Uproar about Tinubu’s Subú-seré

ByFestus Adedayo
(Published by the Sunday Tribune, February 1, 2026)

Subú-seré? Poetic licence gave me the indulgence of this headlining. Not even the English language, in its pretentious globality, could capture Subú-seré. Like Shakespeare benignly prompted, I was in search of an appropriate word to capture my mind’s construct.

Blank was, however, the wall. So I decided to stick to the word’s rendition in my native language.

Subú-seré is a broad, idiomatic expression whose surface is barely scraped by words like “tumbling” or “falling.” Subú-seré cannot be captured by a single slip. It finds expression in repeated falls. It is deeper than its nearest English expression in connotation and texture. Subú-seré can, in one breath, be deployed to describe a state of chaos, mismanagement, or a “tumble.”

In the last few days, the Nigerian president’s fall in Ankara, the Türkiye capital, has engaged the Nigerian world. At a welcome ceremony by his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president suddenly stumbled and fell. He had just walked past a line of dignitaries, which included Turkish soldiers, when, as he moved to the right of Erdoğan, the Subú-seré occurred.

A viral video uploaded on the Turkish president’s X handle showed him helping his colleague president. Erdoğan also held firmly to his hand thereafter, like one would hold a kindergarten child crossing the road. About 45 seconds after the fall, the Nigerian president is seen in the video standing next to Erdoğan and beaming a wry smile.

The day after, while President Tinubu was shown being seen off from Türkiye by Erdoğan on national television, ostensibly on his way to Nigeria, Nigerians still did not know where, in the whole wide world, their president was holed up.

Concerns immediately rippled through Nigeria. The presidency, however, downplayed them all, maintaining that Tinubu was “in great shape.” Sunday Dare, his aide, said not only was the president in good health and unhurt from the slip, but he immediately continued with a scheduled bilateral meeting in Türkiye. Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga took the explainer a notch higher. Tinubu had tripped as he stepped on a metal object “on the floor, which made him lose his balance,” he said.

Onanuga then went into his usual argumentative fallacy of argumentum ad hominem. This fallacy is distinguished by enemy-repelling and blame-trading. It is an everyone-but-self narrative. While at this, the presidential aide took his time to school Nigerians on the difference between a fall and a stumble. “This is not a big deal, except for those who want to make mischief out of a fleeting incident. It was a mere stumble, thank God, not a fall,” he said. As the Yoruba would say, even if we do not know anything else, we know that three people cannot stand in twos.

On June 12, 2024, during the Democracy Day celebration, President Tinubu had earlier fallen in public. It was at Eagle Square. The president fell—pardon me, à la Onanuga, he stumbled—as he was about to board a parade vehicle. But Tinubu himself made a light joke of it. “Early this morning, I had a swagger, and it’s on social media. They’re confused whether I was doing bùgá or bàbáńrìgá (two popular dance steps),” he said. “But it’s a day to celebrate democracy while doing dóbálè (salute to elders) for the day. I’m a traditional Yoruba boy; I did my dóbálè.”

The president probably dóbálè-ed to Erdoğan too, in Ankara last week, being a good Yoruba boy? But not to worry, he is in great shape, said his handlers. But shouldn’t we be worried? As Onanuga said, it should ordinarily be no big deal that a mortal man falls—either literally, metaphorically, or figuratively.

Drilling deep into the figurative of falling, King Sunny Adé, Yoruba juju music great, in a 1970s LP, pilloried his mockers who were deriding his fall. “Òtá mi má yó mi, bí emi bá subú,” he fired, submitting that “if I fall, I will heave myself up”—“bí emi bá subú, emi á dìde.”

Falling and rising are part of the existential slopes of humanity. Whether as a literal fall or as a metaphor, it is doubtful whether a man can waddle through the sloppy contours of life without experiencing its fluctuations. They are embedded into the whole concept of living, so much so that life would not be life if man did not rise and fall.

It was probably a realization that life is fraught with falling and rising that François-Marie Arouet, famously known by his pen name Voltaire—one of the greatest Enlightenment philosophers, satirists, and historians—said of life that it is “thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them.”

Voltaire himself lived a life of sickness and disease. He is often quoted as saying, “My life is a struggle,” and frequently wrote about the miseries of existence. Born with a weak bodily constitution, Voltaire suffered chronic health issues, one of which was Crohn’s disease, which frequently left him bedridden. He also had chronic dyspepsia, frequent attacks of colic, and temporary blindness that afflicted him whenever it snowed.

Scurvy, gout, bronchitis, and even apoplexy were also among his lifelong ailments. This life of illness probably made him cynical about medicine, leading to his famous quip that doctors “put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.”

So also was Blaise Pascal. Voltaire’s French compatriot, Pascal, was a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and Catholic writer. He too suffered from lifelong, debilitating health conditions, which included celiac disease, severe migraines with visual auras, peripheral neuropathy, epilepsy, and possibly craniosynostosis (skull deformity) and autism.

These manifested as chronic pain, stomach issues, and mental disorientation. These lifelong health struggles deeply influenced his philosophy, leading to his early death on August 19, 1662, at age 39.

His final days were recorded to have involved extreme abdominal pain, weight loss, and epileptic seizures. This life of chronic suffering was central to his work, influencing his famous view of sickness as the “natural state of Christians.”

There were, and are, many more great people whose lives were buffeted by ailments. Yet sickness and disease did not—and do not—define them. The Lord Jesus Christ counsels that in this world there will be tribulations.

These include sickness, disease, and even death. Jamaican reggae group Mighty Diamonds, a harmony trio that recorded roots reggae with strong Rastafarian influence, echoed this in their famous track Have Mercy, singing: “Man was made to suffer, yeah / And woman was made to feel the pain,” but praying to Jah to “have mercy.”