Day fall given how he tried to ameliorate the embarrassment with a joke as soon as he got the chance. For him to have alluded to the pillorying he received on social media, he must have been self-conscious about it. What I truly wonder is the nature of his shame: that he fell on his face or that the physical fall metaphorises his presidency? Tinubu’s reaction to his own stumble brings me back to the earlier question: when a president stumbles, in which direction is he supposed to look? I suppose a quick retort will be that a wobbly old person like him should look into their past to draw the necessary wisdom to process their fall.
Trouble is, which past would a man with Tinubu’s history be looking into? His past is pretty recent. Virtually every biographical detail about the man pre-1999 (family history, educational path, and even career trajectory) when he became the Lagos governor is under contention. The rest is so enshrouded in overlapping scandals that he is one president who will probably never be able to launch his autobiography. Whatever he has to say about himself (or his biographers’ document) will instantly be investigated by the online sleuths who, with their access to a world wide web of information, will puncture through the façade.
If his pre-1999 life is draped in the mystery of who he truly is and the road that brought him here, his personal history that unfolded after he became governor is no less fabricated. His alleged leadership record, wildly celebrated by a band of hired intellectuals and professional sycophants, has been a hyperbolic celebration of what is essentially mediocre leadership. His praise singers drummed him up and trumpeted his praises to Aso Rock. Now that he is up there, it turns out there is very little quality in his past that he can draw on to salvage Nigeria.
He is not stumbling because Nigeria is a difficult state to administer. No, he is falling because he was promoted beyond the degree of what suffices as his past—his administrative record, experience, and leadership sagacity—can sustain. The incoherence and lack of coordination in his government give him away as a man who has subsisted on propaganda rather than a true achiever.
So, here we are, stuck with a stumbling president who is too old to look in the forward direction and has very little in his past to call upon at a crucial juncture in the life of the nation. Without the benefit of a past and a future, the best he can do is to look lost.
Punch
