WHERE TUNDE BAKARE GOT IT WRONG
On Monday, June 18, 2017, many national dailies published reports credited to Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Latter Rain Assembly Church.
The reports quoted the pastor as saying that the current political tension in the country which was caused by hate and divisive speeches is the aftermath of the choice of an elderly person (President Muhammadu Buhari) as Nigeria’s president in the 2015 elections.
According to the reports, Bakare compared President Muhammadu Buhari and President Emmanuel Macron of France, saying that the election of the former was indicative of a global paradigm shift. Not done, he wondered why Nigeria which once produced a 30-year-old leader in the person of Gen. Yakubu Gowon would prefer people in their 60s and 70s in the 2015 elections. It appears that he forgot that Gowon was a military head of state and not an elected president.
The preacher also said that leadership vacuum often allowed the likes of Adonijah and Absalom in biblical mythology to overthrow their father, King David, in order to achieve their inordinate ambition, as nature abhors a vacuum.
Pastor Bakare enthused that if President Buhari is ‘very healthy’ then there would be no room for the likes of Absalom and Ahitophel to exercise their ambition. Here he is insinuating that President Buhari’s health challenge may create room for military takeover.
A critical analysis of the contents of Pastor Bakare’s address at the press conference portrays him as a man who indulges in double-speak, considering the fact that the same pastor casting aspersion on President Buhari volunteered to serve as his vice -president in the 2011 Presidential election.
It is shocking that few years after that outing, Pastor Bakare is blaming the so-called current political quagmire on the choice of an elderly president. This is totally uncalled for when viewed against the backdrop that President Buhari, despite his age, has done more than his predecessors, going by the socio-political and economic state of the country at the time he assumed office in 2015.
Despite his age, it is on record that the federal government under the watch of President Buhari is focused on getting rid of the old order of doing things which provided the platform for corruption to be the order of the day.
Can Pastor Bakare say so of the USA, the bastion of democracy, where 70-year-old Donald Trump was elected as President in 2016? In all seriousness, how has age affected the performance of President Buhari?
It is the same Buhari who travelled widely on diplomatic shuttles in his first year in office to boost Nigeria’s battered image. Prior to his diplomatic manoeuverings, Nigeria and Nigerians were shabbily treated outside the shores of their country. There was little or no respect for the green passport and its holder just as there was no foreign investors’ confidence in the nation’s economy and Nigeria’s business environment.
The dividends of the foreign trips by the 74-year-old man are beginning to pay off as evidenced in Morocco’s bilateral agreement with Nigeria on fertiliser importation.