All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential aspirant and ex-Governor of Lagos, Bola Tinubu, took time out to roast President Muhammadu Buhari and Ogun Governor Dapo Abiodun, as he rounds off consultations with delegates who would decide his fate, ahead of the 2023 general elections.
Tinubu, who appears not to be President Buhari’s choice of successor or APC presidential flag-bearer, boasted to his Ogun State audience in the southwest’s language of Yoruba, that he made Buhari President and crowned Abiodun Governor of Ogun.
He was pulling no punches and appears to have now completely yanked off the gloves.
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“You have not heard this from me before. This is the first place I am saying this.
“If I didn’t lead from the battlefront, Buhari wouldn’t have won the 2015 election. Buhari contested and lost the presidential election three times and cried on national television. He even said on television that he won’t contest again.
“But I went to his home in Kaduna, I told him you would contest and win, but you won’t joke with Yoruba-land.
“Since he emerged President, I have not been appointed Minister. I didn’t get nor request a contract. I did not beg for soup, garri nor fura from him. And I did not borrow money from there.
“This time, it’s the turn of the Yorubas to produce a President and in Yoruba-land, it’s my turn,” Tinubu thundered at the Presidential Lodge in Abeokuta, while adjusting his agbada this way and that intermittently.
For Governor Abiodun, who is backing Vice President Yemi Osinbajo for the APC presidential ticket, Tinubu had more stern words, condescendingly referring to the governor as “this one.”
Tinubu said; “This one (Dapo) that’s sitting down here, could he have become Governor without me? We were at the stadium, they tore all his posters. Even the party flag, they didn’t want to hand it over to him, I was the one who brought it.
“If he wants to meet God at the right place, he must know that without God and me, he would not have become Governor.”
Battling Osinbajo
There was more from Tinubu, hours after President Buhari met powerful state governors and made it clear that he would be choosing his successor.
According to Tinubu, he was instrumental in Osinbajo’s emergence as vice president because he handpicked the latter as Buhari’s running mate before the 2015 vote.
“Buhari asked me to be his running mate, but Saraki campaigned against a Muslim-Muslim ticket. He felt it would affect his ambition to be senate president. The senate president could not be a Muslim as well.
“They rose against it. I said ‘I have someone that’s a Christian and I will nominate him. This party must not scatter’. And I nominated him (Osinbajo). That’s the truth,” Tinubu said.
“They asked me to bring three names. Yemi Cardoso was number one, Wale Edun was number two, Yemi Osinbajo was number three. I decided to drop just one name since I was surrendering my right. Buhari agreed to this and I dropped Yemi Osinbajo’s name,” Tinubu added.
The former Governor of Nigeria’s most populous state of Lagos, is clearly no flavour of the month in the Presidential Villa, with various sources telling Quest Times repeatedly since the turn of the year, that President Buhari has settled on his deputy, Vice President Osinbajo to succeed him.
A godfather in Nigeria’s patronage-littered political minefield, Tinubu declared to run for the office of Nigeria’s President in January, and announced to the world thereafter that ruling Nigeria has been a lifelong ambition for him.
The winner of the APC presidential contest on Monday, June 6, would square up to Atiku Abubakar of the opposition PDP and more than a dozen other presidential aspirants from other political parties.
With President Buhari away in Madrid, Spain for bilateral discussions, Vice President Osinbajo held a meeting with APC Chairman Abdullahi Adamu and five governors elected on the party’s platform, on Thursday, June 2.