Beware of the character assasin at the door A reply to Remi Oyeyemi) by Kehinde Bamigbetan
July 2014

Don’t make the mistake: the insurgency plaguing Nigeria is not only happening in the forests of Sambisa. It is occurring right under your nose, on your screen as you position your ipad or laptop to read yet another essay of hatred by those who have suddenly risen from the cemetery of silence.

I refer to Remi Oyeyemi’s ” The Agonies of Bola Tinubu’s Defenders”, a pot-pourri of rumours, fallacies and inexactitudes penned to distract and deceive, misinform and disinform the loyal followers of Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his admirers. As I have written in an earlier piece, the conspirators on this ignoble mission are headed for defeat and damnation.

It needs to be reiterated that the coincidence of the adversarial articles against Tinubu in print and electronic media and the web at the same period is no doubt a syndicated ambush organised by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party and its hack writers to eliminate Tinubu from the calculus of Southwest Politics and clear the way for their planned demolition of the All Progressives Congress in the region. They think they can turn a lucky break in Ekiti into a blitzkrieg across Yorubaland by demonising the progressives and confusing the masses.

From which moral higher ground does Remi Oyeyemi and his PDP paymasters seek to pass judgment on Tinubu? The PDP perpetrated the worst electoral offences imaginable to hijack power from the progressives in 2003. From Oyo to Osun, Ekiti to Ondo, Ogun to Edo, the Yoruba people saw first hand the degradation of their heritage as it was besieged by the locusts destroying everything on their way. They saw the planlessness and the cluelessness that has now been elevated to presidential level by the party. They witnessed a land placed under the control of brigands, where executives danced owambe on the poverty of the people.
One man led the struggle to end this reign of terror, this reckless plundering of common wealth. One man mobilised fellow progressives with his intellectual and material resources to roll back these philistines from the land of the most populous ethnic nationality in the Black race. One man put all he had to ensure that his fatherland did not become the centre of backwardness. He is Bola Tinubu.

There is no way the goat will love the butcher. Since the shenanigans of the PDP were exposed through the introduction of biometric examination of ballots printed with palm nuts instead of human thumbs, the party and its writers have done everything possible to take their pound of flesh. They think the rise of Tinubu from a regional phenomenon to a national contender following the formation of the All Progressives Congress will finally overshadow them and declare their political death. Even if it was predicted that an animal with horns will knock one to death, can it be the aspiration of the snail? If it was said that a sculptor will make one’s coffin, is the assignment for the woodpecker to undertake?

It is only a stream that fills up in your presence that won’t make you drown. Oyeyemi’s faulty historiography ties Tinubu’s progressive credentials to the encounters with Obasanjo between 2003 and 2007. Right? Wrong. Tinubu was a prominent financier of the PRIMROSE Group in Lagos State while he worked as Treasurer in the oil marketing company Mobil. It was the leadership of the group, faced with the challenging financial requirements of the Babangida transition, that called on him to run for the Senate in the elections. it is on record that Tinubu recorded the largest number of votes by any senator in the term nationwide. It is also on record, that despite the close relationship between the Iyaloja General of Nigeria, Alhaja Abibatu Mogaji with the Babangida administration, Tinubu stood with the progressive leadership of the Senate under Iyorchia Ayu to oppose efforts to put the upper house on the leash. It is also on record that Tinubu worked for and defended the mandate of June 12, 1993 given to Abiola by the people so much that he was to be prosecuted under a frame-up charge that he planned to finance the burning of the depot of the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company in Ejigbo. And it is also on record that after he escaped abroad through the popular NADECO route, he contributed greatly to the finance and organisation of the NADECO and other national liberation forces abroad. If these do not qualify him as a progressive and defender of popular interest, what else?

As a journalist and writer, Oyeyemi cannot claim ignorance of this anti-government pedigree. But it would have done irreversible injury to his mission if he attempted to admit them. As Odumegwu Ojukwu, the cerebral Biafran Leader would put it, Oyeyemi chose to commit the tragedy of @selective hypertropia” a deliberate and mischievous skipping of uncomfortable historical facts to justify his jaundiced hatchet job.

Let us address the blackmail of mercantilist and proprietary politics: Nigeria’s dependent, peripheral capitalist system being managed by the ruling PDP is mercantilist and proprietary. The nation is a trading post for multinationals and conglomerates and the country herself is a landlord that collects rents in form of crude oil from oil companies prospecting crude oil under a sharing agreement. If Oyeyemi’s paymasters have failed since 1999 to industrialise the economy to produce basic needs of the people, why seek to make an opposition leader the symbol or example of the system that you promote and perpetrate.

The fact is that the ideology of the ruling class, which emanates from its control of the means of production, distribution and exchange; in short, the economy, is the dominant system in which individuals must appropriate their wealth. We can safely declare that Tinubu has not taken whatever he has acquired to a foreign account in Switzerland while pretending to be trying to survive and wearing adire textiles in Nigeria. It is a mark of sincerity and commitment to the Nigerian project that all his investments are well known and are providing means of livelihood to many Nigerians. It would have gladdened the hearts of the Oyeyemis to see Tinubu as a poor tenant, hardly able to feed his family so that they can use him as an example of a man who confronted government and got his deserved dessert. That Tinubu proved them wrong by astute management of his personal finance is so difficult to accept that they must twist his success into blackmail.

A final word on “imposition”. Oyeyemi declared confidently that Tinubu imposed his wife as senator, his son-in-law as Member of the House of Representatives and his sister -in-law as a member of the Lagos State House of Assembly. A process analysis of how a person becomes a member of these bodies, according to the Nigerian constitution includes two stages. First is a primary and the second is the general election. I know as a matter of fact that the Lagos State Chapter of the Action Congress of Nigeria held primaries where the candidates of the party for the Senate and the House of Assembly emerged. Newspapers reported how delegates voted and how the winners emerged. Even if it is assumed that Tinubu’s influence helped them in the primaries, will Oyeyemi also blame their victory at the general elections in which Lagosians and Ekiti voters chose among candidates of over six parties as imposition? who is trying to fool who here? The emergence method of the Nigerian electoral system is the first past the post system. The majority of the voters preferred them.

On this Oyeyemi’s contempt for the voters and his apparent ploy to manipulate them is easily exposed. In short, when Tinubu’s party loses as it did in Ekiti, it is the protest against Tinubu. When the party wins, it is the imposition by people. This, apparently, is arrant nonsense.

Caveat emptor! That is the how lawyers put third parties on alert lest they be swindled. I have adopted same to alert the reader to the piece to the character assassin prowling round the web by the name of Remi Oyeyemi.

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Remi oyeyemi is a seasoned writer.this bring him down by tinubu and his over feed corrupt pay per article journalists won't stop him

Foolish people with their armrobber mentality defending the arch thief tinubu. Why not satisfy the people instead of ur uneccesary media hype and propagander

Kehinde Bamgbetan or whatever you call yourself, pls save your spit in your mouth and you ink in your tablet. We have had enough of Tinubu and his greed! Tho it might tarry a while, but the day of reckoning is coming for you all. Imagine the total disregard with which he has 'anointed' Akin Ambode as the next governor of Lagos. Everyone now knows that Tinubu practically 'owns' Lagos. He is a corrupt, greedy,and uunbecoming leader of a sophisticated race like the yorubas. Sometimes I wish I wasn't a Nigerian.

This Damage Control Strategy by this brown enveloped journalist is dead on arrival. Not amount of hired International PR firms will salvage already dainted image of the Oluwale and Toronto Certificates holder.

Its funny how we all pick sides but the one that matters. Ours. Tinubu is far better than pdp for now. Haba no light since 1999,fuel increase,looting,closing newspapers,immigration exam debacle, and you're still defending pdp.na wa o really suffering and smiling