By Lanre Adewole
The SAN raged as battleground towns in Osun projected PDP’s Ademola Adeleke’s victory over APC’s Gboyega Oyetola.
That was 2018 but APC as the ruling party compromised vote-count integrity to steal victory for his candidate.
“I know how much trouble we had in the last election (the 2018 gubernatorial) here. I know by remote control through so many sources how we managed to maintain the party (APC) in power in the state” was how then-apex leader and president, now-late Muhammadu Buhari publicly owned the election fraud on 27 January, 2019 in Osogbo while rallying Osun traditional rulers led by the Ooni of Ife, for his re-election.
The senior lawyer worried to me why an illustrious Yoruba state like Osun should be down with a governor like Adeleke.
When the opportunity to judicially legitimize the 2018 heist presented itself, the senior lawyer applied self like hell. To him, Adeleke wasn’t deserving of the numero uno spot of the Living Spring state.
The same Yoruba race believes in ayanmo (destiny). In my corner of the race, you hear something like akoole ti gbe (fate can’t be altered). Adeleke means the crown/anointed/royalty, has prevailed. There is something truly in a name. Even Jabez the son of sorrow, travailed and prevailed. Jackson returned in 2022 from the bruising 2018 robbery to ragdoll Oyetola as the incumbent. An indirect rubber match is set. God no be man.
First Lady, Pastor Remi Tinubu hailed Osun as the state perching above others (Osun le tente) in rounding off her narcissistic explanation of her humiliating order to Governor Adeleke days back. The digital preservation of the ridiculous encounter makes a retelling needless. The world saw a non-state actor, with zero mandate, threatening a sitting governor at what was a state event, bringing back painful memories of July 2013 when Patience Jonathan as Nigeria’s First Lady got up from her seat at a state function in Rivers and snatched the microphone from then-governor, Rotimi Amaechi, calling him a boy in the process. Somehow, Pastor Remi and Lady Patience have developed stronger bond in recent time, with the latter canvassing a second term for Remi’s husband who practically denied her own husband re-election in 2015. Patience even shot down her husband’s rumoured return plan to Aso Rock, though aides of the former president have said Jonathan doesn’t necessarily need Patience as the First Lady if he returns to power.
A lot has been said about the flagrant abuse of assumed power and the servile nature of authority understanding between the centre and the federating units. But I choose to see the aberration in a different light.
In defence of the president’s wife, she has tried to be the better half of the country’s first couple in public conducts and until the Ife sad episode, she arguably rated better with Nigerians than her husband and even when her controversial 65th birthday “crowd-funding” for the National Library ran into the usual mud of suspected sleaze (though not on her part directly), she still got a bigger dose of benefit of the doubt (for accountability) than her husband and most of her recent predecessor First Ladies.
Her public carriage until the infamous Ife headmistress performance had been so cool it could be performative or even bordering on the genteel, considering insiders’ accounts of her not always being elegantly cool like cucumber outside of public view. But the curated image of the nation’s matron held until what some who are close to the first family claimed was the really her, spiked out in an ugly rhythm like hitherto canned demon.
If that was the first encounter between Remi Tinubu and Governor Adeleke, one could say she was a victim of locked mindset and the perception of what is the ideal like my egbon, the lawyer, who believed a state once led by the Cicero as part of old Oyo, should not have a merrymaker as its leader. Adeleke and Remi, incidentally both 65 this year, with the governor older by four months and nine days, had shared a podium before Ife when the president’s wife was in the state to launch Alternative High Schools for Girls, on 23 April, 2024, and the duo bartered compliments. So at what point did she decide to treat her “older” brother like a toddler? What changed in the last 19 months that made her think Adeleke is no longer eni owo (respectable), for her to create such a spectacle especially her decision to return from her seat the second time with sternness, meanness and aggression that let her mouth lead her head?
Maybe she now considers Adeleke unworthy of the governor seat. In the likely event of such an assumption, she could have sensibly gone for supporting her party, the APC, in all ways possible, to dethrone the governor next year. Instead, what she has done with the gra gra in Ife, was practically winning a second term for the governor who profited maximally from the anomic situation by playing the perfect helpless underdog while the wrath of the “scorned” woman lasted.
When we pray to God, one mystery about His interventions is how He can choose any vessel or use any situation, including the considered ugly, to our benefits. That is why the Bible says in Romans 8:28 that “all things work together for good to them that love God”. I believe that in retrospect, Pastor Remi would have wondered what came upon her, stopping the praise of the One who made her and made her what she is today. Days back, someone very close to the first family was filling me in about the early life encounters between Bola and Remi and the now-late Kafaru Tinubu’s connection in Ibadan. Maybe someday, I would be able to share the details, including the filiality of an ambassadorial nominee et al. I kept saying whoa as the gists rolled, with the source connecting dots with names, places and dates. Wonderful God.
“God inhabits the praise of His people” says Psalm 22:3 and the governor, whether theatrically or not, was praising his Maker and the pastor-politician hushed him? There have been debates on whether the First Lady would try such a demeaning act with a Muslim governor, especially in the North, but even something is off with her doing it to a FaChrisLam (all-faith) governor, regardless of the other dimension of proverbially selling her own cheap, to exorbitantly get outsiders. What clearly took charge of her in that maddening moment was the spirt of error and I believe she must have realised it by now. Yoruba will call it sise sise (misdeed spell) or edi (hypnosis). The woman of God is versed enough in the Word of God to know the danger of disdaining a worshipper especially in the middle of lifting praise to the God of all flesh. Michal, Saul’s daughter fell into same error, disdaining her husband, King David (just in her heart and the contempt wasn’t even openly vented) for “theatrical” (his belly coming out of his dress) but heaven-felt public praise to the One who made a royalty out of a shepherd boy (See 2 Samuel 6:16). The consequence was grave. She remained the only woman to die childless in the Bible. God sealed her womb and took fruitfulness away from her. May heaven have mercy on Sister Remi.
Without taking a long, hard insightful look at where a man is coming from, it is always easy to dismiss those considered unworthy of certain heights. Of course, if men were to choose governor in the Adeleke dynasty, especially between Davido’s dad and today’s incumbent, the overwhelming choice would be a walkover. But Samuel, a prophet celebrated for accuracy, chose wrongly in Jesse’s house, seven times. Even David’s father counted him out from the very beginning, but the ruddy fellow chasing rabbits in the bush and watching over his father’s flock was heaven’s choice. God says He is for the heart while men consider outward appearance. In the course of writing this, I caught a piece of Yemi Osinbajo delivering a lecture and wondered aloud, “this man why and how did you not become president?” Maybe it is not in his destiny.
If the Awujale crown is in Wasiu Ayinde’s destiny, he will “chop” it and nothing would happen, even if all the ruling houses ganged up to stop him. I understand the public virulent disavowal. Very little about him speaks the elegance, gait and comportment the ancient throne requires. Also modernity dictates a well-educated Awujale whose paramountcy will be revered everywhere. So, how can a common thug, just fortunate to make a career success, aspire? That is it. If God allowed a career success to the point of becoming not only a household name but friend of the high and mighty including the number one citizen of the country, the question to ask is, to what end? Maybe God was prepping him for a time like this. Maybe God deliberately positioned his friend as president who can help him swing things, for a time like this. God’s way isn’t man’s. Maybe that is why God preserved his life on the tarmac the other day. Maybe many destinies are waiting for his ascension, to blossom. Except if not rooted in succession as being claimed by the ruling houses. Even then, nobody was ever royalty in Jesse’s house. Then David, the worshipper and praiser burst into the scene, with God introducing him to the palace by placing a torturing demon on the expiring and rejected King Saul. The new royalty lineage that produced David as king of Israel was established forever with Jesus coming through it and the Messiah’s kingdom is forever. Like the once-blind Bartimeus, Yeye Asiwaju, who once suffered the kind of indignity she poured on the Osun governor, in the hand of ex-enfant terrible of the Nigerian senate, Dino Melaye to national outrage, should cry in her heart “Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me”, while her defenders are still at making light of something with deep spiritual connotations.
Has the First Lady heard about the governor and a renowned prophet called Baba Abiye, during his boyhood in Ede? Some people carry uncommon grace, like King David(o). Jackson is likely one. Aremu of Ota too. Even Bola Tinubu of Bourdillion.
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