Eminent lawyer and politician, Oba Mekunu Owolabi Salis, has commended President Bola Tinubu on his ‘Man of The Year’ Award 2024, by a combined team of editors of ThisDay and Arise News Group.
The Ikorodu-born Lagosian who is the first Black African to travel to the North and South Pole within a season, described Tinubu as a maverick politician who does not necessarily conform to established norms, as aptly referenced by the panel of editors.
Corroborating Tinubu’s audacious non-conformism, as referenced by the Editorial Board, he remarked that Tinubu made a Southerner the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory.
He hailed the combined team of editors of ThisDay and Arise News for the objective sense of appraisal which informed their choice, despite their relationship with the president which as a subject of common knowledge, had for sometime,not been too cordial.
He observed that initially when the news of the award greeted the public space, not a few must have received it with a pinch of salt, thinking with a skeptical twist of mind that the award might has been motivated by mischievously derogatory motive just in the sense in which Adolf Hitler was awarded ‘Man of The Year’ by the American TIMES Magazine, despite his ignoble role in triggering the violent socio-political eruption that was to explode into the Second World War in the course of which he reportedly sentenced six million Jews to the gas chamber, in a massive racial genocide unprecedented in the annals of human existence.
“But going through the body of criteria as adduced by the juridical committee of editors, ‘for his audacity in introducing very unpopular but promising reforms, driven by his sense of convictions rather than pandering to sheer sentiment or the crowd,”as the editors remarked,with references to laudable gestures such as external reserves jerking up for the first time after some years,to over Forty million dollars, coupled with his tax reforms,Local government autonomy and pragmatic initiatives in the Oil and Gas sector,I could not but commend the juridical team of editors for their objective sense of judgement.
“While I commend the president for the well deserved award, it becomes equally apposite to hasten to emphasize that Awards should not be seen as an end in itself, but rather a means to an end”,said Salis, who in 2019 contested for governor on the platform of Alliance For Democracy(AD) .
“If one may borrow Ex-President Obasanjo’s words in his admonishment to Ibrahim Babangida that SAP must be applied with human face,so does it become not only apt, but also timely, to admonish that reforms where they appear overly draconian must necessarily be tempered with human face.”
