Trouble In Tinubu’s Household – The Guardian (A Must Read)

ALL is not well in the lion’s den. The first indication to this is the sudden presence of town criers in the jungle proclaiming the prowess of the lion. The lion remains the king and every animal knows that. Something must be gravely wrong therefore, if the lion is being forced to re-assert its place in the jungle. The lion is not king by consensus; he is by conquest and no other force in the wild jungle can push him to a subordinate role. He submits to no force majeure.

Kindly permit the allegory. I know that Nigeria is not an ‘Animal Farm’, but I do not have a better way of explaining the ongoing effort to re-establish Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Lion of Bourdillon in the minds of Nigerians. The campaigners, including one Hakeem Adisa, are making it look as if the Great Jagagban has miraculously become imperceptible in the national and regional power equations and requires to be thickly underscored through a vigorous publicity blitz to restore his visibility.

Who doesn’t know Tinubu in Nigeria? He is the man, who, in 2003, stood alone like Mountain Olympus, when others collapsed like a pack of cards in the Southwest and battled to a standstill, the ferocious electoral machinery of the PDP and former President Olusegun Obasanjo. From his isolated location in Lagos, he began life all over again in 2007. It was tough, but by dint of hard work, and perhaps, superior strategy, he came very close to recovering all lost territories.

But for the advent of Ayo Fayose in Ekiti State, just last year, and the continued recalcitrance of the Iroko of Ondo politics, Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, the job was clinically finished. The recovered territories include, Ogun, the home state of President Olusegun and symbol of PDP imperialism. Is this the kind of man that requires lengthy introduction to establish? Sincerely, I cannot find good reason for this sudden reawakening around Tinubu. We have just ended one general election and the next one is at least four years away, and so, I cannot accept that the spin doctors in town are preparing the Jagagban for a very big role in 2019.

Considering his large-scale investment in the APC project, the man had desired so badly, to fly the party’s presidential flag with General Muhammadu Buhari as running mate. When that initial plan allegedly failed, because of the new complex power web in the APC, he submitted a plan B, which was the donation of the VP-elect, Prof. Yemi Osinbanjo. It was, somehow, difficult to believe that a man, who could take on the entire Yoruba establishment without shaking and reconfigure Afenifere into Afenifere Renewal Group, could be so easily stopped from getting a vice presidential slot in a party that he owns 50 per cent.