By Kehinde Bamigbetan
Members of the All Progressives Congress and supporters of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu who read the back page of Thisday on Friday, September 2nd, 2022, must have observed that the two articles –“Two of a Kind” by Akin Osuntokun and “ Tinubu and Afenifere” by Seun Kolade were, indeed, two of a kind!Both oppose the presidential candidature of Tinubu and root for Peter Obi of the Labour Party on grounds that are false and illogical and assumptions that are retrogressive and primordial. Both are not informed commentaries but partisan advocacy, a hagiographic apology to an envious, vengeful ancient regime determined to put old poison in fresh-looking bottles.
What do I mean? Fresh from a media blitz of his decamp from the Peoples Democratic Party, a party that allowed him to become a Special Adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo on Political Matters despite zero electoral value and Managing Director of the News Agency of Nigeria despite zero reportorial experience, Osuntokun tried to live up to his new title as the “South West Leader” of his new party by dubiously grouping his presidential adversaries in the APC and PDP as birds of the same feather to clothe his party’s candidate in borrowed robes.
He should have known that differentiation is the cardinal principle of competition and any attempt to blur the distinctive edges of a brand like Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu in this election to mobilize the mob for his candidate will not succeed.
Osuntokun launches his tirade by disparaging the party primary of the APC as a financial bazaar insinuating therefrom that it signposts that it would not fight corruption. From our perspective, incentivizing delegates who left their loved ones in the country’s 774 local government areas to perform the national duty of electing the flagbearer that has the greatest chance of becoming Nigeria’s next president is another evidence of Tinubu’s legendary compassion and generosity.
It does not compare with the pretentious holier-than-thou posturing of Peter Obi whose media handlers claim does not give shishi but could raise N40million to buy the form to contest for the presidential ticket of the PDP. What Osuntokun should be explaining is how much Obi spent to hijack the Labour Party whose ideology he has never professed and whose manifesto, according to Barrister Kayode Ajulo, a former secretary of the Labour Party, has not read. Osuntokun should be convincing us how Obi was able to get the votes of 97 of the 98 delegates of a party he never associated with since it was established in 2002 and whether the delegates were fed with water and accommodated on the roads to secure their votes.
By rational projections, between Tinubu who brought the Action Congress of Nigeria to partner with other parties to form APC, and Obi, who was a stranger to the Labour Party, who needed to buy any delegate? The answer is Obi who did not just cross parties but is pretending to have committed ideological suicide.Osuntokun worsens his case by invoking the spirit and letters of the irrepressible Pa Anthony Enahoro who came up with the concept of “subversive generosity” to define the strategy of compromising opponents with handouts adopted by the military junta of General Ibrahim Babangida. Without citing any historic precedent or fact, he engages in insane futurology, alleging that Tinubu believes so much that cash can solve every problem that he would throw money at the problem of insecurity. His allegation: “the first item is going to be the appeasement of sundry bandits and terrorists with tons of cash”.
Yet this writer lived in Lagos between 1999 and 2007 when Tinubu was governor. If “appeasement” of bandits was Tinubu’s strategy for tackling crime, would he establish the Rapid Response Squad, empower the police officers with arms, ammunition, and vehicles and support them with welfare allowances that enabled them to drive criminals out of town?
To corroborate Tinubu’s zero tolerance for banditry, the Commissioner of Police in Lagos State between 1999 and 2003 who later became the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Mike Okiro stated in the Premium Times edition of August 26, 2022, how Tinubu begged IGP Musiliu Smith to deploy him to Lagos to combat banditry. Read him: ”Lagos was in a problem. Criminality was at its peak- robbery, killings, kidnapping was at their peak. People were leaving Lagos State.Asiwaju made a special request to the IG. That was how I found myself as Commissioner for Police in Lagos State”. For delivering on this assignment, Okiro credits Asiwaju with the double promotion that made him the country’s top cop.
