Foremost Professor of Political Science, Bolaji Akinyemi, has asked President Bola Tinubu to avoid confrontation with the newly sworn-in 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump.
“If I were President Tinubu, I would try to steer clear of antagonising him because there is nothing a bully likes better than taking on people who are not strong enough to resist him,” Akinyemi said on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme on Monday.
“You know there is that African proverb that if you are not strong enough to take on a bully and you take him on, you are just even going to suffer more for it.
“That’s the advice I will give President Tinubu: try and avoid having a confrontation with him even if that means that he does things that annoy or does things that step on the interests of Nigeria. There are ways in which you could address his reaction without confrontation,” he said.
Prof Akinyemi, a former Director General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), faulted the inaugural speech of Trump as uninspiring, “shocking and depressing”.
The octogenarian said rather than rallying the world for peace, Trump took time to threaten the rest of the world with a bouquet of hostile policies including tacking back Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, tariff wars, and others.
Akinyemi said the US president would “soon learn that there are repercussions to policies, to jingoism”, adding that the world is “in for a rough ride for four years” of the Trump presidency.
The former Nigerian Minister of External Affairs said Nigeria is out of the focus on the 78-year-old most powerful president and that Africa’s most populous nation should not expect anything extraordinary from the Trump presidency.
Trump was sworn in as president on Monday, succeeding Joe Biden, four years after an electoral defeat that truncated his second-term ambition.
Trump, 78, was a political outsider at his first inauguration in 2017 as the 45th president, but this time around he is surrounded by America’s wealthy and powerful.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai all had prime seats in the Capitol alongside Trump’s family and cabinet members.
While Trump refused to attend Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration after falsely claiming electoral fraud by the Democrat, this time Biden has been keen to restore the sense of tradition.
Biden joined former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at the Capitol. Former first ladies Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush were there but ex-first lady Michelle Obama pointedly stayed away.
