President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was on Saturday declared the winner of the Man of the Year 2023 Award by the Editorial Board of Irohinoodua, the first pan-Yoruba media online.
The media group made this known in a signed statement by Omolade Adegbuyi and Babatunde Samson Abiola on behalf of its Editorial Board, a copy of which was made available to newsmen in Lagos, saying that President Tinubu’s choice was informed by his dominant and overwhelming impact in the politics of Nigeria and was arrived at after widespread considerations and extensive debate.
Irohinoodua, the first pan-Yoruba news website established in 2003, had earlier named the Ekiti State Governor, Mr. Abiodun Oyebanji, as the Governor of the Year 2023.
According to the Irohinoodua Editorial Board, Tinubu was picked for the award among an array of leaders across the country who featured in the consideration, disclosing that so many names came up for consideration but none compared with the vigour and flame generated by him across the country throughout the year 2023.
The media group described President Tinubu as a man taken for dead but emerged from bitter condemnation to sweet celebration, pointing out that the selection of his name by the board members was unanimous.
“President Tinubu emerged after considering his grim journey of life through thorns and iron-cast cobwebs in Nigeria’s most diverse and separatist election. He was the most vilified and debated personality in Nigeria’s political space in 2023.
“He encountered the toughest roadblocks mounted by principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness in high and low places, yet he emerged to win the bitterly contested presidential election,” Irohinoodua said.
Speaking further, Irohinoodua quickly recalled that the Nigerian electoral contest had a primordial historical charter whose content since the 1960s had been determined by a few top military brass who either ruled the country by themselves or through their hand-picked proxies, noting that the table changed in 2023 to break what it described as a half-century grip of the political system by a few military cabals to bring about the emergence of Tinubu as president of Nigeria.
“In 2023, a new force that broke the half-century grip of the political system by a few military cabals emerged in Tinubu.
“It was the first time in Nigerian post-independence history that the president was not the candidate of the known and only hegemony that had held the country in firm grip for 50 years,” it said.
“Tinubu was the subject of the nasty scorn of political enemies who made futile attempts to dump him in a pit and cover him with garbage. He stood and fought every stage of the battle with vigour and energy, both physical and spiritual.
“Tinubu was caught between apriori enemies, those who wanted him dead without trial, and a bullied and subdued population of Nigerians who saw hope in him and worked silently for his victory at the polls. In his birthplace, the traditional political forces spat on him and fought with brawl, but their efforts became a fleeting grain in the dust,” it added.
Irohinoodua, however, noted that Tinubu had, since he came to power, fought with rare determination to turn around a comatose structure put asunder by years of misrule, corruption, favouritism, and ineptitude that had been the lot of Nigeria since the post-independence years.
According to the media group, the president has since he came into office demonstrated rare candour after putting in place a clear goal of economic and social recovery, saying that his courageous step taken to probe the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) was remarkable, based on the fact that successive administrations had never bothered themselves with such.
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