Premium Times
Past comments are haunting some of the major players in Nigerian politics as they prepare for campaigns for the 2023 presidential election. On Thursday, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, paid a surprise visit to his old political foe, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, in Abeokuta, Ogun State.
Mr Tinubu was accompanied on the visit by a strong delegation that included billionaire businessman, Femi Otedola, two former governors of Ogun State, Olusegun Osoba and Gbenga Daniel; the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila; former Governor of Osun State, Bisi Akande, and others.
The two main opponents of Mr Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, had earlier visited and many others will extend the same courtesy to the elder statesman before the election. But Mr Tinubu’s visit is significant, given that the two men had rarely been on the same side or seen eye to eye since this dispensation began in 1999.
In the maiden presidential election of that year, Mr Tinubu’s then Alliance for Democracy (AD) ensured that Mr Obasanjo and the PDP lost woefully in the South West. But as the sitting president, Mr Obasanjo created a Tsunami in the next election in 2003 that swept away five of the six governors of the AD in the zone, with Mr Tinubu the only survivor.
Their mutual animosity extended into governance as the federal government under Mr Obasanjo seized revenue allocations to local governments in Lagos State over the creation of new ones by Mr Tinubu’s government.
Although Mr Obasanjo did not openly endorse the candidacy of the former Lagos State governor, his campaign team has been celebrating the visit as a positive development.
“What I heard there – what Obasanjo said, the victory of Asiwaju is assured,” Mr Gbajabiamila later told his supporters in Surulere, Lagos while reporting back on the visit. He added that “He (Obasanjo) embraced our candidate like a brother, gave him a pat on his back and prayed for him copiously.”
While the camp of the former Lagos State governor was celebrating the outcome of the visit, his opponents posted on social media an old video clip in which Mr Tinubu described Mr Obasanjo as Nigeria’s greatest election rigger and that he should be thrown into the dustbin.
The two politicians have since remained on opposing sides, except in 2015 when Mr Obasanjo endorsed Muhammadu Buhari of the APC after the former president had fallen out with then President Goodluck Jonathan and had publicly torn up his membership card of the PDP.
However, in 2019, after Mr Obasanjo endorsed his former deputy, Atiku, against President Buhari, the APC played down the value of Mr Obasanjo’s endorsement…
