Who else noticed the President’s new pair of glasses?
If you have been watching closely (and watching closely is, after all, my job), you will have counted at least three pairs of glasses the President has used in the past three years.
You can’t miss them! Three different frames, and possibly three different ways he’s been seeing the rest of us.
Let me explain.
There was the first pair, the one President Tinubu wore in those early days of his presidency. You can see it in the photographs from his first outing to France.
It is a chunky, dark, rounded acetate frame. The kind that sits heavy on the face, bold and almost professorial. And then, mysteriously, it vanished. Like that cloth you only wore once and haven’t worn again. I have never seen those glasses on the President’s face since then. If I knew where they were, I would probably be super rich by now.
Then there’s the pair of glasses everyone knows. The thin, brown-rimmed, perfectly round frame that he wore in his official portrait. It is a delicate, scholarly frame. Those frames have become as much a part of his image as the infinity insignia on his cap. You would think he took them from Mahatma Gandhi.
Wait, could that be why he’s such good friends with the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi? Does that explain the GCON honour he conferred on Modi in 2024? Was there a deal? Gandhi’s glasses in exchange for honours? Okay, I’m kidding! Forget I ever mentioned that.
Now Tinubu has a newcomer: a borderless, rimless pair of glasses with a soft golden bridge and sleek matching temple arms. This is the pair that first caught my attention in April and also during his three-nation tour in May. When the President landed in Nairobi and walked the receiving line, he wore the familiar round frames. But the very next day, when he attended the Africa Forward Summit, he dumped the round pair for the rimless one.
It was the same rimless pair he later wore to vote in the APC presidential primaries in Lagos, the same pair he wore to collect his certificate of return at the International Conference Centre in Abuja, and the same pair he wore to receive well-wishers in Lagos days after his victory.
So where am I going with this? Well, nowhere! But stay with me.
It appears the President travels with a small fleet of eyeglasses, which he wears to suit the mode he wants to switch into, or how he wishes to see Nigerians on a given day. Maybe the pair that vanished didn’t earn the favour of his wife, who must have told him to trash it. Maybe the round frame is for business and the rimless one for ceremony. Or maybe it is just a function of his mood.
Whatever the reason, the man clearly wants to “see road” in style, and he doesn’t want to do it alone. How else do we explain that, barely three months into office, in September 2023, he relaunched Jigi Bola, a sweeping partnership with the Peek Vision Foundation to distribute more than five million free pairs of eyeglasses nationwide? It’s like an expanded version of Rochas Okorocha’s obsession with moulding statues of his friends. But the origin of Jigi Bola was far from vanity. It began with a woman.
The President, who told the story himself, said his mother, ill and ageing, could no longer recognise him until she was treated and given a pair of glasses. Then she asked him a question: “I have you, and you are able to do this for me.
What about those other women and their children who may not have somebody like you to intervene?” He made her a promise to pursue mass eye care, free screenings, and surgeries. It is arguably one of the most tender stories to come out of Tinubu’s Villa.
What he did not tell us, however, is that he would also become Jigi Bola’s most committed brand ambassador, changing frames like clothes.
I would bet that a good number of those in the opposition received a pair of glasses, too. How do I know? The President confessed. On April 17, at a meeting with his Renewed Hope Ambassadors, he said that if his critics could not see his achievements, he had a remedy.
“If they don’t want to see the hope in the roads that we have built, in the bridges, in the children we raise, in the economy we are growing, we will lend them Jigi Bola. We will give them eyeglasses,” Tinubu said.
It reminds me of that old riddle that goes, “When do people become like glasses?” The answer: “When they make spectacles of each other.”
Now, this is no shade on the President’s eyesight. Heck, I am bespectacled myself. And I have to pay some money to see the world that most people my age see for free. Most people the President’s age also need an extra pair of eyes to see, let alone a 70-something-year-old leading more than 230 million people.
Extra frames are welcome if they help him read the documents he signs so that he does not, by accident, sign a deal that sells the country and all of us. What’s more? Spare frames make sense because glasses grow legs and can wander off exactly when you need them.
But here is another theory, though. Hear me out. It could be the First Lady.
They say behind every successful man is a woman. It may also be true that behind every frame the President changes, there is a woman: his wife, Senator Oluremi Tinubu. Anyone who watches closely knows the First Lady does not joke with her eyewear. In three years, I have seen her wear more frames than I have seen Shettima change caps.
Today, it could be a bold, dark, flowery frame; another day, a frameless slice of glass; the next, something thick and architectural. She is a lady with taste, the First for that matter. So, it would be no surprise at all if that taste is rubbing off on her husband.
So, last week, the President dropped the new glasses and went for his famous Gandhi frames. They were the same frames he wore to read his Democracy Day speech, which honoured the immediate past Managing Director of PUNCH Newspapers, Sir Ademola Osinubi, and 49 others.
He also wore them to receive the first Malagasy President to visit Nigeria, Colonel Michaël Randrianirina, and to swear in two new ministers: the Minister of Power and the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.
Round or rimless, it does not matter to Nigerians what kind of glasses the President wishes to wear. Whatever prescription glasses he chooses should be clear enough to let him see the true state of the country. We still have power blackouts, dozens of kidnapped pupils are still in the forest, and Nigerians are fatigued by the constant fear of terror. The only glasses that matter are those that do not blind him to this reality.
