Don’t cry for Bola Tinubu - Femi Aribisala

But once elected, Buhari started a romance with Babatunde Fashola and Kayode Fayemi designed clearly to sideline the Jagaban. While these former governors were previously members of Tinubu’s inner-circle, they had since run out of patience with the heavy handedness of their boss. Therefore, during the election campaign, both of them campaigned for Buhari above and beyond the call of party duty.

Fashola, in particular, was clearly fed up with being under Tinubu’s political shadow. In the struggle for who would be the APC governorship candidate in Lagos State, Tinubu did not allow Fashola to choose his successor, in the ignoble tradition of Nigerian governors. While Fashola favoured Dapo Sasore, the former Attorney General of Lagos State, Tinubu railroaded in Akinwunmi Ambode as the APC candidate.

While again, in the ignoble tradition of Nigerian politics, governors promptly transform themselves into Senators when their term as governor ends, this option was closed off to Fashola because Tinubu had already installed his wife as the Senator from Fashola’s constitutency. The only option left for Fashola politically was presidential ministerial appointment and, even there, Tinubu had put up a road block against him.

Tinubu prefers to nominate political nonentities for higher office in the South-West, so that he would be the only Iroko tree in the forests of the region. Therefore his candidates for ministerial appointment from Lagos were his little nationally-known former commissioners, Wale Edun and Yemi Cadosso, who could pose no threats whatsoever to his ascribed South-West political supremacy.

Alarm bells:But when Fashola and Fayemi accompanied Buhari to the G7 meeting in Germany in June 2015, alarm bells started ringing in Tinubu’s Bourdillon Road mansion in Lagos. This was clearly a signial that these former governors were intent on by-passing the official godfather of the South-West by applying to be members of Buhari’s kitchen cabinet on their own recognisance.

The Tinubu brigade would have none of this. Therefore, a campaign of calumny was launched to cut Fashola in particular to dimunitive size. Suddenly, the “memo” was sent out implying the former governor had developed political leprosy. When two books were launched simultaneously celebrating his achievements as governor, none of his APC colleagues from Lagos dared to attend for fear of entering the bad books of the dreaded Jagaban.

In order to nail the coffin on Fashola’s ministerial aspirations, it was leaked to the press that a whopping 78 million naira of public money was spent on the construction of his personal website. 139 million naira was also alleged to have been spent on two boreholes constructed in Government House, Lagos during his tenure. The intention here was to ensure that Fashola becomes ineligible for ministerial consideration on grounds that he would not pass Buhari’s anti-corruption integrity test.

However, Buhari was apparently unimpressed by these political shenanigans. When his list of ministerial nominees were unfurled, Fashola and Fayemi featured prominently among Buhari’s “first eleven.” None of Tinubu’s nominees made the list. Other nominees from the South-West were precisely the kind of people Tinubu did not want in Buhari’s team; people who would not be indebted to Tinubu but to Buhari.