Media scholar, Farooq Kperogi, on Saturday said that the alleged cold war between Bola Tinubu, presidential flag-bearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for the 2023 election, and President Muhammadu Buhari “will graduate to a real hot war”.
Bellnewsonline.com reports that writing his weekly column, Kperogi said the supposed tension between Messrs Tinubu and Buhari “bubbled to the surface this week with Tinubu’s impassioned Abeokuta outburst”.
Kperogi’s view comes in the wake of his outburst during the APC presidential rally in Abeokuta, Ogun state capital, on Wednesday.
The APC candidate had said the Naira redesign and protracted petrol scarcity were designed to frustrate his chances in next month’s presidential election.
“Hide the petrol, hide the naira, we will still vote! We will win,” the former Lagos governor had said.
“Even if you change the ink on naira notes, what you want will not happen. We will win. That umbrella party will lose. We will take this government from them — saboteurs that are dragging power with us.”
But the APC presidential campaign council said the former Lagos governor did not blame the president for the situation — but only sought to warn him of saboteurs working for the main opposition, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Kperogi wrote: “It was always obvious to keen, disinterested observers that Bola Tinubu’s gamble in helping Buhari to ascend to power won’t pay off in the end; that his opportunistic political love affair with Buhari won’t be requited; and that the brittle, delicately thin thread that held their relational dynamic would snap sooner or later. I wrote countless columns on this.
“Tinubu won the nomination of the APC not because of Buhari and the cabal of provincial power brokers that prop him but in spite of them. Tinubu was compelled to ventilate his famously impassioned “emi lo kan” outburst in Abeokuta (in the Yoruba language, no less) when it became nakedly apparent that Buhari and his cabal had perfected plans to edge him out of the APC presidential primary contest.
“People who know Tinubu from his inchoate age in Iragbiji tell me that he is a dogged, rugged, never-say-die fighter who would rather die fighting than give up a fight. His contemporaries dreaded fights with him not because he was strong but because his fights were often brutal and never-ending until he won. Even when he was bloodied and beaten to a pulp, he would get up and continue the fight if not immediately then later.
“The story I heard of Tinubu’s childhood in Iragbiji reminded me of someone I grew up with in my hometown whom we nicknamed Mohammed Shaytan. Mohammed was his given name, but his bizarre emotional investment in endlessly ferocious fights with anyone until he won earned him the name Shaytan, the Arabic word for Satan. We used to allow him to “defeat” us so we would have peace. Perpetual personal strife, which he thrived in, wasn’t physically, mentally, and emotionally sustainable for a lot of us.
“When the cabal was plotting to exclude Tinubu from the APC presidential contest, I had an informal chit-chat with a higher-up who had some associational affinities with the cabal. I told him that based on what I’d learned about Tinubu’s childhood and teenage years (some of which I can’t disclose publicly) and which seem to have endured into his adulthood, he would rather be dead than give up the APC nomination.
“After the “emi lo kan” blow-up, which shook Buhari and his inner circle to their roots, my older acquaintance called to tell me I was right. The speech—and, of course, the support of APC’s northern governors, and his deep pockets— caused him to win the battle, but he is now in danger of losing the war, if he hasn’t already lost it. Here’s why.
“Tinubu’s fervent, arrogant, and vaguely vituperative speech in Abeokuta at once unnerved, humiliated, and alienated Buhari and his inner circle in ways they had never been since 2015. Buhari never forgives, but he is also diffident, hates direct confrontation, and evades taking responsibility. That’s why he is such an ineffective but dangerous leader.
“All indications clearly point to the fact that Buhari is still nursing the hurt of his well-justified humiliation by Tinubu. His inner loop of advisers is also waiting in the wings to exact revenge against Tinubu, which is frankly inexplicably self-indulgent, even hypocritical, because they would not have supported Tinubu even if he didn’t humiliate them on national television, even if he praised them to high heaven from now till kingdom come. Well, they seem to be now out for Tinubu in full force.”