Maybe Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s absence from the APC NEC meeting last Friday had more undercurrents than the party was willing to let on.
The truth from where we sit is that all isn’t well with the APC and that is already widely known at this point.
What isn’t widely known is why Tinubu chose the most important meeting of his party since it coasted to victory at the general elections, to play truant.
Some twenty four hours after the NEC meeting ended on a somewhat superficial note, Ekekeee worked the phones; speaking to a wide range of party insiders and Tinubu aides.
Prior to the NEC meeting, we were reliably informed, Tinubu had tried to impress it on the party hierarchy not to invite Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker Yakubu Dogara to the peace meting. If they were going to be invited at all, the Asiwaju stated, the duo should come bearing formal apology letters for defying the party’s directives on the choices of principal and presiding officers.
President Muhammadu Buhari and National Chairman Oyegun’s disposition to the crisis was slightly different and a little more conciliatory. Buhari had maintained his stance that while Saraki and Dogara had poured scorn on the very notion and idea of “party supremacy”, the APC should put the dust stirred by their intransigence aside and carry on with the business of governance.
Chairman John Odigie-Oyegun had even gone on the record a day before the NEC meeting to say that party leaders should be ready to gobble some humble pie and yield some ground to the lawmakers, sparking insinuations that he had been bribed.
“Oyegun’s comments had really infuriated Asiwaju. It didn’t look like the party chairman was putting his foot down hard enough”, a Tinubu aide who wouldn’t want his name disclosed for this story, told Ekekeee.
The pervasive feeling in the Asiwaju camp was that Saraki and Dogara had been allowed to get away with murder and should publicly apologize or be treated like the renegades they had become, a party source disclosed to this medium.
A former interim national chairman of the APC, Chief Bisi Akande, was also less than pleased with the developments. He had written a vitriolic open letter as well in which he suggested that some corrupt oil barons were behind Saraki’s emergence as Senate President.
It was no surprise that the duo of Akande and Tinubu inexplicably shunned the meeting. A party source told Ekekeee that Akande had asked Tinubu some 24 hours before the meeting if he had received an invite. When the latter answered in the negative, Akande had wondered aloud to the former Governor of Lagos why they should both attend a meeting they weren’t invited to.
The duo had received their invites much later, but it was too late in the day already, said an Asiwaju source. There was however provision for them to be at the meeting because there were empty table spaces at the meeting venue with their name tags on them. This version of events is corroborated by a Premium Times story on the subject.
While National Publicity Secretary Lai Mohammed labored to explain why the duo were conspicuously absent from an all important meeting that the NEC was, for the APC, peace may well still be afar off.
There are suggestions that the next hurdle the APC would have to cross will be that of settling for a Board of Trustees (BoT) chairman–a position Tinubu eyes but which he may be asked to abandon for the good of the party because ideally, the party chairman and the BoT chairman shouldn’t hail from the same zone.
The party isn’t out of the woods just yet.
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