Also in his confused perception he claims that Tinubu wanted Chief Bisi Akande retained as the APC Chairman. Unknown to him, Akande had earlier asked to opt out due to old age. As an enduring brand for the anti-corruption battle in Nigeria he would not go against the stipulations of the party’s Constitution. But Ikimi thought otherwise. He stated that: “The Constitution of the Party clearly defines the Party Organs and the Party Leadership. There is no provision for anyone to be named as the Party Leader. Asiwaju Bola Tinubu having paraded himself both at home and abroad as The Leader of Opposition and of the APC had great difficulty in descending from the fictitious throne. In order to continue manipulating the party from his parlors in Abuja and Lagos he struggled to retain Chief Bisi Akande as Chairman.”
To also allude to the loss of Ekiti governorship to the PDP as a vote against Tinubu amounts to tissue of white lies! From all indications, that election was a personality struggle between Dr. Kayode Fayemi and Ayodele Fayose. The latter, if the vote by the people is anything to go by is more grassroots related. Was the vote against Tinubu, as erroneously assumed by Ikimi, the same scenario would have played itself out in the recent Osun governorship election.
He was wrong again on the Muslim-Muslim ticket. How could that have happened when ASPC had not formed a National Exco, nor put structures on ground at the unit, ward, Local Government Councils? That could not have been when the party was yet to provide the guidelines on the emergence of candidates for governorship at the state and the presidency at the national level.
It is for Nigerians to decide if they want a Muslim/Muslim ticket. After all, it happened in 1993 and heavens did not fall. What the citizens need at this critical moment of our troubled history are men and women who would frontally tackle the monsters of corruption, mass youth unemployment, insecurity, the insidious culture of impunity to deliver the dividends of democracy at their doorstep.
Ikimi is also wrong on the Ribadu issue. That Tinubu used and dumped him in the 2011 election is a figment of Ikimi’s wild imagination. During the negotiations to expand the scope of the party to assume a national dimension, the CPC and ACN had a gentleman’s arrangement that the former should produce the presidential candidate and the ACN to produce the Vice Presidential candidate but Buhari and Bakare did not accede to this.
That President Goodluck Jonathan eventually won can be traced to his presence at the Redeemed Christian Church of God’s Annual Holy Ghost festival. His tacit endorsement there sent a signal to the largely Christian-dominated South-West geo-political zone. Ribadu at that time could not even win at his ward in Adamawa state.
Contrary to Ikimi’s statement that “Tinubu’s reckless and arrogant self-aggrandizement paved the way for the imposition of a strange leadership on the APC in July 2013 when the party obtained registration from INEC,” it was his political clout that did the magic. And to say that “Those of us who had worked so hard towards the successful merger and creation of the APC were manipulated out of the scheme of things” exposes him as one always desperate for political recognition, wanting to reap where he never sowed.
The OANDO contract he also referred to on the eve of the APC Chairmanship election followed due process and has nothing to do with the person of Bola Ahned Tinubu. Ikimi should get his facts right.
He and Modu Sheriff were never going to be seen even by Nigerians as progressives or true democrats. While Ikimi is branded as belonging to any government in power, Sheriff has the stinking toga as the mastermind behind the Boko Haram insurgency. It was always going to be hard for the tiger to change its colours.
Tinubu has paid his dues in the democratic dispensation, as the beacon bearer. One can situate him within the milieu of a born-leader who has vision in quantum; one with the capacity to feel the pulse and the pains of his people; one who has the courage to do right and the boldness to say ‘no’ to evil in all its shade; one with the compassion to right the wrongs bedeviling his people. Fortunately, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is blessed with all these character traits. And as amply demonstrated during his struggles for democracy, his eight years qualitative leadership as the Lagos State governor, against all odds he is eminently qualified to lead this nation to greater heights.
