Ayo Adebanjo, a leader of a faction of the pan-Yoruba Socio-political group, Afenifere, has attacked Bola Ahmed Tinubu, national leader of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), saying that his ambition to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari in 2023 was behind most of his recent decisions.
In recent months, there have been increasing speculations that Tinubu, who was a former governor of Lagos State from 1999-2007, was aspiring to contest for the 2023 presidential ticket of the APC.
In the last few weeks, several chieftains of the APC had endorsed his alleged presidential ambition; they claimed Tinubu was the best leader in the South to lead the country after President Buhari’s second term.
The APC is expected to zone the presidential position to the Southern region in 2023.
However, speaking on the state of the nation in a telephone interview with, BusinessDay, Adebanjo noted that Tinubu’s decision not to comment on the herdsmen’s killings in the Southwest states and decision to support Buhari’s second term bid were because of the promise by Buhari to hand over power to him in 2023.
He said Tinubu’s presidential ambition in 2023 would fail because President Buhari was deceiving him.
“They sold out to Tinubu, because Buhari promised to give Tinubu power in 2023; but he is just deceiving Tinubu; Buhari would not handover to him in 2023,” Adebanjo said.
“Tinubu can sacrifice anybody for his selfish ambition, if he does not know, Buhari would not hand over power to him in 2023,”he further said.
The elder statesman further scoffed at the recent visit by a faction of Afenifere to Buhari, stressing that the leaders of the group were imposters.
On the demand of the faction to President Buhari for true federalism, he said the APC was not sincere about the issue of restructuring of the country, stressing that the party should fulfil its promise because restructuring was part of its manifesto.
“The APC people are using them, they know that now the pressure is on the man to tackle the insecurity in the country. If the APC is sincere about restructuring, why can’t they do it? It is in their manifesto and they set up a committee to look at how feasible it is, so they should do it,” he added
At the time of filing in this report, efforts to get a reaction from Tunde Rahman, Tinubu’s spokesman, was unsuccessful. He initially picked his call and said he would get back to our correspondent, but he never did. Further attempts to reach him proved abortive as he neither picked his calls nor replied to SMS sent to his mobile telephone line.
Iniobong Iwok
