By Nicholas Ojo
A member of the Labour Party (LP) Presidential Campaign Council, Dele Farotimi, has told Festus Keyamo that the latter’s mentor, late Chief Gani Fawehinmi would have been ashamed of what he had become.
Farotimi spoke against the backdrop of Keyamo’s recent comments in defense of the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu.
Tinubu, at a meeting with private sector stakeholders, recently in Owerri, the Imo State capital, tried to justify his shunning of town hall and debates organised by media organisations during his remarks.
Tinubu had made some remarks where he apparently engaged in some tongue-twisting which was taken as another gaffe thereby eliciting wide range criticisms.
He reportedly said from ‘balabloo-blu-bulava’, to the consternation of his listeners.
Many people pointed at the gaffe as further evidence of Mr Tinubu’s mental decline because it was not clear if he was struggling to pronounce ‘hullabaloo’.
The apparent gaffe has elicited much criticisms from Nigerians, with many pointing it out as further evidence of Mr Tinubu’s mental inadequacy.
The spokesperson for the APC Presidential campaign council in his attempt to make the misspeak look as a deliberate “sense of humour” by the politician, while sharing a video of Mr Tinubu’s incoherent speech on Twitter said:
“Listen to the sense of humour of @officialABAT. He says he prefers a proper town hall meeting to the gibberish his opponents say elsewhere.”
“He practically demonstrates the gibberish they say by uttering those tongue-twisting words to show the nonsense his opponents say elsewhere,” Mr Keyamo added.
However, Dele Farotimi in his reaction to Mr Keyamo’s comment, stated that it is painful to watch Keyamo these days.
“It is painful to watch you these days. You were the leading light in my generation. Erudite. Blessed. Head and shoulders above your peers.
“What happened to you? The boy that you were, the young man that want to work for Gani, would be ashamed of the man that you’ve become,” he tweeted.
The spokesman for the Atiku/PDP presidential campaign council, had condemned Keyamo over his defence of Ahmed Bola Tinubu on Channels TV’s Politics Today.
Bwala, a lawyer, countered Keyamo’s claims on Tinubu’s innocence about the forfeited monies in his U.S. bank accounts that had generated much discussion.
As a guest on the programme, the legal luminary argued that Keyamo was in it to deceive Nigerians over the state of the cases involving Tinubu and faulted the idea that he could be separated from the forfeited monies.
“Everything he said was wrong,” he said. “See, I taught in the law school. I am sorry that I have to say that. There are several courses we teach in the law school — professional ethics is one of them.”
He frowned at the ‘psychological’ tactics that Keyamo used during the show to get Seun Okinbaloye, the anchor, into accepting his argument.
“It is not enough for you to know the law; how you dispense the law and how you argue the law is as important as the knowledge of the law itself.
“And once you are losing an argument in court, the next thing to do is to descend into the legal gutters to begin to challenge,” he added.