Opinion
Bisi Akande’s Book Of Scandals
A QUICK admission: I have not read Chief Bisi Akande’s recently launched book, My Participations. But I have read excerpts from it and going by these excerpts the book which comes across as a memoir and not an autobiography could easily have been titled: “Scandals” or “Revelations” or such other less benign title than My Participations.
It would seem like what the All Progressives Congress, APC, leader wanted to do with the book is to make a clean breast of those issues that have occupied his mind for many years, if not decades, but which for whatever reasons he had not had the opportunity to discuss.
The book was his opportunity, perhaps his last given his age, to present the balance sheet of those aspects of his life in politics and finally make peace with his soul.
What has so far been coming out of the book and the anger and acrimony it has generated could not have been worse had the book been one of those scandal sheets that go under the generic label of entertainment/’soft sell’ news and which could be easily picked off a newspaper stand in many of our cities.
Was Bisi Akande’s Book Meant To Ruffle Feathers?
If Chief Akande had deliberately set out to ruffle feathers he could not have done better.
Perhaps what gives the impression the book is a scandal-mongering effort is nothing more than the error of those who chose to focus on its explosive sections while neglecting more substantial matters between its covers.
Maybe the mistake is just that of our sensation-hunting journalists out to drive sales of their materials.
Much of Chief Akande’s political life has been spent in the heartland of Western Nigeria and specifically among the old guard of politicians who emerged from within the circle of the defunct Egbe Omo Oduduwa or the Action Group, AG, that was ably led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
Many of Chief Akande’s old comrades, including the Chief himself, saw and still see themselves as followers of Chief Awolowo.
They are of a distinguished political pedigree that dates back to the late 1940s through the anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and the Independence years through the turbulent period of the 1960s, the realignment of the 1970s down to the late 1980s when the death of Chief Obafemi Awolowo left the entire body of the political group in the hands of Chief Awolowo’s lieutenants that have been pulling it in different directions ever since.
While the Chief was alive, he was able to rein in the centrifugal forces within his fold. But his passage left the flanks open and it is the mouldy clothes from within that are now being aired in the sun.
Most of the anger that has followed the presentation of My Participations whose outing was done by no other than President Muhammadu Buhari, a man whose globe-trotting tendency belies his reluctance to travel out of Abuja to any other part of the country except his home in Daura or more likely some other parts of the North West- the anger stirred by My Participations has centred around what many of its critics see as the avalanche of inaccuracies or barefaced lies, according to others, it contains
Did Bisi Akande Choose To Launder Tinubu In His Book?
Many are bristling from the fact that while the author goes out of his way to launder the image of few persons, they believe he equally goes out of his way to savage the reputation of others for no other reason, and this here is where the rub lies, than to position another leader of the APC, one of the party’s so-called National Leader, the other being Chief Akande himself, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu for a run at the presidency in 2023.
In other words, the entire attempt at apparently airing in public the dirty linen of his erstwhile comrades and other former party leaders is to advance the cause of Bola Tinubu.
While this may not be entirely true it does have a ring of truth to it considering that this foremost politician of the South West appears to have passed the rigorous test and standard set by Chief Akande that other notable politicians from the same region and of equal note or even anterior importance failed.
From the excerpts I have so far seen, only the likes of Buhari enjoy similar benevolence from the reputation-denting lines of Chief Akande’s memoir in spite of the fact that it was under a military junta led by Buhari that Akande and other politicians of the First and Second Republics were handed long jail terms.
Akande, in spite of this, still found a place in his heart to be generous in his assessment of Buhari in ways he is obviously not ready to extend to others of his political family or region.
The Book Makes Enemies For Bisi Akande
Which reinforces the idea that this is an effort at image-laundering and space-clearing for Tinubu.
In the quest for 2023 the North is the beautiful bride that both regions of the South positioned to jostle for the presidency must court and Buhari has enormous power, if not the ultimate political power, to make or mar the ambition of whoever he wants.
It makes good sense to make or remain friends with him. In this stake, the likes of Olusegun Obasanjo, Pa Ayo Adebanjo and company are quite dispensable fodders. Or so Chief Akande’s logic seems to say.
Yet, the good chief could have advanced Bola Tinubu’s cause without alienating his rivals or opponents in the South West. It is as if Chief Akande thinks he needed to prove his commitment not only to Tinubu’s political ambition but also the North that could help bring it to realisation by antagonising the opponents of both at once.
But in making one friend for Tinubu he seems to be making ten enemies for him in his home region.
These are formidable enemies that can still do enormous image launderingbe imagined. Now the hornet’s nest has been stirred Tinubu has crawled into his shell, dragged as he has into avoidable controversies.
It’s hard to imagine that he had no idea of the contents of Chief Akande’s book to have advised him to either tone down his all-out attack on others or expunged them.
Some of the attacks or the claims that led to them are quite unnecessary, but for someone’s determination to cause trouble for the sheer hell of it. What purpose were the revelations meant to serve?
What was the point of telling Nigerians who built which house for who or granted who a C of O at this point? What was the voyeuristic tale-mongering for?
If Chief Akande knows some members of the AG also called it Afenifere as ‘a sobriquet’, what’s the point of his dogmatic claim that Afenifere was only recently established?
Trouble sleep yanga go wake am!
Source: Vanguard
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