So, What’s the Deal?
For a very long time and for reasons presumably known to close observers of the polity, former Lagos State governor, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, had stayed away from the corridors of power – a government he helped to bring onboard. And in addition, he maintained a dizzying silence that has constituted serious worry for those currently running the show. But all that ceased last week, when he held a closed door meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Villa, Abuja.
Tinubu, after the meeting, had described the development as a proof of the fact that the news about their differences was not true. “It is fake news”, he told state house reporters. It is also not by accident that penultimate Sunday, the First Lady, Mrs. Aisha Buhari, was at Tinubu’s Bourdilon residence in Ikoyi, Lagos, where they both met. Thus, Tinubu’s eventual meeting with Buhari was believed to have been made possible by the one with Aisha.
Of course, the details of both meetings are not known yet to the public, but the simplest deduction is that they are not unconnected to the elections of 2019 as horse-trading might have begun in earnest. Well, it would be interesting to see what deal Tinubu might have struck with Buhari, and that is premised on the notion that he has learnt his lessons on how to better handle ‘sophisticated high-wire national politics’, if his experience in the last two and a half years counts for him.