THAT Asiwaju Bola Tinubu has to unleash his feelings most emotionally and at a most auspicious moment on those he felt had treated him with disdain against the laws of reciprocity, has successfully thrown him into the political space for polemicists, pundits, disputants and ardent political watchers to dissect.
This creates an opportunity for every analyst to look into the inner recesses of power politics and its destructive and disenfranchising tendencies, especially as it pertains to the Nigerian ruling party, APC when it is flagrantly abused.
Though most of the arguments are a spherical aberration of what the real issue is, many have chosen to run with these same trivialities that only appeal to emotion and not reason.
What is Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu asking for from the party he helped to midwife and nurture into prominence? How democratic, just and fair is his demand? How justifiable, fair and democratic is the action of those who are bent on denying him of his demand at this last minute?
Tinubu is not asking for an automatic ticket. He’s asking for an opportunity to participate in the primary election instead of voodoo and maliciously concocted consensus candidacy which seeks to be coming a way too late into when the race is supposed to be flagged off.
Those who are angry that Tinubu is braggishly berating his erstwhile political beneficiaries are quite inconsiderate. Do they expect him to venerate ingratitude? That is quite unlike us as a highly religious people with good conscience as we are.
How about the argument of the naysayers who are bent on dragging into a serious matter, the awkward comparison with the Ambode saga of yore. Tinubu didn’t shut down Ambode’s ambition as being wrongly portrayed.
He allowed Ambode the opportunity when he insist on participating in the primary election to test his popularity, just exactly what he’s asking the APC caucuses to let him do in the present circumstance. But those who love to juxtapose reason with petulant perversity will not like to hear this.
The APC and her ruling apparachik must be dispassionately guided by reason vis-a-vis her clear and cherished desire to retain power than primordial consideration being perpetrated by self-styled puritanical do-gooders of democracy and democratisation who are hell-bent on bringing the ruling party to disrepute by their actions and inaction.
The PDP has put their best foot forward despite the advertised baggage of its captain, building consensus and mending broken fences. The APC must come out with a match, war chest to the war chest.
In Nigeria, it is very common to observe that those who had too many opportunities but did so little always insist on telling those who had the little opportunity but did so much what to do.
Those who had the elasticity of opportunity to build the nation and party but never did cannot lord it over those who spent their resources, both human and capital, to build the party to what it is today just to satisfy the unholy desire of a few. It is time to let Tinubu exercise his bragging rights freely.
- Austen AKHAGBEME is a Columnist with Blank NEWS Online
