Opinion
Tinubu Is The 16th President Of Nigeria – Not You, Pastor Bakare
By Jesutega Onokpasa
Dear Pastor Tunde Bakare, please make no mistake: Bola Tinubu, your brother and tribesman is winning this election and will be the next President of Nigeria.
God clearly wants him to be President of this country and if you had cared to humble yourself before The Lord, you should have been able to decipher the mystery of this divinely ordained destiny.
Indeed, it is truly astonishing that you, of all people, would stab your own brother in the back so shamefully and the most underhanded manner imaginable.
Besides being a serial prophet of numberless false prophesies, it is truly heart wrenching that you have now further descended into practicing what can only amount to witchcraft in broad daylight!
While, in what is only interpretable as cowardice unbecoming of a man of God, you did not mention Tinubu by name, it was nevertheless quite clear that the All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Candidate, was your unmistakable target.
According to you, in your unbelievably ill-natured address, Nigerians should beware of “politicians with a sense of entitlement” who “evade political debates and do not consider it imperative to communicate with the electorate”.
This is truly low and, I’m most sorry to say, utterly shameless, coming from you, sir.
Nobody that has ever run for President or any other office, for that matter, in the current republic, if not in our entire history, as a country, has communicated more with the electorate and been more engaging with the masses than Bola Tinubu!
How could you even insinuate that a man who made himself available for interview to the BBC is avoiding debates and public engagement?
The only fora Tinubu has not appeared on are Arise Tv and its sister outfit, Thisday Newspaper and this is entirely because at the Presidential Campaign Council, we made a decision not to make our candidate available to disgracefully unprofessional media practitioners in cahoots with the opposition for the sole purpose of undermining our candidate!
Left to Tinubu, himself, he would go absolutely anywhere, anytime.
Well, we are not making our candidate available to Arise or any other platform of questionable professional integrity as has been clearly stated by Dele Alake, Bayo Onanuga and Festus Keyamo.
You can tell that to Nduka Obaigbena, sir.
You also claimed in your rambling statement as follows: “this ’emi lo kan’ politics that insists on one’s turn, even if circumstances do not align, is bad”.
What, in the world, is the meaning of that, Pastor?
This penchant of some Yoruba people, who should know better, making a mountain out of the molehill of an intrinsically contextual statement must stop.
This is precisely what Olusegun Obasanjo, supposedly also a Yoruba man, also sought to do recently when he endorsed his fellow Anambrarian, Peter Obi.
It is totally disgracefully that you would also go rogue, turn black sheep and be hating on your brother by means of the deployment of putrid obfuscation and blatant falsehood.
I am not Yoruba but I only truly became Tinubu’s supporter while watching him address a group of our party members in Abeokuta where he made that remark.
He was not addressing you, Pastor Bakare.
He was not addressing your congregation either.
He was not addressing the Yoruba nation, for that matter.
He wasn’t even addressing Abeokuta people, for God’s sake!
He was merely addressing a small group of our party members, his own fellow party men and women, who just happened to be of Yoruba extraction, given the location and occasion.
It was therefore strictly and entirely an internal party affair and you, claiming to be a member of the APC, should not be the one shamelessly pretending not to know that!
Bola Tinubu was addressing our fellow APC members and was therefore, speaking strictly within the context of the party, its history and its electoral trajectory, thus far.
He was trying to remind our party men and women about the contributions he had made to our success in 2015 and in 2019 and asking us to reciprocate his efforts in the primary that would, at the time, be holding in a mere couple of days!
The Asiwaju was only reminding our fellow party men and women, in his native region and political base, what, under his sterling and sacrificial leadership, we had achieved as a party.
He was asking party members to stand with him to stave off an infernal betrayal and grotesque injustice being perpetrated against him at the time, and you cannot claim not to be fully aware of this or you would only be lying through your teeth, sir.
As you, of all people, should be fully aware, Tinubu was only reminding our party members that in reciprocity of his contributions to our collective triumph as a party, we should be honourable enough not to stab him in the back as you are currently doing, Pastor!
Bola Tinubu was speaking entirely within the context of intraparty affairs, barely days to our presidential primaries and merely trying to rally people to his side as any contestant would.
It is therefore to deploy a lie from the pit of hell, itself, for anyone to then twist this side remark out of its proper context and insinuate that Tinubu was claiming before Nigerians that it is his turn to rule.
He never said, meant nor even as much as suggested anything of the sort!
You are the one, who without appropriate office, requisite status or warranted occasion, decided to address Nigerians, only to end up spewing forth despicable lies against your fellow man.
Tinubu was not addressing Nigerians when he made that statement; he was talking to fellow politicians in the same party and we heard him loud and clear and I became his diehard supporter, thereon!
I have wondered, elsewhere, what I would have done if I was in Tinubu’s shoes on a similar occasion.
What would I say to a bunch of my fellow party men and women, who also just happened to be fellow tribespeople back home in the Niger Delta, while addressing them in our native language, regarding something I could easily win in a totally democratic manner which was however in danger of being denied me through abhorrently undemocratic subterfuges?
Am I supposed to tell them that it is not our turn and certainly not my turn either?
Why did I gather them there to address them in the very first place?
Just to dispirit, demoralise and dampen their enthusiasm or what?
What would you have done in similar circumstances, Pastor Bakare?
Demoralise your flock into capitulation?
It is, indeed, truly embarrassing how supposed men of God as yourself have been on this man’s neck.
This is certainly not Christianity, at all, and entirely inconsistent with the Culture of Christ.
Tinubu is a Muslim minority head of a Christian majority household.
The man is a religious minority in his own house!
If, as Christians, we discriminate against Tinubu, simply because he is a Muslim, wouldn’t we then also be discriminating against our own Christian sister, Remi Tinubu and against our Christian brother Seyi Tinubu and his other Christian siblings.
How do you discriminate against their husband and father without also discriminating against them?
And the only crime Bola Tinubu would have committed against us is that he allowed our fellow Christians to practice their faith under his roof!
Are you people even thinking at all?
If Tinubu can let our fellow Christians practice their religion right in his own abode, is he then the one we should pick an axe to grind with for being true to his own religion?
If, as Christians, we can’t get along with a guy like Tinubu, what sort of Muslim could we then possibly flow with?
Or, are you asking us to discriminate against Kashim Shettima?
We should discriminate against him for building churches?
How many churches have you built besides the ones you preside over and collect tithes and offerings from?
Have you ever built a mosque or contributed to the building of one?
And you dare exhort the faithful to discriminate against a Muslim who built our Christian brothers and sisters numerous churches in the North?
How do you people even understand Christianity?
My dear pastor, I implore you to stop dwelling on the disappointment of having not won a ticket you couldn’t possibly have won under any realistic expectation.
I’m sorry to put it this bluntly but your primary run was a complete joke from the start and none of us in this party ever took you seriously, sir.
As we would say over here in Delta, “who you help?”
I was truly dumbfounded when you coughed out 100 million naira to buy a form to be our candidate!
I wondered, at the time, “who has this one helped in this party that he expects us to make him our flagbearer?”
That’s just politics for you, sir.
You ran, you could not even get a single vote, therefore lost miserably.
That’s life, my brother.
You move on and wait for God’s direction in your life.
It is truly disgraceful that instead of waiting for God, you have dissolved into inconsolable bitterness to the extent of brazenly stabbing your fellow tribesman in the back.
Tinubu’s only crime is that he remembered to put oil in his lamp, did his homework well, and, most manifestly paid his dues.
All of these you woefully failed to do while making empty noise, as usual, and apparently placing reliance on what was all along clearly a misinterpretation of the will of God!
Well, Tinubu defeated you and that’s that, brother.
Hating on him, trying to tarnish his reputation and deliberately misconstruing his statements is not how to wait for God and most certainly not how to be a Christian, sir.
Dear Pastor Bakare, you will not be president of this country, and, for your information, the rulership of this country, come May 29, this very year, has already been granted and irreversibly given unto your own brother, Bola Tinubu from above.
There is nothing wrong with that; it is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in the sight of the righteous!
Tinubu is the next President of Nigeria by the special grace of Almighty God.
It is Bola Tinubu, not Tunde Bakare, that is the 16th President of Nigeria!
You clearly read the vision wrong, my brother.
He will be your President as much as mine, indeed, whether you like it or not, sir!
It is the will of God so take it in good faith and move on if, indeed, you are a true child of God.
Know this and know peace.
Indeed, I come in peace and peace be with you and yours.
Onokpasa, a lawyer and member, All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, writes from Warri.
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