May 21, 2026
Olu Fasan
Lord Palmerston, a 19th-century British Prime Minister, famously coined the saying: “There are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.” He was talking about relations between nations. However, Nigerian politicians have unashamedly hijacked the maxim to justify their utterly unprincipled,chameleonic behaviour. Nigeria is a country where politicians go to bed saying one thing and wake up saying the exact opposite without so much as blinking an eye,a country where political relationships are defined not by principles but by self-interested calculations of “what’s in it for me”. Civilised societies frown upon such behaviours,but Nigeria celebrates them.
Take Bola Tinubu, the grandmaster of self-interest politics. In 2014, he led the then newly established All Progressives Congress, APC, to visit former President Olusegun Obasanjo in Ota to solicit his help in stopping then President Goodluck Jonathan’s re-election. “We are determined to rescue Nigeria,” Tinubu told Obasanjo. “We want you to lead the mission. We want you as the navigator.” Recall that Tinubu, as Lagos State governor,and Obasanjo, as president, were sworn enemies, and that Obasanjo “diabolically double-crossed”Tinubu’s old party, Alliance for Democracy, AD, and defenestrated all its governors, with only Tinubu escaping by a hair’s breadth. But on this occasion, united by the shared interest of removing Jonathan from power, the past didn’t matter. Tinubu said in Ota: “There are no permanent friends or enemies in politics, but permanent interests.”
