In 2018, as the news started sinking in that incumbent Lagos state Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode would not be backed by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu for a reelection, there was a kind of tension across the state.

In the middle of all that, a relatively unknown name, Babajide Sanwo-Olu was floated. Announced that close to the election year, the All Progressives Congress, APC needed to do something drastic to ensure he became a household name before the election.

One of the drastic steps taken was to spam the entire state with Sanwo-Olu banners and billboards. It’s from one of the billboards that the title of this piece emerged.

The billboard read: ���� ������ �����, �����-��� �������.

This was obviously an attempt to inform the public that this is Tinubu, the famed kingmaker’s anointed.

This line comes to mind in light of veteran journalist, Sam Omatseye’s recent diatribes directed at the Labour Party Presidential candidate, Peter Obi.

Omatseye’s vituperations are not new. Anyone of repute that has ever spoken or been at opposing ends of Bola Tinubu would have felt Omatseye’s deep bites.

It’s simple: ���� ������ ��������, �������� �����.

The picture that the Tinubu-Omatseye relationship paints is that of evening walks where a man is walking a drooling pitbull that’s on a leash.

Occasionally to scare passersby or prevent them from getting too close, the dog owner would jerk the dog’s chain in their direction. The dog would lunge at them and they would scatter in different directions, leaving the dog owner smiling as he continued his walk.

The relationship has been a point-and-kill one where the shot caller points at the target and the executor goes for the kill. One where the pitbull owner whistles and jerks the chain to get the attack dog going.

In attacking Obi, Omatseye continued the series of attacks that started before the APC Presidential primaries with victims like Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, President Muhammadu Buhari, Former Governor of the State of Osun, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the leadership of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), and now, the man standing in Tinubu’s way, Peter Obi.

Omatseye’s piece, “Obi” is riddled with the same arguments manufactured from APC’s political strategy room and shared gleefully online by the foot soldiers.

In “Obi”, Omatseye, towing the ethnic bigotry-laced campaign template that the Bola Tinubu campaign has chosen to run, tried to pin Peter Obi to a corner as just a South Eastern candidate that has struggled to get support from other regions.

While that is false as seen from the wide acceptance that Peter Obi has enjoyed across the country, it also fails to achieve what Omatseye hoped that it would.

For one, that those who hitherto wanted out of the Nigerian project are now supporting Obi to win is not the damning indictment that Omatseye was trying to sell.

What it does is show that people wanted out because they were marginalized and made second class citizens in their own country.

They wanted out because of the unmistakable disdain that the Buhari administration has shown the region since it won power.

They wanted out because of statements like the one from the Oba of Lagos, a Tinubu ally and Omatseye’s leash puller about drowning people from the region if they refused to back his preferred Governorship candidate.

It is not Peter Obi or the South East that Omatseye’s ridiculous arguments hurt, it is Tinubu, Buhari and the rest of them to whom Omatseye panders.

If you thought the attempt at connecting dots that didn’t exist was the most comical of Sam Omatseye’s “Obi”, you are in for a shocker as he was just getting started.

Omatseye took things further by digging up a non-issue and attempting to use it to drive home points that hold no water.

The non-issue was the 2006 allegation that Peter Obi’s emissaries w

Salewa97:
No matter what they say, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is our next president 2023.