Renowned Political Science professor, Bolaji Akinyemi, has urged President Bola Tinubu to steer clear of any confrontation with the newly inaugurated 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.
Professor Akinyemi, a former Director General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), criticized Donald Trump’s inaugural speech as uninspiring, “shocking, and depressing.”
The octogenarian noted that instead of promoting global peace, Trump’s address focused on threatening the world with a series of aggressive policies, such as reclaiming the Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and initiating tariff wars, among others.
Akinyemi remarked that the US president would “soon learn that there are repercussions to policies and jingoism,” predicting that the world would face a “rough ride for four years” under Trump’s leadership.
The former Nigerian Minister of External Affairs also pointed out that Nigeria, as Africa’s most populous nation, would not be a priority for the 78-year-old president, and should not expect anything extraordinary from his administration.
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