Uncorking Bakare’s Sakabula

Tunde Bakare, the one-parish Serving Overseer of Citadel Global Community Church, launched, what I believe, his 2023 presidential campaign, on Wednesday, December 23, 2020. He adopted the theme: “An Idle Man’s Brain Is The Devil’s Workshop”. Doing that, he was as vituperative, as he was caustic.

I should have left the matter to go. I believe that the topic is still very germane given his follow up speech this Sunday, His response to those who talked about the sermon is the stimulus. Bakare himself spoke twice on the matter in just five days. So, let the debate continue.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu, BAT, was the launch pad of Bakare’s political project. In more than half of the one-hour sermon, the Overseer took the “traducers” of BAT to the cleaners. He described them as “those Yoruba rancorous elements, noisemakers who have not achieved as much as Asiwaju Tinubu has achieved, but are always querying and worrying themselves about his ancestry”, in very unprintable names. He called those of his race, the Yoruba nation, ‘ode’- dumb or fools, and some, “naked”. He must be very angry at them!

I asked a respected colleague how much he thought BAT must have sent to Bakare for the PR stunts. He responded: “No. It is more than money. He wants the man to support him after he (Tinubu) might have fallen from reckoning. This is my reading of what he did”. The political cleric himself denied ever taking money. Those who believed he did , he tagged  “undertakers”. “You think somebody will pay me for what I am doing? No one is rich enough to do it. No one in this country or elsewhere is rich enough. The “Blood of Jesus and the Calvary” purchased him long ago. One of the “undertakers”, he said, could not even understand the sermon: “With all the PhDs he acquired”. The acada in America claimed Bakare embarked on “strategical delegitimisation of Tinubu”.

I believe the Overseer did not collect money. The “Blood of Jesus Christ’ on the cross of “Calvary” has  nothing to do with it. I simply believe  Bakare was up to a  big mischief.  Bakare was not marketing Tinubu for the 2023 presidential race in that Beatitude.

I am not the only “undertaker” in that skepticism. Former Senate Chief Whip, Professor Sola Adeyeye is one. The US based, columnist, second, other commentators, third and my humble self, four. Undertakers have only one business: bury the dead. I join others to bury the mischief in that December 23 “support” for Tinubu. But I allow Adeyeye to speak first:

“You have missed the point if your conclusion from Tunde Bakare’s circulating video is that he was endorsing Bola Tinubu. …Oh no! Bakare was courting Tinubu in the hope of getting Tinubu’s endorsement!

Elders don’t see an elephant and turn round to call it a bush rat. I align with the professor and the senior journalist. Their thoughts  are not mere coincidences. Something must be in that video that I needed to see again. This is the burden of a writer, I went back to the video. I transcribed every word spoken by Overseer Bakare. How do we abbreviate  that self? “Daddy O”? I am already used to ‘Daddy G.O’. I worked on Daddy O’s Beatitude. These are what I could make of it.

I begin with BAT’s ancestry. Bakare said  BAT’s ‘traducers’ are “Yoruba rancorous elements, noisemakers,…always querying and worrying themselves about his ancestry. His traducers are quick to tell you, he’s from Iragbiji”. Daddy O, like Samuel declared in 1 Samuel 12:3, bear me witness that this is the first time ever that anyone, friend or foe, will brazenly and openly make BAT’s Iragbiji ancestry a topic for a political symposium. That in itself is self-serving, “The “traducers”, of whom you are number one, are interrogating that aspect of Tinubu’s life, because they genuinely feel that the man, Asiwaju, should be proud of his background, no matter how lowly it is. Daddy O has his own hidden agenda for bringing it up openly.

If Tinubu is indeed from Iragbiji in Osun State, I think he should raise his head up high and claim that town and be proud of everything that is Iragbiji. That does not make his “traducers” “noisemakers”. Noisemakers are in Abuja, they meet every Wednesday. General Muhammadu Buhari (Rtd) christened them so. That BAT ruled Lagos as an Iragbiji man is never a crime. Check the political leaders in Lagos today, they are all “atohunrinwas”, sojourners! Raufu Aregbesola was a commissioner in that same Lagos for eight years before he remembered his Ijesha upbringing. He ruled, and or ruined Osun State as a governor for another eight years. That did not count against him. He is currently a minister in Abuja, using the Osun slot and controls the Alimosho end of Lagos politics from Abuja till date.

Hear Daddy O again:”Furthermore, no right thinking person will describe himself as self made man… Everyone who has spoken the word of encouragement to us has entered into the makeup of our character…as well as of our success”. That philosophy, Daddy O claimed, formed the “basis of the relationship between the late Iyaloja Abibat Mogaji and his (sic) adopted son, Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu. Therefore the latter calling the former his mother is not only proper, it is also honourable. It is those demonising the mother and son relationship that should find something profitable to do with their time”.

Again, Daddy O, this is another veiled mischief! BAT has never told anyone that the late Mama Abibatu Mogaji was not his biological mother.  You are the one “demonising the mother and son relationship” here. “Alara ni ara o ro ohun, iwo ni oku aisun oku ai wo”- you don’t sympathise with a man who never complains of body ache for suffering from insomnia. Daddy O is the one saying Tinubu is not proud of his maternity.  The Bini have a  name for mothers: “Iyenoge- Mother is precious. In Yoruba we say:”iya ni wura iyebiye ti a kole fi owo ra”-Mother is a priceless gold; you can’t buy her with money. I don’t want to assist you in scoring your cheap political goal here. Every child should be proud of his/her mother, no matter how lowly the mother may be.

Rising from the dust of deprivation  to the mountain top is worth celebrating. Bringing in Mama Mogaji and Tinubu up in your sermon is nothing but what is called undiluted double-dealing. And if you think we are mere “undertakers”, for thinking this way, listen to yourself again, Daddy O: “…Therefore, those who are envious of him and those who desire to take his power slot should just stop their useless talk about him and busy themselves with what can add value to society” I agglutinate this to what Daddy O said about the same Tinubu on October 28, 2019 for the public to decide who is after BAT’s slot:

“The foolish person would no longer be called generous. You can say ‘so so and so’ has stolen all the money in the state, …Since democracy began, they are living larger than life, having jets here…, having houses in Bourdillon,… at the expense of the public. You will not go without vomiting what you have stolen….Because a king will reign in righteousness and princes will rule with justice”. Bakare’s Biblical allusion to Jephthah is in bad faith. As a Bible scholar of many decades, Bakare knew why the people rejected Jephthah- because of his ancestry. Drawing an analogy between Tinubu and the roguish Jephthah suits Bakare’s projections perfectly. Daddy O is a-heroic Bible teacher. He knows that Jeptthah did not exploit Israelites to fight their cause. Daddy O is sending us back to the Scripture so that we can know who Tinubu is. The “dramatic irony” device is too cruel! What Bakare has stylishly told us is to make a comparison that will be negative to BAT. Tinubu must be agonising now.  But does BAT deserve all he is getting now? A well deserved one, I dare say. What happened to the leaders who made him? Destruction, they say, hangs on the lintel to serve same dose to those who attained greatness by destroying others.

Rounding off, Bakare described the  ‘visiting’ Yoruba leaders, whom he claimed came to woo him into the ‘Yoruba agenda’ as “men of the cloth and those who are naked”. He asked them to eat their humble pie because “Tinubu was working day and night”, when they snored. He listed the states Tinubu “secured” and asked, rather rhetorically: “You say he is nobody,? Ode (dumbs). Stop all the nonsense about ancestry. You will kill your heroes and those who can deliver you, you will put aside and nothing will happen”.

Daddy O described BAT a “villain” in October 2019 and a “hero” in December 2020. “Nigeria people, you celebrate your villains and crucify your heroes”, he said then. Daddy O suffers the same character deficits with Sergeant Troy of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Far from the madding Crowd. “A man to whom memories were an encumbrance and anticipations a superfluity”.  Barely a year ago, BAT “has stolen all the money in the state”. Today,  BAT works “day and night”. I respect the ‘anointing’ on Daddy O.  But Adeyeye thinks otherwise: “The pulpit of Christ is not a podium for silliness”.

Daddy O, did you say Yoruba leaders are “sakabula” in 2020? General Oladipo Diya once described Yoruba leaders in the National Democratic Coalition, NADECO, as “Agbako”-MISFORTUNE! Because of Sani Abacha. But when in 1997, Abacha demanded for the head of Diya on the platter, the Agbakos saved his neck.

Yoruba leaders are “naked” and “sakabula”, because Abuja must hear Daddy O speak. The trophy? 2023 presidential ticket after the envisaged political annihilation of BAT. Fine enough. If Bakare thinks that “sakabula” cannot face the “machine guns”, ask him the outcome of the 1968-1969 Agbekoya crisis of Western Region. Which gun did the peasant farmers use to prosecute the war, successfully, against the ‘machine guns and Ak47 rifles of the military government?

Those who invaded the then old Ondo state with machine guns during the Omoboriowo and Ajasin crisis in 1983, nko? Didn’t sakabula defeat them?  Go to Ugbole Ekiti, the armoured tank deployed there  is a memento till date. The people didn’t have to fire their “sakabula”; they gave the assignment to the bees! The secret the elders use to eat eko (corn meal) without staining their fingers is under the leaf. Daddy O called Yoruba leaders “ode”-dumb, fools. Matthew 5:22: says: “…but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in the danger of hell fire”.  Thy word is settled, oh Lord!

Daddy O rounded off on Tinubu: “… He is making money from taxation. Why don’t you make yours? If the system allowed it and he exploited that system to his own advantage. I read it on his 68th birthday… he said  OBJ is my hero. I learnt how to be transparently corrupt from him”.

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