\nIn 2011, Tinubu was hailed for cutting his nose to spite his face. The PDP nominated his kinswoman, Mulikat Akande, as Speaker of the National Assembly. However, Tinubu conspired with recalcitrant PDP party-members to frustrate the plans of their party for his South-west homestead. Instead, he engineered the election of Sokoto\u2019s
![\"kogi\"](\"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/kogi.jpg\")
<\/a>, an APC wolf in PDP sheep\u2019s clothing, as Speaker.\nIn 2015, Tinubu received payback for these shenanigans again to the detriment of his native South-West. The same Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto he schemed into the position of Speaker in 2011, repaid Tinubu by frustrating his efforts to install his Lagos acolyte, Femi Gbajabiamila, as Speaker in 2015. Taking a leaf straight out of Tinubu\u2019s 2011 playbook, Tambuwal conspired with opposition PDP members to install another Northern PDP turncoat, Yakubu Dogara, as Speaker.
\nTinubu\u2019s comeuppance here is particularly savage because it was actually Gbajabiamila who reportedly convinced Tinubu that Tambuwal would readily act as traitor to his PDP party in 2011. It is therefore veritable poetic justice that the same Tambuwal became an equally ready tool of the PDP in the frustration of Gbajabiamila\u2019s ambitions and the interests of Tinubu and the APC in 2015.
\nMoreover, Tinubu was repaid for his 2011 manipulations with interest. The same treachery employed to Tinubu\u2019s political disadvantage in the House was also duplicated in the Senate. Bukola Saraki, another PDP turncoat, refused to abide by the dictates of APC Central, firmly controlled by Tinubu\u2019s ACN. He snatched the position of Senate President without official APC approval, but with the support of the opposition PDP. So doing, he sidelined both Tinubu\u2019s first-choice of George Akume, as well as his second-choice of Ahmed Lawan.
\nCrumbled cookie
\nJust as Tinubu was licking his wounds at the denial of his \u201crightful inheritance\u201d in the National Assembly after the APC victory at the polls, the news came that his political cookie had equally crumbled at Aso Rock. It had been popularly alleged that Tinubu\u2019s portion in Buhari\u2019s presidency would not be limited to the appointment of his political godson as vice-president, but would also include the allocation of no less than nine choice ministerial nominees to the discretion of the Jagaban of Borgu.
\nBut by the time Buhari unfurled his ministerial list two weeks ago, the alleged dedicated slots had shrunk to zero. Many of us had warned in the heady days of the formation of the APC that those insistent that power must return to the North would be determined to checkmate Tinubu if and when the election was won. We warned Tinubu that even as he cannot conceivably be accepted nationally to rule Nigeria as president, even so can he not rule Nigeria by proxy. We warned him that the North would never allow Buhari to be his Man Friday in Aso Rock.
\nHowever, Tinubu was too far gone to listen. It would now appear that he even failed to take out insurance policies against such probable eventualities.
\nBut 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\u2019s 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.
\nFashola, in particular, was clearly fed up with being under Tinubu\u2019s 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.
\nWhile 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\u2019s constitutency. The only option left for Fashola politically was presidential ministerial appointment and, even there, Tinubu had put up a road block against him.
\nTinubu 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.
\nAlarm bells:But when Fashola and Fayemi accompanied Buhari to the G7 meeting in Germany in June 2015, alarm bells started ringing in Tinubu\u2019s 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\u2019s kitchen cabinet on their own recognisance.
\nThe Tinubu brigade would have none of this. Therefore, a campaign of calumny was launched to cut Fashola in particular to dimunitive size. Suddenly, the \u201cmemo\u201d 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.
\nIn order to nail the coffin on Fashola\u2019s 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\u2019s anti-corruption integrity test.
\nHowever, Buhari was apparently unimpressed by these political shenanigans. When his list of ministerial nominees were unfurled, Fashola and Fayemi featured prominently among Buhari\u2019s \u201cfirst eleven.\u201d None of Tinubu\u2019s nominees made the list. Other nominees from the South-West were precisely the kind of people Tinubu did not want in Buhari\u2019s team; people who would not be indebted to Tinubu but to Buhari.
\nWhile Buhari completely ignored Tinubu\u2019s candidates, he included that of another South-West bigwig. Obasanjo\u2019s favourite-son, Prince Olagusoye Oyinlola, former governor of Osun State, was included in Buhari\u2019s list. Thereby, the president asserted the saliency of Obasanjo\u2019s South-West influence in Aso Rock over that of the Jagaban. He even pointedly appointed Obasanjo as his special envoy to Guinea-Bissau.
\nThis is certainly not what Tinubu bargained for when he decided to pitch his tent with Buhari and the APC. If he were to be furthermore overlooked in the appointment of BOT chairman of the APC, the marginalisation of the Jagaban in the post-election APC would be complete.
\nComeuppance: Some of us saw this coming. In the heady early days of the APC coalition, we warned that Tinubu would be used and dumped. But we were labelled as PDP lapdogs and charlatans. That is why I say today: let no one cry for Bola Tinubu.
\nAnyone who hears Tinubu\u2019s recent vicious attack on Saraki would realise these are the tokens of a frustrated man. Tinubu could not attack the President, therefore he poured all his venom on the Senate President. He accused him of indiscipline and disloyalty; the very things he celebrated in the PDP rebels who joined forces with him against their party in 2011.
\nFace saving device
\nThe recent declaration that Buhari appointed Babachir Lawal as Secretary to the Government of the Federation at the instance of Tinubu is a face-saving device. The Tinubu camp forgot to tell us this until now. At the time of new SGF\u2019s appointment, all the uproar was about the Northern lopsidedness in Buhari\u2019s choices.
\nObserving the sidelining of Tinubu by Buhari, Senator Femi Okunroumu said: \u201cI am having a good laugh. This is what I expected. In any case, Tinubu is stretching his luck too far as he wants to dictate who will rule Nigeria. Tinubu\u2019s wings need to be clipped. With the ministerial list, Tinubu has been dumped. He should not just be dumped, he should be disgraced.\u201d
\nOn his part, Afenifere chieftain, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, said: \u201cAPC is not a party; it is a gang of people whose sole aim was to remove Dr. Goodluck Jonathan as president. In a real party, you share the spoils of office before elections not after elections. This is what is happening in APC. We warned our people, but they failed to listen.\u201d
\nIn the new politics of today\u2019s APC, it is better to be the enemy of Bola Tinubu than to be his friend. The enemies of Tinubu become Senate presidents; they become Speakers of the House of Representatives; they become ministers of the Federal government. But the friends of Tinubu are sent to Siberia.
\nThe Jagaban of Borgu himself has been slain politically upon his high places. How are the mighty fallen!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MANY monuments have been built in honour of the man Bola Tinubu. He is acclaimed as the political genius of our times who not only engineered the taming of the PDP juggernaut, he caged it and confined it to the backwaters of Otuoke. Since the APC defeat of the PDP in the presidential election, Tinubu […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6362,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[933,936,119,365,75,245,935,48,934,932,937,938],"class_list":["post-6449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-ahmed-lawan","tag-akinwunmi-ambode","tag-aminu-tambuwal","tag-babatunde-fashola","tag-bola-tinubu","tag-bukola-saraki","tag-dapo-sasore","tag-femi-aribisala","tag-kayode-fayemi","tag-mulikat-akande","tag-wale-edun","tag-yemi-cadosso"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/kogi.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4oswh-1G1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6451,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6449\/revisions\/6451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}